Today, I dug out a six-minute video I had taped as a
crude “selfie” in January 2012, at Keyes Gap on Route 9, going into the West
Virginia Panhandle from Virginia.
The video quality is a little grainy and certainly
jerky, rather like some personal “found footage” (as if in a “Devil’s Pass”, or
maybe leading to a “Blair Witch”). I’ll
get into the issue of editing and reshooting soon on one of my newer Wordpress
blogs. I have run into some issues
converting my Sony iMovie videos to YouTube.
Toward the end of the video, there are about two
minutes where I speak in my living room, into a Macbook webcam.
The video puts a moral problem forward in the
abstract: should someone who is “different”
but individually talented (me) be expected with some special deference to the
needs of the tribe or the group? I do
mention the “sustainability” issues (like climate change) and the possibility
that enemies could force us to live more collectively. I also mention the idea that sometimes people
do use their freedom (of speech, particularly, or of “refusal”) to promulgate
(or at least harbor) what amount to authoritarian values. It can be a useful exercise to look at how
life would remain “worth living” if a calamity (whether from nature, or from an
enemy) forces us to change our own personal purposes. That could generate another video (like this proposal). (Oh no!)
I can bring back a time when I had started as an
inpatient art NIH back in 1962, and my father would chide me as to whether I
was willing to “let go of it”.
Picture: from the grounds of the Monroe Institute,
VA, south of Charlottesville, on Roberts Mountain (Aug. 23, 2014).
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