My belief assumed a form that it commonly assumes among the educated people of our time. This belief was expressed by the word “progress.” At the time it seemed to me that this word had meaning. Like any living individual, I was tormented by questions of how to live better. I still had not understood that in answering that one must live according to progress, I was talking just like a person being carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind; without really answering, such a person replies to the only important question-“Where are we to steer?”-by saying, “We are being carried somewhere.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
So I’m on this old schooner with my camera, and I can smell the salt and diesel and century-old wood, and my hands are burning from helping haul lines because I can’t just stand there like some tourist with a viewfinder, I’m either crew or I’m cargo, and I didn’t come out here to be cargo.
That Tolstoy quote isn’t some clever frame for pretty pictures. It’s the whole GODDAMN POINT. We’re all out here asking “where should we steer?” while the tide’s already made every decision for us, while progress, that beautiful meaningless word we use to avoid admitting we have no idea what we’re doing, carries us somewhere we pretend to have chosen.
But here’s what happens when I stop asking: I pull the rope. The bridge passes overhead like some massive rust-orange metaphor we’ve all forgotten how to decode. The light hits the water just so. And for maybe thirty seconds I’m not worried about meaning or direction or any of that real world NOISE, I’m just there, meat, body in the wind, doing the thing in front of me, feeling the wood creak and the canvas snap and the bay trying to carry us out past the Gate.
These aren’t just photographs. This is what REALNESS looks like when I stop fighting the current.
When I stop trying to be captain and just let yourself be crew for once.
