I’m standing on Ava’s boat with this fisheye screwed onto my camera and I know, I fucking know, this is the only lens that tells the truth about what it feels like to be alive on the water at sunrise instead of entombed in some office pretending my life means something. The fisheye doesn’t lie by claiming objectivity; it admits the distortion up front, says yeah, this is warped, this is bulging at the edges, this is what it actually feels like when you’re present instead of half dead. I’m shooting the way my brain is actually processing it, not as some neat, composed rectangle but as this overwhelming spherical assault of light and water. That sweater I’m wearing in the shot, the one I’d lose later and still miss, it’s in focus because the fisheye takes everything, honors everything, doesn’t pick and choose what matters.
The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.
Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life? What follows is not a blueprint for the man entombed; not many people find themselves in a situation paying a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year (as if any man is worth that much). But the struggle is relative: it’s a lot hard to walk away from an income like that than from a fraction thereof.
Sterling Hayden, Wanderer, 1963
Sterling Hayden is right: the tomb seals itself when you stop choosing the distorted, difficult, glorious truth of actually being somewhere over the flat lie of security. I’m squeezing the shutter because this lens is the only one that captures what I’m feeling: that the world is curved and immense and I’m just this one warped figure who’s trying really hard to pay attention.