Night

How many people might have looked at the moon that night? And how little can words say about the longing, loneliness, love felt in those million moments?

Images and photos are a way to cross that chasm – but only a little bit. The numbers describing blue and orange pixels too cannot say much about that moment. Was this really the color of the night sky? It’s one of the few photos I didn’t edit at all, but the colors you see are still determined by the optics of my lens, the way the sensor works with the light falling in, the way the camera is programed to deal with that information, the way RAW files are compressed to jpgs, and finally the technology of the screen you use. It’s a very scientific process in the sense that if I took a hundred photos (fast!) and did the same thing a hundred times, the photos would all look very very similar. But it still says so little about what actually happened at that moment.

The thing is… everything is like that. Our eyes work like that, different of course, but still the same. The images we take, words we use, data we gather, stories we tell – it’s all an entangled mess somehow rooted in whatever happened in the quantum soup we call “reality.” It’s a chaos of which we can only experience a tiny tiny tiny part of through these entanglements, everyone of us on our own.

There is no problem here. It just reminds us how small our language and images are.

Taipei is cloudy now, so please greet the moon from me.