Over the course of nearly a decade of consistent effort and tenure here at WordPress.com, I have dedicated much of that time to the exploration of our very human nature as it relates to our experiential awareness of existence as a sentient, self-aware, and yes, spiritually-imbued creatures. In the interest of promoting and encouraging those who visit here to engage in their own explorations, I have often presented my ideas based on three main conceptual premises, those being Poetry, Prose, and Probity. While I have alliterated the description of these efforts with the three “P’s,” it’s more than just an attempt to employ a literary contrivance. At the heart of most of the matters I’ve discussed and written about at length, there is a thread that connects all these efforts, which has been and continues to be an honest effort to illuminate the ideas contained within them, utilizing these three main components of expression.
While I also have enumerated them in a particular order for the title of this post, the order should not be taken as an order of importance necessarily, and certainly each of these methods of expression have their own unique contribution, and share an essential quality in the broad scope of my writing. As I intimated earlier this year, my emphasis in relating the results of nearly a lifetime of reflection on the accumulation of experiences and memories over many years, might be possible to be brought into sharper focus, in at least one way, by following through on my thought to review the objects and souvenirs accumulated over that time. Having spent so much time putting off this review due to other more urgent obligations, I kept telling myself that one day I would benefit from hanging on to the most important pieces, which I believed could play a significant role in assisting my ability to recall those moments and events.
The sheer volume of these items, many of which surround me in my writing space, is beyond any expectation I might have had along the way, and even just trying to organize a basic presentation of the most essential of them has proven to be an almost monumental task. In order to begin to examine this avalanche of archival ingredients, including documents, letters, images, and all manner of memorabilia, it seemed logical to review what has already appeared in my blog entries as a way of finding a starting point for presenting this material, and I found that most of the entries over the years had one of the three “P’s” at the core.
Poetry may be one of the least often utilized components in the archives here, and although there are a great many more available selections that I composed over that time, the use of my poetic creations in supporting my ideas has been limited in some ways, mostly because by doing so, it seems to me, the inclusion of a poem would be more effective when expressing my thoughts or supporting my ideas. For me, poetry is a deeply personal and unique aspect of expression, and should be reserved for occasions when including them will create a clear highlight to a particular blog post. Such choices are very subjective for me, and when I am considering using one to include in a posting, I usually go with “my gut.”
The images I created above to lead off this post, and the one below it of me delivering a recitation of an original poem written for a family wedding, give a fair idea of the kinds of items I have saved and the kinds of images that became important components in the accumulation of thousands more that tell the story of how I arrived at this time and place in my life. The photo of the medals on the left are particularly important, as they include several awarded to both my father and my son, along with a few given to me along the way. Our family has participated in the service of our country over generations, and both my father and my son served in combat theaters during their service years, earning much more than awards of medals. My own service during what was described as the “Cold War,” fortunately did NOT include time in combat, but did require a degree of sacrifice and deprivation under difficult circumstances.
So this is where the story begins. Generations of family members preceded me in nearly every aspect of life experience, in ways that not only laid a foundation for the unfolding of my own physical existence, but also in ways which would prepare me and influence me as the events of my life became my everyday reality. Somehow, I instinctively knew that the objects, documents, and images accumulated along the way, would be vital to my understanding in the years to come, and the tendency to be sentimental and emotional regarding these items served me well whenever I engaged in purposeful reflection or undertook the recording of important events.
From my earliest memories of family gatherings with grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, and cousins, my parents seemed keenly aware of the importance of documenting the important moments with some of the most basically functional cameras available decades ago, that were often only adequate under specific conditions, and required additional light from a flash unit whenever the photos were taken indoors. It was of particular importance to my father, it seems, since he invested in this Kodak camera early on in our young lives:
Since I became the resident photographer in our family in later years, I inherited this camera and recall many times when my father would drag it out, most often when special occasions warranted, and only occasionally were we asked to pose on an ordinary day. The film this camera used was 120 Kodak film, which was a designation by Kodak which produced negatives about two and a half inches wide, but the lenses for such cameras weren’t especially sharp by today’s standards. Not long after we became accustomed to waiting a week or more to see the pictures taken in this way, one day my father brought home a Polaroid camera, and much to our amazement, the photos would appear in minutes after developing within the envelope produced by the film pack, and it also required a little tube of “fixer” to be applied once the development was sufficient:
Both of these cameras have noticeable “bellows,” accordion-like folds which allowed for both movement of the lens and for making the camera fold up neatly when stored. I remember the fascination I felt at the idea of making photographs from a very early age, and once I was able to afford my own equipment, the popular cameras were all in a 35mm format, but still utilizing film spools which had to be loaded manually into the back of the camera, and rewound once the roll was finished:
No longer were “bellows” a part of the equipment, and after years of practice and having accumulated a number of large format cameras and darkroom equipment, I became interested in doing photography full time, and for years during the 1980’s, I managed to find work as a freelancer, performing all sorts of assignments from portraits, weddings, special occasions, and even gained some publishing credentials in newspapers and magazines:
The photo of me on the right at the top of this blog post shows a recent image of my face digitally inserted into a previous image taken years ago, bringing me full circle into the work I often do today, repairing images with defects of some sort, or faces with eyes closed, or simply to take up a challenge to blend images together:
Photography continues to challenge me in a number of ways, not to mention the stacks of photo albums and archival items to preserve, but these and the thousands of other images in my collection all hold an essential place in the maelstrom of time, along with the evidence they provide for the probity of all that has occurred to me throughout these many years.
John's Consciousness 