TRANSIENT LIGHT, FLEETING TIME
Reasons why I wrote this book of essays
How can I explain why I have committed much of my life
revealing unfairness, injustice, oppression and un-freedom?
In the past I have been vague about this,
not wanting to expose my inner compulsions to strangers,
not wanting to tell others who I am,
preferring to offer others to see the world as I see it through my lenses.
Recently watching a wonderfully concise documentary about
Luciano Pavarotti,
Bono from U2, who obviously loved Pavarotti, said of Pavarotti’s late critics,
“what they don’t understand is that he could not sing as he did
without having lived a life filled with heartbreak.”
I recognised that heartbreak clearly explains
why I chose to photograph and film what I have seen:
the stresses of poverty,
the immiseration of so many lives,
the waste of children’s potential,
the eviscerating loneliness of the old,
the horrific consequences of war
for at least 3 generations in three countries,
and the emptied hearts and minds
who have fallen victim to coldblooded billionaires
and to cravenous politicians.
These burdens of war, poverty and loneliness belong to the victims,
but they leave outsiders/journalists/witnesses with heartbreak,
witnesses who can do little else but to remind the rest,
those blinded by their comforts
and blinded by the smoke and mirrors of the conventional corporate media.
As a result of my history, career and teaching,
along with learning about lenses, f stops,
and how to organise a shooting day,
or how to create a truthful photoessay, a portfolio or series
there are a number of primary questions,
or I should say, an examination of oneself
that must occur before a photographer can know what he/she is doing
besides pointing a camera and hoping for the best?
PROCESS
And what might this ‘best’ be?
Truth-telling?
Moving hearts and minds?
Giving a gift of beauty and wisdom to a community?
Is it about making photographs for oneself or for friends and family,
or is it about becoming powerful, famous, rich and admired?
Amongst those questions which need be discussed are:
•What are ‘truth’ and ‘beauty'?
•What is one’s duty (if any) to their talent and to their community?
•How does morality deal with the challenges before the photographer?
•How does the photographer recognise what is important and vital to create?
•How can emotions be introduced into a two-dimensional static image?
•How can the photographer (or for that matter, as in all the above,
the film-maker) arrive at the point of pre-visualising images,
stories and characters?
and:
•What constitutes a story?
•What makes a story important and appealing to an audience?
•Why concern yourself with the audience?
To paraphrase the great Russian filmmaker and theorist, Sergei Eisenstein,
“every director (read as photographer, painter, poet, novelist, theatre worker, etc) needs to know everything about everything and to never stop asking questions.
These are amongst the reasons I wrote the essays in my new book
TRANSIENT LIGHT, FLEETING TIME
The book can presently be purchased as a PDF from here
and as an epub in many forms in online booksellers (scroll to the bottom)
and soon to be available as a beautifully printed hardback.
David Whyte on Heartbreak from his book Consolations ... an English poet and philosopher now living on Whitney Island in the Puget Sound ... a hugely interesting and inspiring writer and speaker....
( I find that I’m often heartbroken....)
Heartbreak is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control, of holding in our affections those who inevitably move beyond our line of sight.
Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colors and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a love relationship, in a life's work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete's quick but abstract ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.
Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked for and then walked around; the hope is to find a way to place our feet where the elemental forces of life will keep us in the manner to which we want to be accustomed and which will keep us from the losses that all other human beings have experienced without exception since the beginning of conscious time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.
Our hope to circumvent heartbreak in adulthood is beautifully and ironically child-like; heartbreak is as inescapable and inevitable as breathing, a part and a parcel of every path, asking for its due in every sincere course an individual takes, it may be that there may be not only no real life without the raw revelation of heartbreak, but no single path we can take within a life that will allow us to escape without having that imaginative organ we call the heart broken by what it holds and then has to let go.
In a sobering physical sense, every heart does eventually break, as the precipitating reason for death or because the rest of the body has given up before it and can no longer sustain its steady beat, but hearts also break in an imaginative and psychological sense: there is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak. A marriage, a committed vow to another, even in the most settled, loving relationship, will always break our hearts at one time or another; a successful marriage has often had its heart broken many times just in order for the couple to stay together; parenthood, no matter the sincerity of our love for a child, will always break the mold of our motherly or fatherly hopes, a good work seriously taken will often take everything we have and still leave us wanting; and finally even the most self compassionate, self examination should, if we are sincere, lead eventually to existential disappointment.
Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose. It is the hidden DNA of our relationship with life, outlining outer forms even when we do not feel it by the intimate physical experience generated by its absence; it can also ground us truly in whatever grief we are experiencing, set us to planting a seed with what we have left or appreciate what we have built even as we stand in its ruins.
If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it, to see it as our constant and instructive companion, and perhaps, in the depth of its impact as well as in its hindsight, and even, its own reward. Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.
-David Whyte Consolations