Pictures

Pictures are memory devices. That is why they are so comforting. I just loaded God-knows-how-many pictures of my trip to the Czech Republic onto my facebook page. It was strangely therapeutic, especially in the melancholy mood I was/am in.

Sometimes I am melancholy because I cannot place myself in the context I am in. What am I doing here? Is this where is should be? Why did I decide this would be meaningful? These questions are so much more obvious when I have left the familiar for a foreign country with high taxes and no open container laws, but these questions are always lurking around the edges of my thoughts, just beyond articulation in my antsy mind.

Pictures, however, remind me that indeed my story has progressed as I remember. I was just in Prague. My memory is reliable, and thus the story that I have told about myself is reliable. I can load these pictures onto my own little identity representation device with little captions to explain why I went where I did, and to show, sometimes all too overtly, why these images make me who I am. It is almost as if I am trying to convince everyone (myself) that I am that person who loves philosophy and is curious, smart, creative, and thoughtful. (Maybe this blog is another attempt...)

Either way, I articulate a story about myself: I am a world traveler. I lead students through academic tours of foreign countries because art, history, identity and politics matter to me. They matter because they are so important, and furthermore, I have beautiful pictures to prove how important they are!

All of this is to say, sometimes we need some confirmation of our own self-story. It is not that I doubt that I was in Prague, but somehow these pictures tell my own story of purpose and organizing telos (the goals and ends I direct myself toward as I live) back to me. Pictures are one of the little tools that I use to remember the right things and in the right ways. Perhaps it is a bit solipsistic to tell myself my own story with the photos I have taken and captioned, but I think it is all I have to start with.*


* I know too well, based on a 75 page honors thesis, that really, I have others. Facebook facilitates the ability of others to confirm my story, to call it into question, or to merely act as a "look of the other" kind of check. There is this other element though of the weight of the responsibility of my own story that can become a bit detached from the confirmation of others because perhaps I can always find someone to confirm whatever story that I create.