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"Autobiography is a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause."
– Paul de Man, Autobiography as Defacement
I am editing a twenty-minute clip of my late lunch at a park in Sydney, one of many videos I took while traveling alone in Australia. It is two weeks after the events in the video. I have not eaten dinner. It is one in the morning. Tomorrow is Monday. None of these facts occur to me. There is a longing that drives me through this physical limbo into a deep investigation of many hours of footage. Clip after clip after clip. Watching, rewatching. Starving.
The grass bristles in a close-up shot. I wonder how it will feel with somber music. I've found a sufficiently satisfying royalty-free song called "ambient-thoughtful-solemn-funeral-music." I place it against the grass, squinting, as if to assess a picture frame's levelness against a drywall. I am unsure how effective the sound is, to evoke the feeling I had felt in that lived moment, the sweet melancholy of life that had motivated me to bring a camera, to capture…
Have I eaten today?
The grass bristles for my attention. I look at it again. My distraction has returned it to a stranger: it is just grass. I am editing a video. The top right of the screen tells me, boredly, 1:25 AM. The grass is empty. It cannot be in want of anything, let alone attention. It is an artifact of the past, distributed into pixels on my computer.
What am I doing?
Editing, suddenly, feels ridiculous. So does that one-week journey. Am I just stupidly rearranging pieces of evidence into a vapid poem? Are all of these videos just moments of existential vanity? It occurs to me: for each of the living-in-the-moment adventures I thought I was taking, there had been mirrored, color-inverted shells-of-a-life happening in a parallel world. I hadn't been present, after all. My mind had been performing a presence for the inversion, the recapitulation. I'd been stupidly beaming at my self-honesty in that little park when actually I was simultaneously there and not-there – a part of me in the park, another part of me in an astral projection, seeing myself in the park from my dusty room two weeks later, proud of my presence in that park, that stupid park. In the sobriety of my pulsing sleep deprivation, I realize that during the entire solo trip, I had saved some deeper reserve of my emotion somewhere dark, hidden, waiting for a reinterpretation that would imbue a justification of my existence that I could not find in that moment. From this, an inkling of a fear begins to pool outwards: that there is no justification.
Tomorrow is Monday. Tomorrow entails a number of things: I will eat dinner, take a shower, go outside, go to work, etc. (not in that particular order). The next day will come. I will go to work again. As always, there will be people. I will meet and talk to those people. They will see me, address me, inquire about me. They will know what I look like when I pass their office in the hall, what I look like on camera during a meeting, have secret opinions about how I look different on camera than I do in person (as everyone does, inevitably). This will continue for months. Years, maybe. All of this feels harrowing under a truth that is dawning upon me, slowly, threateningly, as I'm presently scrubbing through this stupid grass-of-a-video on Final Cut Pro: there is nothing in my life that cannot be filmed.
All of this can be filmed. My room, me, editing. Tomorrow, working. Five days from now, sleeping. All of it. This is terrifying news to me. I recall one of my favorite genres of YouTube videos: other people's lives (i.e., vlogs).
How do people live every day? Have they found what within it explains the next day? Where is the seed from today that becomes tomorrow? Must I always carry it, sow it again and again? I will ask these questions subconsciously as I watch a fifteen minute video ("[vlog ep.3] cozy introvert day of drawing and editing - how to edit your vlogs cinematically") of someone going to a cafe, ordering coffee, editing a video which is not the video I am watching, talking about it– excitedly, happily, performatively, desperately…
Is everything in my life as empty as the scenes that I've recorded? If I do film every moment of my life, will I find that all of it turns up empty, just like the grass, like the lunch in the park? If that is the case, I don't want to be recorded. I don't want to be filmed, because maybe I prefer the imprecision of emotional memory to the nihilism of evidence. The grass is empty. I want to remember the grass, not see it.
Anyways. It is nearing two in the morning. I should save and go to sleep. But I'm bothered by this pervading emptiness that will not stop growing. I stare, and stare, and stare. The video hobbles, languishes on, indifferent to the sinkhole that it is spinning into existence. I do not move.
The screen goes dark. I am confronted with my reflection within the frame: hunched, bleary-eyed, wanting for sleep.