From my earliest memory I have been afraid of the dark. Streetlights meant more to me than being able to assess my surroundings — it meant civility, development, non-alone-ness, connectedness, predictability — a safety net (a neurosis of belief far stronger than data or facts).
Now I am well into the second half of life. Somehow (who is living me?!?) in a reflection of the childhood ranch I grew up on (thank God we moved to town for my 7th grade year) … I now own and live on my own ranch on the Texas side of the Red River. What’s more, it has dense dark woods with small rutted dirt roads and animals such as venomous snakes, 300 pound feral hogs and howling coyote packs. The county has lots of drug arrests each month so I guess some grower or meeting could happen somewhere in the dark hours.
Where am I going with this? My soul, and William Faulkner:
Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be. — “The Bear” in The Saturday Evening Post (9 May 1942)
Think when he said this. Mississippi, USA, May 1942.
I don’t think so much about cameras (or not) as a I walk the woods at midnight. I do wear good boots, death from rattlesnake doesn’t bother me as much as the thought thought of extended malaise. I let the fear at night in the woods sit with me and think about the real “bear” I think Faulkner also addressed:
“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.”
No camera or satisfying ego explanation can address my soul’s greatest threat. I am willing to work to uncover my psyche to the point of releasing the morphogenetic fields of my complexes, projections and neurosis. If someone finds a camera for this work I don’t want it, learning to walk through my woods has a reward intrinsic to the work I cannot well explain. Streetlight visibility is not the same as meaning.
