Get it down.

Here’s an unsettling story:  seconds before a Filipino politician was shot, he took a picture of his family — and the gunman.

The man with the gun, at left, is just about to kill him.  He’s aiming for the face.  Here’s a ghastly little postmodern one-upsmanship on that photo of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald:   The present gets shaved and shaved more narrowly, without getting any closer to what is actually happening to us.

We all know that feeling of browsing through photos we took of some brilliant or poignant event, and realizing that we weren’t really there at all — we were just the ones operating the camera, storing it away for later without ever having been fully present.  Camera, it’s the Pope!  Camera, she’s opening her present!   Camera, pay attention, you almost missed that one.  The camera sees and remembers more than we do.  But this time, the sound of the gun must have blotted out the sound of the camera:  a click to record a life, a bang to obliterate it.

When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with tracking down every season of emotional trauma or euphoria that passed through my mind.  I can’t remember or even imagine why, but it seemed horrible, terrifying, that one of these  interior moments should be forgotten.  I guess I did it because what lay ahead of me was such a blank, and I was afraid of being a blank, a void.  I was afraid that if I didn’t keep track of everything that made me who I was, I would turn out to be nothing.

I don’t want to cheapen the death of that poor man or the suffering of his poor family, but I think I am that man.  Hello, it’s a party, and I’ve got my camera! The foreground composition is worked out so nice, and I always feel better when I get something nailed down just right.  But I wonder if I’m missing anything.