Framing the Past

The photo accompanying today’s post was taken on August 10, 2007 which was approximately one year into our ownership and rehabilitation of Rosslyn. Seventeen years ago. It feels like yesterday. And a lifetime ago. Time’s a queer companion. Deceptive. Especially when storytelling, when untangling the timeline, when framing the past from the present.

Time’s deception is inadvertent, I suspect. Organic, rhizomic, sprawling, and intermingling. Layering. Fusion. Hybridization. Cross pollination…

I’m finding it, time, to be a formidable foe. As I probe our early recollections of Rosslyn, we don’t always remember the same things, the same ways. Susan and my sequences, memory mottled and imperfect, are often incongruent. Photographs — and we took many across the years, documenting our slow rehabilitation — are especially useful for forensically reorganizing memories. And yet, back in 2005, 2006, 2007, we didn’t have the luxury of super-duper smart phones in our pockets at all times appending useful met data to all of our photographs. so most of the photographs were made with a camera, and it was quite easy back then to get your dates incorrect on a camera. And many of ours are. Or have no dates at all.

Framing the past from the present without the certainty of 100% reliable memories or metadata is a bit like considering the view through Rosslyn’s wavy glass. Or deciphering a scene painted on the wrinkled water surface of Lake Champlain.

Which is challenging. And intoxicating.

For now I’ll leave you with a couple of thought provoking tidbits that are part of my current kaleidoscopic contemplation of framing the past.

Viewed out of context, a detail can become a whole.

[…]

While the facsimiles record parts…, they seem to deconstruct the decorative program… like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. (Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Puzzle pieces, each intriguing, afford unique but potentially misleading glimpses into the whole.

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” — Marcus Aurelius (Source: Medium)

Opinions and perspectives, occasionally at odds and incongruent, nevertheless afford provocative insights.