Alternate Universes, Alternate Selves
or, "Help! I've been spending too much time in the multiverse!"
Dear Friends,
Around twenty years ago, when I began my undergraduate studies as an art student, I remember sitting in a photographic history class one day as the professor lectured on about Julia Margaret Cameron. On her father's side, she was born into colonial, imperial wealth (he worked for the East India Company) and her mother had her own prosperous lineage, descending from French aristocracy. Then, Julia (née Pattle) married Charles Hay Cameron, who also was well-off.
It was around this time that I was also taking an antiquated photographic processes class. I was one of the final cohorts to enter my college where the darkroom was taught as the foundation. By the time I was graduating, the school had restructured the photography major to begin with digital. Throughout my time in school I remember hearing all the talking points about how any neanderthal with enough money to buy a Canon or Nikon DLSR could now just press a button and create an image, thinking themselves a real photographer.
The argument was that we had spent our time in the trenches of stop bath, of f-stops, of emulsified papers. We were somehow better, more life-like—despite the truth being that for a lot of us we had to stumble in the darkroom to correct our own mistakes and learn. Just like those with fancy cameras would, if they kept up their practice. This all feels a little extra hilarious to me, considering photography's own antagonistic origin story (being compared to media like painting) and all the discussion of what it means to capture a three-dimensional world in a medium of representation (cue Baudrillard speaking about the age of simulcra).
I suppose, on some level, personal growth for me has been becoming increasingly skeptical of gatekeeping over the years. It tends to never age well. I was told I was a different type of photographer because my emphasis was making art—and because I had grown up developing my own film and prints. Then, by the time I was graduating from college, my program began to strongly de-emphasize a career in art-making (impractical) and more focus on careers that one could move into with a BFA in Photography (digital retouching, studio assistant, lighting tech, et cetera). I was encouraged to become an artist, and then when I was walking across a stage to grab a diploma and shake a person’s hand, they were like, wait! Why are we teaching the youths these principles! A career in art is a terrible thing to encourage!
In that antiquated processes class, I had also just bought the materials for platinum printing (the normal photographic process involves silver, i.e.: 'silver gelatin prints', which is much cheaper than platinum), and I was aghast at how much they cost—especially considering that the platinum prints I would create would be a one-off assignment for a niche darkroom elective. It felt like lighting a cigar with a burning, hundred dollar bill.
I'd like to think the sticker shock was connected to the realization that came as I sat in that plastic chair, but I remember specifically wondering how many artists were never permitted to come into being because they didn't have the wealth to access photography equipment. How many humans, with brilliant eyes for composition, died before they could ever touch a camera and gift us an image of the ages? I suppose hearing a professor lecture on about Julia Margaret Cameron’s family tree that I really began to wonder how many photographers existed in alternate universes who could just not afford the materials to make images with (this is not about Ms. Cameron particularly, she’s just the figure at the center of this personal memory tied to epiphany).
Even though DSLRs did and do create a class barrier, we are now in an age where anyone with a non-flip phone can take a high-quality image. For me, this is where some level of artistry gets a fair play (at least compared with the entire timeline of photographic history). The class barrier is, on some level, lesser. Maybe this is also why writing has always had a charm to me: as long as you have something to write with & something to write on, you can capture your story in the written word.
I'm not sure why it's part of my nature to be like this. It's like Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths." I've always wondered about the alternate universes where other artists came into being—or were not forgotten. It's a thought experiment of quantum mechanics: wondering what our canons would be if certain people had access to different tools in different moments throughout history. I mean, this is not just class: but race, gender, ethnicity, ability, age, and beyond…. I sometimes wonder what my relationship to photography would be if I had gone to school a few years later after DSLRs had become the foundation. Or even if I waited to go back to school like I did with my MFA and PhD studies. In the current year, me saying I once worked as a photographer is more of a go-to answer for an ice-breaker exercise than anything I strongly associate with my present. Is there an alternate reality where I exist identifying as a fine arts photographer and not a creative writer?
On a similar note about canons and multiverses… it was only a year or two ago when I was walking through the shelves of Cellar Stories in Providence (a massive, used book shop that has since closed) that I remember considering all the names unknown to me as I walked through the aisles. I'd consider myself a fairly well-read person, and even if there are certain writers I have not read, I'm familiar enough with their biographies and oeuvre. It can be fairly overwhelming to be in the presence of so many strangers who you wish you had the time to know. There's something humbling about just looking at how many people who have made it as far to publish a book, and even at that point they go unremembered.
It's a bit macabre, maybe, but this week I've also been thinking about how many books that we, the writers, have in us. I sometimes even wonder about the hypertextual pathways of my own work, if they had not been created in the certain circumstances they were born out of. This past week I started drafting a novel that has been in my head for seven years. Some plot points appeared back in 2017, when I was working on a thesis that would become my story collection, Moonflower…. That thesis (and in turn, the collection) would not exist if I did not go to the program I went to. It was deeply informed by my return to the South after nearly a decade. Similarly, if I had not left my career in New York to go to graduate school, my body of work would no doubt be entirely different.
I hope this is not coming across as navel-gazing and self-indulgent and tediously self-evident. I suppose I'm amazed sometimes at just how much a non-existent book can exist. This week I compiled seven years worth of outline notes, character notes, fragmentary ideas…. I tried to be as much of a "planner" as I could be (as much as the term “pantser” is kind of a personal ick, it is more of who I am at my heart). There's also the strange feeling of feeling like you recently figured out a solution to a plot point only to discover you'd already patched things up nicely on a note card three years ago, in nearly the exact same way. It’s in this way that déjà vu and jamais vu feel like a petit tapping into an alternate reality.
These ramblings may be inspired by spending too much (not enough?) time up-close with multiverses lately. I wrote about This is How You Lose the Time War in my previous post. Last night, I ran a book discussion group where we talked about Finna by Nino Cipri (the book group is themed around exploring concepts of time and space in speculative literatures). In Finna, two protagonists move through an IKEA-esque multiverse that is both absurd and hilarious and chilling and scary and exciting and so many other feelings a multiverse can evoke. Without saying too much, there is a scene toward the end of the book where our protagonist, Ava, is going down a hallway and begins to see fractals of different universes where the plot played out differently. It’s haunting and aching to imagine what it would feel like to take Schrödinger's Cat out of the hypothetical: to bear witness to all the paradoxes of quantum superposition at once and to see yourself in them (cue Everything, Everywhere, All at Once).
If I’m not just wool-gathering here, then I’m afraid this prattling may be a prodrome of a mid-life-crisis-to-come. As I get older, I’ve begun to think a little more severely and deeply about how many books I have in me. I already have at least one completed novel (not trunked; I would still like to publish it one day). And now… I’m doing it again. There's something both nectarous and acerbic about having to go back to the start (do not cue Coldplay) even if the story has already been completed in my mind. I remember hearing another writer around my age speak about how they didn't want to be one of those people who spent years agonizing over their first novel, so they decided to just outline it and write it across a summer and be done with it. If you're like "that sounds like bait," I thought so too. It was definitely spoken with an element of trolling the audience and trying to rouse someone into a debate.
That being said: how nice would it be to have one of those minds that plans something A to Z and then executes the task swiftly and deftly? How nice would it be to know which of these stories in our heads were going to be the ones that made it? The ones that survived, the ones that thrived. Although, on some level, if I'm not meant to publish all these ideas in my head, I probably would NOT like to know (would you?). It's the element of not-knowing which helps maintain vigilance and faith that maybe one's work will end up out there some way and find its readers who need it most. That you will exist in that kairotic moment where the thing you have created is the very thing your readers need at that exact moment in time.
Friends, do you ever think about these things? Have you ever gotten lost daydreaming about the multiverse? An astrologer friend once told me that Pisces is the 'oldest' sign, and since I am a Pisces I am always thinking about death and endings. Maybe there’s a universe in which astrology is real (sorry, that actually was bait). Maybe I've also just been reading too many books about time travel and wormholes recently, but if the multiverse exists, do you ever wonder who the other yous are, what their lives have been like? This isn't to suggest the one universe we got is somehow lesser, by the way. Julia Margaret Cameron's soft, sepia-toned images are beautiful. It's just sometimes I wonder what other beautiful worlds were hidden away, or never found their nascence in the first place—and where all these intangible ideas will ultimately fit in a tapestry of the seen and the known.
Anyway, maybe this will be the one universe in which I write a novel in three months. Wouldn’t that be grand?
Until Next Time,
JD
So good!