A Developing Story

Better Living Through Chemistry

Where we go when we die…

We've lived and posed. Impressions of us burned both onto film and into our brains. Then set awash in stepwise baths under the vantage of a red safelight while the image in the mind fades.

Two-dimensional beings hang on dripping sheets from a string across my safelighted room. While the glow of red usually means to stop, here it allows the alchemy to continue. Shadowy wraiths come to life, from the gossamer dead—to better living through chemistry.

There they are. Back from the dead. Shadows emerge, then define.

Two points determine a line. Three points make a plane. Real people's linear lives are summarized and put onto planes of photographic paper within planar constraints. And it's all for us tertiary beings who bring them out, our connections with the past spanning differing dimensions of magnitude.

All of these ghosts hang there, lifeless now, suspended in a living story already told. A triptych legacy.

Hanging lifeless from the last generation, they drip with solvents. Emulsion sublimates the silver iodide so zombies can claw themselves out to rejoin the living.

They survive now, emerging into the light. They evoke memories and rekindle reminiscences. Then they go away, back into the word-of-mouth tales told at weddings and funerals and bar mitzvahs.

Whole generations can fit in an 8x10-inch album of faux leather and acetate sleeves on a shelf. A book for each child. A record for each vacation. A journal of birthdays. Pictographs on our walls that hold hooks under layers of paint.

But entombed in the leaves they are held fast by bookends and have no clue as to their next metamorphosis, for a sea change is coming, their past being catalogued into the future, where there will be space for everyone.

Even us.

Entomed, they are shielded from the dust with clear, plastic condom sleeves. For now, backgrounds escape the inevitable jaundice since their lives are closed books.

There are only so many shelves for photo albums.

Yet, there are not enough prying eyes for their liking.

They want exposure. They want overexposure. Their images and likenesses are what keep them alive in a strange, but curated, way. Now, as Moore’s Law continues, so follows the next generation of homuncular redux, frugally cramming them into one dimension. One of pixels and binary data. With all the room to spare that can be rented. And where they will live in a cloud.

Like we were told in Sunday School.

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