Needle And Thread

Needle And Thread

'One by one, the knots we've tied will come undone,
Like picking locks, we'll sow our seeds beneath the sun,
Our accomplice is the rain, with patience, that of the saints.
We'll try to document this light, with cameras to our eyes,
In an effort to remember how being mended feels like.'


I'm not much of a model.


Don't get me wrong. I'm not a model, and I don't plan to be one. It's just that if I were actually a model in some far-off parallel reality, I'd be terrible. The fine art of picture-taking is lost on me. A shop window mannequin is probably more coordinated than me at posing, and most of them don't even have the luxury of elbow or knee joints. No, it requires a certain amount of pride and confidence in yourself, borderline arrogance maybe, to really be comfortable taking pictures. Especially so they don't turn out the way that any of my attempts at hiding my awkwardness do.  


I much prefer words.


They're irresistibly personal, freeing my thoughts with such tangible self-expressiveness. They're not static, not motionless like the frozen split second of a snapshot. They'll weave around your mind, leaving a trail of imprints, of impressions that feel almost dreamlike. We write in black and white, yet think in technicolor. We write words and phrases, but they conjure up rose-tinted memories and vivid scenes. Pictures just leave me with a sense of emotional detachment. They don't capture the moment, they merely capture a moment. One that would otherwise be lost and forgotten by the time the next click of the camera comes along.


It's a paradox I find poetic, almost. That something written and read could be more beautiful than something seen. How meaning is so lost in the chaos of a picture that it seems eerily distant. We've all looked at pictures and not wholly recognised ourselves, but somehow we'll always feel a link when reading the stories we wrote as a child. It's because the lines and dots that appear from the tips of our pens are more than just that. They're an embodiment of our thoughts, more so than the exaggerated emotion we see in photoframes. Well, for me at least.


We rely on our eyes to see, not feel. People forget that.