When your own trash is your treasure
I might be one of the few people who's genuinely not interested in the planet Mars. I get it, it's a large planet. But realistically speaking, there's not much going on there. Photographs from Mars have been looking more or less the same ever since the very first ones produced by Viking 1 and 2 in the late 1970s. I still remember seeing those first photographs. For a ten year old boy, that was exciting. Now, their resolution is a little better, and they're not quite so orange any longer.
These days, there's this rover or mini-robot, and there's that rover or mini-robot, all of them featuring names that make the writer in me cringe. There probably is an article to be written about those mission names, but I can't make myself do the work. Regardless, there are only so many photographs of tire tracks on Mars I can get excited about (that number is close to zero). And I'm writing all of this as a former astronomer (albeit a cosmologist, which sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from planetary science, if you think in terms of scale).
When NASA just published the photograph above (the remains of what helped them land their current mission), I actually felt a pang of sadness. Is there a location anywhere that's not some convenient dumping ground for our trash?
There's a novel by Philip K Dick, one of my favourite science-fiction writers. It's entitled Martian Time Slip and it centers on people who live on Mars. Like all novels by Dick, it's really focused on the present, using science fiction as a Brechtian alienation device (Polish writer Stanisław Lem did the same, albeit for different reasons). At least one of the characters is bored out of their minds because there's nothing going on there (keep in mind this novel was written before any of the pictures arrived). When I first read the novel, I enjoyed that idea so much: it's the anti-model for science fiction where the future isn't fantastic in any way, and advanced technologies cannot mask the general malaise of people's lives.
Speaking of malaise: Twitter. Or social media in general. But let's stick with Twitter. In some ways, my aversion is based on the fact that social media basically destroyed the exhilarating and very active blogging scene that existed a little more than a decade ago. On blogs, people would read something or look at something, and then they might respond underneath, leaving a comment. Social media inverted that relationship: now, it's all about the commenting, and often, people don't even read what they're commenting on.
Social media also massively amplified something that existed in blogs' comment sections. In fact, it already existed in mailing lists in the 1990s (where I first came across the phenomenon): trolling and bad-faith arguing. This resulted in a relatively small number of very active and aggressive commenters being able to dominate and often shut down what had the potential of being good discourse. For that reasons, I switched off comments on my own site a long time ago. I realized that I would either have to spend a lot of time on moderating comments -- or simply use my time for something more productive.
It's not very difficult to trace the massive erosion of the United States' democracy to social media. Donald Trump's evil genius was to be able to exploit the fact that you can whip up resentment as the troll-in-chief with a small army of like minded followers. This brought down the Republican Party, transforming it into the neofascist organization that it is today.
And now there's Elon Musk, an oligarch, buying Twitter. All you need to know about Musk can be gleamed from a profile that Sue Halpern wrote in 2015:
"Elon Musk [...] a man of visionary intellect, fierce ambition, and fantastic wealth, who is emotionally bankrupt. [...] In fact, the man has all the attributes of a classic narcissist—the grandiosity, the quest to be famous, the lack of empathy, the belief that he is smarter than everyone else, and the messianic plan to save civilization."
In my first job in the US, I worked with such people at a software startup that had been founded by a number of MIT graduates. This is 20 years ago now. I still remember how aghast I was at the combination of a lack of any kind of empathy coupled with, to use Halpern's phrase, the belief that you're smarter than everyone else. It's a scary combination that ended up bringing down the company. Even if you're smarter than everyone else, your software still has to do what your clients needs. My bosses simply couldn't understand how their clients didn't appreciate that the software had so many bugs -- how could they not see the elegant data model underneath?
To be honest, I don't think that -- to use a very neoliberal phrase -- my return on investment on social media, in particular on Twitter, has been high enough to justify spending much more time on them. Musk's Twitter takeover already looks like a boon for the exact kinds of accounts that helped Trump. That's just not an environment that I see myself in any longer. So I decided to vastly reduce my Twitter presence and to use it only to advertise my writing. At the same time, I will use this Mailing List to disseminate more of the interesting stuff I find.
Speaking of finding interesting stuff, after I watched almost all Japanese accounts I follow on Instagram post pictures of blooming cherry trees -- it's a huge tradition there, I decided to check up on a tree nearby that I knew was a Japanese cherry tree. It's on my main route for my walks, so it was easy to keep track of it. Trees here started to bloom at least a couple of weeks after they had started in Tokyo and Nagoya, and there aren't just cherry trees.
While I was still waiting for "my" cherry tree, I noticed what looked like two other trees that were already in full bloom. Were those also cherry trees? And if so, why would they bloom before that one tree I knew of had started? Long story short, there exists a variety of Japanese cherry trees (a Japanese contact told me of eight famous ones). And there are more cherry trees here than that one I had known of. Apparently, I had never paid enough attention. From what I gather, there are at least three different types of Japanese cherry trees here: if you look carefully, you can see their differences.
I went out a few times to look at them and to take pictures. They're beautiful against a blue sky; but they were also very beautiful one day against a cloudy light grey sky (which makes for much better photo light).
Japanese cherry trees bloom for only a very short period of time (a week to ten days) before their petals fall. In Japan, that's seen as a sign of their beauty: you better enjoy it while it lasts, knowing that it's their fleeting nature that reminds you of the fickleness of life in general. I've been trying to bring this mind set to my life, even as I am making only slow progress. So one day, I brought along a little Moleskin calendar from a few years ago, and I collected samples from the trees, pressing the flowers (which, of course, probably isn't what you'd expect a middle-age guy with greying hair to do; but I don't care much about what people think).
The weeks before, I had already had the idea to somehow make something out of the cups of green tea I'm enjoying every day. Much like the flowers of cherry trees differ, so do the various types of green tea I use. There are many shades of green, and the leaves come in different shapes and sizes. So far, I've been thinking about making cyanotypes (hello, Anna Atkins!). But cyanotypes are blue, and from what I found, you can't tone them green. I haven't fund a solution, yet.
I think that all of this connects to photography. From what I can tell, many photographers are the types who collect -- to preserve. In fact, we all do that with our photographs to commemorate an occasion. But people who spend more time with photography appear to be especially focused on this: collecting objects, collecting images.
With that I'm going to conclude for today, because I just got a new shipment of tea in the mail. It's time for another cup.
As always thank you for reading and following along!
-- Jörg