How bloody emotional was today?! This was the day the world paused to watch 33 miners resurrected from the ground; the culmination of 69 days of engineers and physicists and drillers and other errr miney skills, pouring their energy and knowledge into a courageous feat: one that many will remember as a miracle. It was incredible to watch the scenes at Camp Hope; the antithesis of all-day news coverage that usually signals the latest terrorist attack.
At midday I met Leonie at the V&A to see Shadow Catchers: an exhibition in camera-less photography (note to self: when experiencing an exhibition about images and the nature of ephemera, be sure to take a gorgeous kiwi poet & photographer). To protect the works, the gallery is black and dimly lit, which gives the already ethereal images a real intimacy. I was transfixed by the image above, and those of Susan Derges, who submerges photographic paper in rivers and used the moon to create images. I loved what she said about photography: that it is tied up with death insofar as we try to capture absent moments. That its a way of holding on when something doesn’t exist anymore.
Over the past few months I have been somewhat spasmodically taking iphone photos and posting them on ‘The Red Wheelbarrow‘. The name is from a Williams poem: ‘so much depends, upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rain water, beside the white chickens’. And this for me, is exactly what blogging and photography and twittering is all about: its a way of containing and recording, however transiently, ordinary moments. And these mediums are an invitation to participate in each others moments.
And I think thats why the rescue of the miners matters so much to us all; why we are so moved by the experience and why we feel connected to it: life is really just the accumulation of days. We start with day one and live until the last day and the middle bit is the accumulation of all the days, days that we want to have meaning and connection.
The meaning and connection comes from engaging with every day. And then later, making sense of all the days.
Some are just more awesome than others.
Today was a much better day than so many other days! So glad for the miners and their families!
Pearl
It was also Mrs Thatcher’s 85th birthday – kind of appropriate that she was knocked off the news by a the miners I thought.
I love the miners, could have watched the rescue-o-rama all night! I have been so impressed by the skill and tenancity of the rescue team. Perhaps BP should have shipped in the Chilean engineers and their mates to fix the big leak.
it was brilliant wasn’t it? also the whole ‘one with the wife AND mistress waiting up top’ drama thing.
i liked that they saved the miners. hannah’s little friend is from chile. but the fact remains, why couldn’t they do the same for those dudes in the kursk. sometimes its easier to just shut the door. hey. that reminds me. a chilean mine survivor, a kursk survivor, a jew, and irishman, a priest and a kiwi walk into a bar, barmans like.. hey fuck off kiwi you drunk bogan.
si i love ya but sometimes you are just fucking weird. or drunk.
You forget the is inter-connectedness between the days, and between the people in those days.
For instance, this day could also remembered by you almost losing all the football tickets to matches in the next few weeks, in a holiday that has been planned over the last few months, by a range of people on different continents.
Purely as illustrative example, you see.
I can’t believe you would bring that up.
IT WAS ONE TICKET TO ONE GAME FOR ONE PERSON.
But the ripple of interconnection reached Spain, and the chill of a thousand popsicles shivered up the spines of four poker weary men
It’s like LOST, only without the Labrador. Or polar bear. And I don’t think they had a car either.
pffft.
worst case scenario you put the three tickets in the potty and then the pokerage loser misses out.
Today was definitely a very big day … it’s always nice when things end in happiness.
I’m so jealous of your visit to the V&A, and I really enjoyed your thoughts on the exhbition … I can’t wait to get there myself some day.