Four Months

Once upon a time I wandered in the desert for a week in a 3 cylinder rental car that had to be downshifted to climb a grade when the air conditioner was running. I wasted a day each way flying to and from the desert. I spent half a day developing the film from that week and another half a day contact printing the negatives and looking them over. I spent three days printing the dozen or so good images that I had taken in the desert on double-weight fibre-bases silver paper that I processed to archival standards.

I spent 13 days and produced 12 first-class images.

The screenplay, so artfully pictured above, took exactly 4 months to write and has yet to spend an indefinite period in the purgatory of re-writing before it ascends into the heaven of finished work or is consigned to the hell of un-published rubbish with 2 novels and two hundred poems for company. Granted, that of the 4 months, I had writer's block for three and a half weeks and for much of the rest of the time, my daily "writing" consisted of merely re-checking the spelling and punctuation that I had checked the previous day and then giving up to have a beer.  But still it was a hell of a lot more work than making 12 "first-class images".

What is my point?  Well, writing the preface above has caused me to lose my focus on the point I was trying to make. Maybe by tomorrow I will figure out the cosmic import inherent in a comparison of writing and photography.