Philosophy and Photos: Beginning Again

By

Carl Reader

I decided to begin writing again at the age of seventy-one.

What precipitated this rather ridiculous decision were some drops of water that formed on my kitchen window this morning.

After fifty years of frustration with fiction writing, alloyed with thirty years of concomitant drudgery doing journalism, I thought I had had enough.

Then I saw the drops of water on my kitchen window.

Rain kept me in this morning. It was telling me something.

The droplets made me think of another photo I made over fifteen years ago. That photo was one of my most successful. It sold several times, once to a very rich person. A woman recently stared at that old photo in my apartment and told me how amazing it was.

Seeing these new droplets made me wonder it I still had it in me to make a photo that was just as good.

I have been working as a photographer for a company that provided pictures for yearbooks for many years now. It's how I've made money since my career in journalism petered out as newspapers died  (and continue to die).

At the age of seventy-one, I should be retired, but I'm one of those ancients kicked to the curb of poverty by my own poor financial planning, failed relationships, the wretched pay that most journalist suffer and my love of writing fiction for nothing when I should have been out working for pay.

So I decided to quit writing about a year ago.

Anybody with any sense would say it was about time. Of course anyone who writes fiction lacks even a scintilla of sense.

So I quit.

For about the millionth time.

Then I saw those droplets this morning.

And I just had to photograph them, several times, just to see if I was at least as good at photography as I was when I took that original photo of a wet spider web many years ago.

The droplets insisted I photograph them.

If it's one thing that a writer and photographer is, it's obsessive, so I took more and more photos of the water droplets on my window.

Another obsessive photograph.

It was time to find out if I was as good a photographer as I ever was. I went on the computer and ferreted out that old photo of a wet spider web, the one I was trying to live up to now.

You can see it below.

Wet spider web taken over the Delaware River.

I'll leave it to you to decide if the old me or the new me is a better photographer. If I had to say, I'd vote for the old me, but I could be wrong.

So what's the point of this?

I came to the understanding that I had been judging myself far too harshly when I decided to quit writing a while back. The photographs told me that in a strange way. Photographing the new water droplets this morning was a way of expunging the hate I felt for myself at being such a failure, for I realized I quit things out of self-hatred brought on by my many failures.

But who are we to judge ourselves? The water droplets asked me, like sirens calling me back to myself.

Judging myself is what I had done after fifty years of writing fiction and trudging through journalism for thirty of those years and ending up an impoverished old man because of it.

The water droplets spoke:

If I could still take those photos this morning of the new water droplets, they told me, perhaps I still had it in me to string together a couple million more words.

But another revelation came along with that one.

I had to write the absolute truth, for I saw the truth of those droplets now. Every water droplet is equal.

I know how impossible it is to write absolute truth, since any writing is personal, but what I had to do was write what was absolutely true for me. I had to write the facts as they happened, just as I photographed the water droplets as they happened, and then let the words flow out from that truth as best I could, just as I let the new photographs flow out.

We are in a post-truth era, and that is what was making me sick enough mentally to quit writing, which I love more than anything. I was experiencing the post-truth world too willingly. I was bombarded by it in the media and from the mouths of deluded friends and family.

I had to focus on the only truth I had access to.

My own.

I'd express that and let others decide if it was worth it, if they could be truthful enough to do that.

They always judge anyway.