why

$deeper existential dread

“Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.”
~ Werner Herzog

I’m not an apologist for cinéma vérité, and I also want my knees to function when I retire.


HUH: I’M AMBIVALENT, DUDE
YOU GOOD: ALWAYS TRYING
COOL COOL: COOL COOL COOL

//

// UPDATE 05.25.2023


Svetlana Boym:

While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one’s homeland with paranoid determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion. Home, after all, is not a gated community. Paradise on earth might turn out to be another Potemkin village with no exit. The imperative of a contemporary nostalgic: to be homesick and to be sick of being at home — occasionally at the same time.

// UPDATE 04/28/2023

This inward reconciliation from forgetting and remembering at the same time is important to me because it lets time flow.


// INITIAL UPDATE 04/27/2023

More Herzog:

I don’t feel guilt. I only see the destructive elements in it. When I say tourism is sin and traveling on foot is virtue, it’s condensed into a dictum. It’s much more complex than that, but let’s face it, for me, my experience, the world reveals itself to those that travel on foot.

Now for some Søren Kierkegaard and literary banter via Lewis Hyde:

‘Forgetting is the shears with which you cut away what you cannot use, doing it under the supreme direction of memory. Forgetting and remembering are thus indentical arts, and the artistic achievement of this identity is the Archimedean point from which one lifts the whole world. When we say that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest simultaneously that it is to be forgotten and yet also remembered,’ says

Søren Kierkegaard.

‘It’s a fascinating choice of metaphor,’ comments a literary friend...

‘I suppose that this paradox describes accurately the kind of stance to the past that makes reconciliation possible: it is necessary to forget and remember at the same time.’

Lastly, a side character named Jenn from Kentucky Route Zero:

I’ve been saying we should just use photographs. Watercolor paintings already have the quality of a half-remembered dream, anyway. Like they’re inviting you to forget them, or somebody else already forgot them for you; like a mama bird feeding her chicks cotton candy...

Photographs are... it’s not that they’re really more accurate or true, but we *think* they are. They put you in that mindset. They have *authority*.

In some convoluted way, photography is both a pathway to- and a documentation of this constant process of reconciliation as a function of simultaneously remembering and forgetting. Otherwise, it probably happens unknowingly to me most of the time. I’d also like to use the medium to study how this reconciliation happens or doesn’t happen with other people.