How Do We Add Up - Ultimately?
July 26, 2009 by rtwsenior · Leave a Comment
What will your life’s art add up to? A fancy, but disposable, commodity? Or a perpetuating garden of flowers?
In the previous two posts, I have been analyzing Robert Silvers’ great composite portrait of The Titanic, which I bought eight years ago as an object lesson to my, then-toddler, grandchildren. If you haven’t read my last two posts, please take a minute to do so, or this might sound quite confusing. Robert Silvers is an amazing photographer who has fashioned many large photomosaics, some of them copies of the Great Masters’ Works, by positioning tiny pictures together using their color values to create the bigger scene. I compare his technique to the way each human being creates their own master work made up of a mosaic of all of their own life’s smallest moments.
Now, to continue my imaginary analysis about the person, who upon examination after their death, learns that this rendering of The Titanic is the accumulation of the life they have just lived. The Analyzer is now making assumptions about the person, based upon the evidence contained in the tiny pictures making up the whole:
“1) Obviously, they were wealthy. Very wealthy, to have lived such a glamorous life. Their wealth allowed them to travel and they did do so, but, strangely, they limited themselves severely to only places of water.
2) People were not important to this person. There are many more fish in the photos, than there are people… more boats and ships, than people. Though we can safely assume that people occupy those boats and ships, they are simply not important to the person living this particular life. Where are the family shots? The babies? The best friends? I find a beautiful girl or two, and a few men and women indulging in water sports, but they seem to be in passing, as a fellow tourist would be.
3) All of these photos represent an easy life. There are no storms, no bad weather, no discomfort, no ugliness. Nothing but pleasure. So, this person whom we are analyzing had protected himself from anything unhappy or difficult. Life’s path had been greased by the ability to buy one’s way along and the person hadn’t been toughened up by the “College of Hard Knocks.”
So, to look at our big picture of the Titanic, we see how the wealth and luxury fits in; the disregard for human life, except as it can adorn or enhance an object; and the egotistical assumption on the part of the Titanic designers that their creation couldn’t be touched by disaster. Hard Knocks were not taken into consideration because those designers must never have been humbled by diversity.
Now we can see how life’s yin and yang fit together. The yin, being the tiny pictures or those snapshots which have been made by our own life’s hidden security camera. The yang, being the huge mosaic that they combine to form, all unbeknown to us. That huge picture is completely impossible to discern while one is still alive, shooting their own picture collection. But, it might be guessed at, if we ever thought about what makes up our life.
Script-writing is something like this mosaic too. I’m particularly aware of this now, when I’m trying to dream up the right little chips of scenes to stick in the scripts I’m actually working on these days. How do you build meaning and depth, beauty and significance into a movie and not distract from the main story? At this point in my writing, the story is still so fluid that I could come up with just about anything. I could take it so many ways. What I decide will ultimately affect the whole mood of the movie.
That is also easily true of any young life. Which direction are we going to send it? What little scenes do we fill it with? And how do those affect the overall mood of the movie we are creating…or that Bigger Picture we will have to look at with The Analyzer, once we leave this world below? Let’s just be careful not to put together a big hollow fantasy like that highly-touted ship that sank on its first time out the gate.
I’d rather you build a good strong rowboat and use it for many years. Or plant fields of pretty flowers that come back strong every single year. Pay close attention to the little photographs and the big one will take care of itself.”
Life As A Photo Op - Continued
July 24, 2009 by rtwsenior · Leave a Comment
What are the underpinnings of a picture? Of a human life? Last post, I started a commentary on the famous poster created by Robert Silvers of The Titanic. Eight years ago tomorrow, when I first saw this marvelous work consisting of a photomosaic with hundreds of tiny photos combined to make one large portrait, I was inspired to write a long, philosophical piece for the erudition of my two grandchildren who were mere toddlers at the time. Now, I’ll continue that line of thinking, but it will clarify things for you to go back and read the last post if you’re not familiar with it:
Assuming that the portrait of the Titanic is the unwitting creation of someone whose life had added up to this scene, and assuming that we are taking part in a life review using this picture to figure out the direction of a life, we might hear The Analyzer say:
“Notice that an overwhelming percentage of the photos that make up the blackness of the Titanic’s hull are underwater scenes of the deep, dark floor of the ocean. Most consist of marine life and reef creatures, as well as the darkness that they live in. The sunken hull of the Titanic has now been discovered and photographed in its watery grave on the deep, night black ocean floor. So, even within the mosaic of a fine proud ocean liner, one can find clues to its destiny.”
How would you feel now if you were the one under review? Not so hot! And, you’d be wondering how you could change the fate of the picture that you had, unknowingly, painted with your life. How could you, at this late date, stop the Titanic from sinking? How could you divert the horror that you had created and had amassed with all of the millions and jillions of little life decisions you had made along the way? Maybe, if you had learned to laugh for all of those times that you chose to curse. Or, if you had forgiven, instead of holding onto a grudge. Or had had a different ambition instead of power.
Maybe now that you have left life and are staring at the clear picture of where you were going with it, is there any way to divert the ultimate tragedy that is readable in the cards? It’s certainly a lot harder to do, once you are in that Analysis Room In The Sky; when your billions of freezeframe snapshots have been put in the developing solution and collected up as finalized. If you had only spent your living days analyzing your moves and decisions. “Where is all this going?” “What am I all about?” “How do I become spiritual instead of material?” Then your picture surely wouldn’t have come together as one of the most materialistic symbols imaginable, steaming confidently towards its own destruction.
It would be something lovely, with a forward-moving future, such as a lovely flowering plant, full of luscious buds ready to burst into stunning blooms (see Princess Diana) in the next stage of existence. That pending future is just as easy to read in its mosaic/life photograph as this one of the Titanic is. Which one would you rather see in that data-gathering of life’s sum total, as you take the analysis of what you did on Earth? There’s the whole thing! Even the lowliest flower is much more desirable than the most powerful accident waiting to happen.
To continue studying this composite picture of Robert Silvers’ Titanic as if it’s a human life that we are totaling up:
Appropriately, every small picture making up the composite whole is ocean-related. There are many sorts of ships represented: tall ships, cruise ships, sailboats, yachts; plus many beach scenes, diving scenes, swimming scenes. We also find appropriate underwater scenes, such as scuba pictures of reefs and creatures of the deep. So, this individual was true to themselves to the core. Consistent.
All pictures were happy and pleasure-filled. I don’t see one to be ashamed of. However, I also don’t see even one shot that portrays “work” in any way, unless the person was a pleasure boat captain, or a marine photographer, or a travel channel host. Even so, they were obviously having a whole lot of fun. Which is what life is all about….right?
There are no indoor shots…no studious shots…so this is a very focused collection that features the oceans of the world. No wonder, that it is expressed in one very powerful image of a great ocean liner. So, what conclusions do we draw, if these were the personal memories of one person? If they were a printout of somebody’s memory banks?
To Be Continued…
