Usually my screensaver is a photograph of the four ghosts from the classic video game Pac-Man. However, when I’m playing music off my laptop, but am otherwise inattentive to it, something kind of spooky happens. For some reason, my computer opens up my library of photographs, and to whatever music is on, runs a slide show through all the pictures I have stored.
The first time this happened the music I was listening to was the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. There’s a positively alien quality to their music, something that suggests the presence of divinity in the universe. It was entirely dislocating to hear this music, which always carries me away from myself, scoring images culled from my life, photographs I hadn’t seen or thought about in ages.
The images came in random sequence, with each picture appearing for about five seconds. Not only had I abdicated control of the photographs I was looking at, but also the way in which I was looking at the pictures, as whatever program was operative, slowly zoomed in on an arbitrary detail in each photograph. There was my father, in his red sweater at Christmas, the image of his hand on my sister’s shoulder filling the screen…Rachelle in a Sumo suit at her 30th birthday, the camera moving in to study her smile…Heidi playing on a beach…A person whose name I can’t remember, drinking a beer on the dock of a friend’s cottage, the mechanics of the slide show focusing our concentration on the waters of the lake, just beyond her shoulder.
Accompanied by the music of Sigur Ros, there was a distinctly funereal quality to this experience, and it was as if something in my life had passed, and I was looking back on the life that was, rather than a life that was being lived. It was actually a very emotional experience, reminding me how very precious and precarious all our lives, and the people we have in them, are.