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Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
One Thing In the Japanese film, 'Afterlife' a range of characters are asked to select footage of themselves that will represent their life, who they felt themselves to be. Imagine choosing one act, one experience that would signify YOU. Or one item that stands for everything you feel about living, being here this time in this world. Quite incredible, yet not impossible to do. Think about the scene in Brokeback Mountain where Ennis embraces that shirt and we know everything we could possibly need to know: about him, about the relationship, about memory itself.
My mind wandered to the derisive term "one-hit wonder." It made me ask why, when we have a fabulous experience of song or book or play or film, we aren't more grateful for just that. Why we apply the word "only" with a sneering retrospective energy that robs the one thing of its wonderfulness. Occasionally we make exceptions: Harper Lee comes to mind. But mostly we seek to quantify, which is to judge via numbers the value of a creator or experience. "She ONLY recorded one album" or "He ONLY made one film." That house ONLY has one bathroom. [Ancestors whisper: one WHAT? Inside the house? Incredible!] I guess it depends. No one would ever say, "She ONLY won the Nobel Prize ONCE. She couldn't have been serious about her work." But why do we do this to others, and to ourselves in small and constant ways?
Earlier today I was busy with something at my desk and I looked up. Glass-topped millpond, one goose performing shoreline security check of pond before inviting goslings for morning stroll. Up and to the left, my bulletin board, home to various talismans and chatchkes new and old. Up, wayyyy up, a photograph that miraculously persists in a dwindling collection. I sat back and gazed up at this photograph for a long time, enjoying it as if it had been taken by someone else. It's not a perfect photograph technically speaking, although it isn't bad and it definitely has the incomparable warmth of 35mm. That Pentax only ever let me down years later, on Coastal Highway #1, but she'd done her time.
The female garlic vendor had not wanted me to take that picture. Presiding over her wooden cart, plump arms folded, lips parted mid sales-pitch, hair oily with Athenian smog, she was the queen of the Agora that afternoon. She could be my one thing, I realized. Had I not since pushed myself through three books and countless other "accomplishments" [whatever that means], this photograph could be the one item. Such a weirdly peaceful feeling, not at all about giving up or lazing round or attributing false triumph, but something else much more powerful. A knowing in the midst of other creative ventures and scary new hikes up steep learning curves: this photo could be enough. I will never forget the taking of it: taste of car exhaust, melodious Greek all around, fish and animal carcasses and eggplant everywhere behind me. I hid behind a pole. I persisted, kindly. She lives on here on my bulletin board, surrounded by bulbs of permanent freshness, mid-shout for all time.
Back to work, grateful for this eerie and reassuring revelation in the middle of a hectic morning. What's your one thing? The thing or act or experience that could stand quietly for all you are in this thing called life if you had to choose?
Listening to: Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, One Hundred Days
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