that which has been <-> what has been

Coming from Ohio into California, you notice that continuous mountainous range as one drives in a car. Of course they are the "landscapes and sites", you would want to capture in photographs - telling the world, proving that you had been there, had felt it. Maybe "felt it" is a word not that readily associated with "images". Maybe "seen it" is, and again I guess, I am wrong, I am ambivalent.

"Images" and "Memory" are obviously bound together. Memory comes with, almost invites feelings. Marguerite Duras's protagonist in "The Lover" would qualify as a proof/witness, in her recounting life through seeing images from childhood.

So, dropping from Ohio into California, I recounted (not without a bit of that whimsical playful imagined memory-ing) the contrapuntal transitory scenes in "Annie Hall" from the interior snowing New York to sunny sunny California. That cinematic moment each time it came to my mind as we drove in California, gave another moment of joy.

So far, I have been completely "out of form" with my pictures, infact I was horrible in that "capturing act" of photographing because I never seemed to have the camera when the right image happened to be there - presented it-self in front of me. Leave alone that, when the camera was there, the battery was down or actually gone. So, when I was on the Amtrak Starlight coach, seeing the Pacific Coast and with nearly everyone of my fellow passengers clicking pictures of that wild vegetation, of those flying birds, the ocean and the mountains on an evening horizon, I had to figure something to cognitively fight my regret away.

I would never be able to say if I did not have the pictures that "i was there" , that "i had seen it". I could say, yes I did take a "picture" - picture in the way Ethan Hawke takes of Julie Delpy in "Before Sunrise". I could close my eyes, take a breath and let the image "sink in" :D, silly me.

I told myself, what Roland Barthes had said to the world a long time ago- the photograph is about the ‘that which has been’ and it certainly is not the "what has been". But "what has been" - will i ever be able to articulate it in words? - the beauty that I saw, and there you go because "what I saw" is not the same as "what was". My memory will be garbaged by trivial memory of route maps to remember, passwords I ought not forget, citations I better am able to cram for my prelims.