I was just writing to Jumuraa. He had wondered about the new photograph. After explaining what it was I was trying to do I figured it was worth expounding.
I often edit photographs for or just at work. There isn't always a great deal of things to do here and some time falls though cracks. That is normalcy.

The new image contains many icons. Primarily it informs the family. My mother is the figure looking downward from the top. She was teaching us how to swim. Something that she still does. I am not above the use of easy metaphors. My two of my brothers and I are clinging to the edge of the pool. Geoffrey, who is now 22, is resting cherubic on my arm. Shleeve (now 20) is to his right, fiddling with some dwidget or maybe just his thumb. They look away at their own business. Geoffrey is looking down the pools edge like it is a horizon line worth crossing. He now lives in Manhattan and studies Law. That was his course. Shleeve, is introverted and analyzing. He is studying close to home in Cullowhee, history. These two brothers are as similar as brothers normally are but different in the ways that brothers know they are. We think we are nothing alike sometimes but we are wrong. Here we are in one pool together.

My younger self is on my left side. I am harder to see but present. My small fingers grasp the neckless of my current self. Stubbornly griping it's rope just under my chin. The other child hand resides on my shoulder. I wonder what the younger me thinks gazes past myself. Right now he looks at me from the screen. Perhaps he is surprised that I look so similar to the teacher in the pool beside him. Now I am approaching the age that she was when I was born. But now he isn't looking at me. He stares out into you reading this. I like that young me is on the left. The Memory Left. Physical residence of the logic in our brian.

A child planed who I am today. We all have that inside us. The decisions we have made propel us into tomorrow. Every heroic deed or isolated moment becomes the evolutionary sequence. I was born with a desire to create out of anything. When I was his age I painted with tomato paste and made mini macaroni murals for class. Now that I am 24 I made him. Now I am on his right. I am the imagination that the sequence produced. This new me made newer every day is the Right. Physical location of creativity in our brain. Somehow I feel like this is some kind of time travel. Visual highways to the past.

The rest of the family is hard to see because they aren't visible. With every picture, snapshot and photograph one person is usually left out. That is the photographer, someone who frames life a 60th of a second at a time. There are three invisible people in this one image. Firstly I believe is my Father. I don't know who else would have taken a picture of my young family in the pool. I doubt that my mother set a timer on the camera. If she had then her smile would have been fake. I know this because I have half of her DNA and I can't smile when I know the shutter will open. Also, she is cautious. It is unlikely she would have set a camera near a puddle. If it was my father all is well. He, at the time was part of our family but no longer is. His image is from the past, where it stays. Old family. Another invisible is Jef. He took the picture of current me in my new home. Jef is part of the new family, our more adult family. It is though that spectrum that the world now sees us. The Young family. In me both families exist.

Lastly is the image of the dancers. There photographer is lost in time. I chose to include a symbol for the impressions in my sequence left by those I don't know. I parade of individuals who in some small way made the result. The Sum of Me. All of them danced by or watched. One dancer is the fry slinger from Burger King who told my Mother it was strange to hear her listening to Deep Purple at the drive through. She was surprised to hear her 8th grade history teacher rocking out. After that I suspected that your age matters less when you aren't allowed in the ball pit anymore. My life was filled with people who danced their lives around me or watched as I danced mine. In the past we learned from them. Some like the photographer I've forgotten. Others I know only by the shape of their bodies or the arrangement of a face and scarcely a deed or name.

In another way the dancing image is representative of my reentry into a work environment. The image is from a bulk of photographs taken in Mars Hill College long ago. They are part of a book I should be working on right now. Last week I was on vacation in the Caribbean. I swam, drank and sunbathed. It was the pool. Now I return to the images of windows and red dancers. Now I work them out.



I suppose it is about memory then isn't it. -Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating-. Finding wisdom of the soul. Some that isn't susceptible to proof but is infact it's own proof. The sum of the past is the future. Kind of like the Song of the Open Road.