Obiter Dictum

The past is not some instant, frozen in the distance, unchanging. It is not, either, an image receding in the mirror as we pull away, speeding into the future, which doesn’t even exist, really. We are constantly, perpetually creating our past in every instant. The now is the past.

There are no empty moments.

Each passing moment is pregnant with life, giving birth, in a flash, to a past. Our past. Do we ever leave the past? Do we ever leave it alone? Do we fictionalize and idealize those moments? We do. We don’t strand the past on a street corner with a look of bewilderment on its (our!) face, as we burn rubber into the dark night of the next moment.

We bring it along. All of them, along for the ride. Repainting, redressing and recasting them to fit. If we, as individuals, are the sum total of our past, a past which is clearly malleable and ever-changing, shifting according to our whims, then we can equally say that we are the sum total of our now. Our many nows which buld up and weigh on us.

Or, are we the sum total now of all of our future nows? If you can change your past, now, with naught but a thought, the merest hint of desire to remember things differently, then how can your now be truly your own? Isn’t your now the product of some whim, some random thought in your future?

How could we know?

I had set a task for myself to write a short-story to enter in the Writer’s Digest Your Story competition for October.

As anyone who knows me might imagine, I have put it off over and over again. I keep listing for myself the manifold reasons that I could not possibly win. I regularly remind me of the potential embarrassment that could result from making my writing public. And on and on and on.

This morning, though, I decided that none of those excuses or lines of reasoning matter much. There is nothing, really, preventing me from submitting, other than fear. And fear means Mr. Ego is back in the driver’s seat, doesn’t it? It isn’t like submitting a story is life threatening, after all.

So, type away, I did. Submit, I have. We shall see how it goes. Perhaps in a month’s time I can add “published author” to my list of accomplishments. If not, I think I’ll just try it again.

A couple of months ago, I found myself sucked in to the world of high dynamic range (HDR) photography. HDR is a melding of photographic technique with certain post-processing, er, processes. The general notion is to take several captures of the same image, but at varying exposures. It is easiest to fix the aperture and vary the shutter speed, thereby eliminating any focus issues, which would be nearly impossible to deal with later (although, I am toying with the idea of doing it the other way around just for grins).

The resulting images can be anything from normal-looking, where the processing is not apparent, to surreal and impressionistic. I tend to go in for something in between the extremes. One of my images is below. You can click on the picture to see my small HDR gallery:

Watering Tower, 2009