DSLR

[Have you ever stared at your image on a mirror, considering deeply and with utmost concentration what it is that goes on beyond your eyes—how everything you’ve always known (and all that you will ever come to know) has happened (or will happen) somewhere inside that one head you see in front of you? I have.]

On the train he lay on cabin seat 47D, which was advertized as “private” and was “private” in theory, but “public” in practice. Moroccan servers and touareg carts snaked their way constantly up and down the narrow lane outside, their shadows cast on the “privacy blinds” he had pulled down—for “privacy.” He was alone and lonely. The cabin fit four—seats A-C were empty, except for the casually strewn camera equipment across from him, on seat B, barely used at all. Some dust covered the lenses, but the fact was beyond the point at this late stage of the assignment. Meknès had come and gone, as had hope.

Now he sat in a deep slump. D was by the window, curtainless and refractory in summer heat. The filthy camera lenses reflected a distorted pinhole-reality, like everything had once been sketched with a ballpoint pen on a balloon inflated beyond its coefficient of restitution, and then deflated. “Muddy as hell.” But he could at least glimpse the glimmer of his blue eyes staring back through razor-sharp, heat-stretched lids, not thinking about anything in particular, vacant and absent, his brightly blonde halo of hair like a holy buzzsaw caught in caked filth. Because he was wearing shorts, he could also see up his legs. They seemed well used, well worn, and infinite as they disappeared down the dusk of genital darkness, his vanishing point in this grotesquely mirrored perspective. He could see his own involuntary oscillatory bobbing, and as the train made its way East the ground became uneven, rising slowly with an unrelenting grunt.

No, he wasn’t thinking of anything, but he was interested in how individuals generate their own personal realities. All things visual appeared to construct a strong, concretely-defined and colorfully-outlined cosmos, but his interest had shifted into a kind of introspection as he stared into his own irises, points of sensory perception nearly invisible on the lens’s surface. They were there, he knew, because they simply had to be. He felt a sense of despair in realizing that he stared back into his own conscience, piercing the very signified of his concrete semiotic being, the meat of this stony skull concealing a brain with instantaneous thoughts identical to his own. At that point he was a calculating, photographic, aural, tactile, olfactory, gustative, orgasmic machine and nothing more, all of his reality neatly contained in an eccentric ellipsoidal mass of neurons, all perfectly enveloped in one upper quadrant of a dirty camera lens. At that point all of reality consisted of five millimeters on some polymer-coated lens of some DSLR on some seat in some train weaving its way across Northern Africa on some planet Earth orbiting some sun in some solar system in some Milky Way galaxy lost and suspended like a grain of dust within some local cluster spotlighted and sparked into life by some 2.725-Kelvin heat of Cosmic Background Radiation.

Perhaps, in fact, he had not always been so brainy. Perhaps he once saw himself—his self—as a sort of meaningful filter for reality, something that could actively change his sensory perceptions of the external, a hint that anything was possible, that dreams could be made real in a stroke of insight, that the very nature of his life, his being, was actually a thing of wonder. That something or anything mattered. But all such cerebral ideas were much too vague for a man as he was: a photographer.