The first of these images is perhaps the best photo I’ve ever taken of another human being. In this case, the person in question had such force of personality that he pretty well grabbed the frame and made the photo happen as it came out. It almost counts as spirit possession.
He was not, in fact, brooding. I suppose this is a demonstration of the accusations levelled against photography by Sontag and echoed by others, that the photograph steals people from themselves, and allows frozen time to be reinterpreted or relabeled. Simply by assembling that portrait along with these others and giving them all a title, I see something that was not there.
That seems to me to be just an extension of Socrates’ complaint against writing, that representation lets experience live on as something other than what it was. To put it more positively, it gives us time to see more, to create a surplus of meanings, when otherwise life just rushes past.
Whatever the case may be, brooding is my state of mind right now: deep, troubled, uncertain thought. The thought that breaks through at 3am, breaching out of sleep, the thought on reading news and wanting to say or do something but knowing it’s futile. Brooding is the thought of a nesting bird sitting on eggs that will never hatch, warming the never-born.
Good one Tim. Brooding asserts the multilayer capacities of mind and thought. A strength. Even if no eggs hatch.