august eighth

I’d been seeing so many of my friends using digital cameras that I started thinking I wanted to buy one too. Then I remembered the Olympus E-P1 that had been sitting abandoned in my closet, so I took it out for the first time in a while. For some reason, I hadn’t been able to fall asleep the night before, but as I stared intently at the battery charging in front of me, thinking, “I should hurry up and sleep so I can wake up tomorrow morning and turn the camera on,” I gradually drifted off.

The last time of use was two years ago. Flipping through the photo album, I found that pictures of flowers, grass, and trees occupied most of it. There was a video, too. I almost skipped past it, thinking it was simply a recording of a moving sunset, but after waiting about five seconds, a voice began to speak. The voice opened the video with the proposition that it wanted to become a tree. Then, in a calm yet slightly solemn tone, it carefully explained, step by step, why it had come to hold such a dream.

"I want to be a tree.

In <The Vegetarian>, a novel by Han Kang,

the protagonist wants to become a tree.

Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to say so,

but I think I can understand her,

at least a little.

Human beings are such strange and intelligent animals.

But for some reason, I feel far more at ease

standing in the middle of a forest

than I do among crowds of people

with faces that look like mine,

and sometimes I find myself unbearably envious

of those countless brown faces densely filling it.

I think it is fortunate, a stroke of luck, to have been born human,

but I often find myself imagining the life

I might have lived, had I been born curled up

in damp, cold earth, slowly unfolding my body

as I fed on water and sunlight.

What part of the world would I have lived in?

What landscapes would I have seen?

By what stirrings of nature,

by what kind of environment,

would I have slowly died?

Trees do not scold us for anything.

Even when we cut away, tear off, and carve

into their new shoots, leaves, and branches,

they neither shed tears nor seem disturbed by it.

They simply stand silently where they are.

Rather than making me feel sorry for them,

that image awakened in me a wordless longing.”

There is a certain boldness in the voice, the kind peculiar to a young girl, yet to me, it somehow sounds tired. The hand filming the scenery is not steady but trembles ever so slightly, and the silences between words do not feel completely empty but more so dense and heavy.

Perhaps it was not that I wanted to become a tree, but that I wanted to stop for a while, like one. Perhaps it was not that I had grown tired of people, but that I had grown tired of the pace of crowds that are always rushing somewhere. Perhaps, pressed beneath all those feet spinning in circles toward a destination they had already lost, I had failed to see the star pointing east. I kept wanting to find the light, so I was always drawn westward, into the sunset—and so it was always night.

The owner of that voice now uses the word person more often than human. Rather than losing myself in the sunset, I run surrounded by the first light of dawn. Rather than grieving what has been cut away, I go searching for the branching points where I might still grow further. And I still long to be a tree. But now, I long in the same way for every other living thing that moves and breathes.

After watching the video to the end, I inserted the SD card into my laptop and began transferring the photos when I suddenly realized that, among all those pictures, there was not a single photo of the Olympus E-P1 itself. If it were to break or stop working, then unless I had taken a photo of it with another camera, I would forget forever what that model had looked like.

In some ways, perhaps people are the same. We will never be able to see ourselves as others see us, nor will we ever be able to look at our own eyes from the perspective of a third person. It is different from looking in a mirror. Seeing the contours of your face and skin, the image of yourself living and moving through three-dimensional space, is different from seeing yourself trapped upon a flat pane of glass.

But if I think about it another way, perhaps I do not exist only within my body and face. I exist in people’s memories, in the breakfast I made today, in the paintings I drew with my own hands, in the daily diaries I have scribbled, and in the eyes of the people I love as they look at me. And so, even when the time comes for my body and soul to disappear, I will not disappear.

A camera cannot photograph itself. But if, somewhere in the landscapes its lens has captured, in the sounds, in the faces, and in the eyes above those faces, something of it can be seen reflected back, then perhaps that is the camera itself.