Ideas in the Stream

As we all access so much information so easily the process presents the risk for me of becoming a trap, an intellectual form of hoarding - a clutter of pixels.  I think of this river of ideas and facts like a trout stream where hundreds of beautiful fish endlessly await for the eager angler to to choose the correct fly and pull them from the water's grasp.  One might fish from hunger or the adrenalin rush of the catch or the challenge of the fish vs. man or the insatiable desire to view the beauty of holding the  fish in the sunlit flow, but all is temporary.  When younger my accumulation of books was the same.  

I travelled constantly for work.  When I had time off book stores offered a trout stream of ideas and stories.  More were caught than consumed. Shelves were filled which now must now be emptied.   Our next home will have no space to hold my books.   No one wants them.   

The same specter of uselessness sometimes hovers over my shoulder as I edit my photographs and post them to Flickr - now my 1,000's joining billions.  Off the internet my images consume terabytes.   I am uncertain of their value except for my own amusement.  What of the video cassettes of travels to remote places that are stored in a cabinet below my tv monitor?

We have a digital record of most all of our business work for the last 30 years - now approaching 800,000 pages.   In order to economically cease business the records must be converted to pdf's and stored off line in a safe.  Useless, really, except when there is some question posed, usually when someone has lost their own record.  I had made no promise that we would keep the records but we have.  

And then there is my study of the story of the photograph of Anna Marie Merkel by Andre Kertez, who she was and became and the strange book "Jusep Torres Campalans" by Max Aub.  I will someday publish that tale on my blog.... But again, information that illuminates such a small moment in history - one enigmatic moment in the life of a photographer, the images of Anna Marie safely stored in museums, her identity and life possibly a mystery to almost everyone, both then and now.

The retention of lists and information and ideas might have an audience and a purpose; the hundreds / thousands of students and the tens of thousands they have taught and the lives they have lived.  Anyone who has had a devoted teacher is very fortunate to be the beneficiaryof tenacious curiosity and devotion to knowledge

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