© designboom

Olivia is thinking a lot about aging. We met as two young American women studying abroad in Poland and ended up as roommates. We seem to be on similar wavelengths ever since though we are more often than not continents apart.

I imagine our connection is in part because we’re almost the same age, but I think it’s more causedly our having the same orientation to life. We love to travel, to lose ourselves in the foreignness of a place, and to use that isolation to find ourselves, once again, but through our thoughts and wonderings rather than what our family or home town or circle of acquaintances would make us out to be.

Like Olivia, I can’t seem to shake long periods of thought about getting older as I approach a new decade. Some of my questions and concerns about getting older are worked out in my films; others lie in wait for me until 4am like this morning.

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It seems both miraculous and terrifying that at every moment we are being torn down and built up, cell by cell. From the moment we are born, we are in a continual state of change. Birthdays, those customary celebrations, would have us think otherwise: that we remain 19 until we are 20. But, in fact, we are 19 but a mere second, then time trots on and we are instantly older, different, if only microscopically.

The status quo (in Latin, literally, “the state in which” we find ourselves) is one of constant flux. If we accept this fact, then it’s no wonder why it’s so hard to know, much less love, oneself. To do so, we must accept ourselves as constantly changing persons–often without evening knowing the scope or origin of those changes–and embrace ourselves anew with openness, flexibility.

Further still, how do we remain receptive to the changes in those around us when we cannot predict our own metamorphosis as we age?

These are the quiet fears of a late twenty-something as she creeps closer to the three decade mark.

Perhaps most disturbing to me is that as soon as we pass puberty, our bodies begin a continual process of decay. No more new teeth. Our existing ones only get older, damaged by plaque or rot. Our hair, once shiny and smooth, only slowly loses pigment until it turns gray, becomes wiry, and grows in ever stranger places. And our skin, once soft and supple, starts its wrinkling, sagging, and spotting. Our body passes a peak of newness that occurs somewhere in the late teens and early twenties. Then, we are no longer (in body) our freshest selves.

To many people around me, these musings on getting old are an annoyance and easily dismissed. How can they feel pity for a twenty-something who worries about her age? A young thing who doesn’t even know what being old is?

To the contrary, I think it’s at this moment when I can most profoundly feel my youth slipping away. After all, I just had it in hand! And now, at this precise moment, it’s just barely beyond my grasp–not miles away in the distance–and I can almost still be it but not quite. I wonder if it’s not unlike the loss of first love. While it may not be the most profound, the most devastating loss of one’s life, and with more time, may reveal itself as a naive interlude, at the moment, the pain borders on the ludicrous. It’s the freshness of the loss that makes it (or makes it seem) all the more palpable.

It’s also at this tender age that I haven’t quite achieved the self-acceptance that I hear many a wiser person express about him/herself. I’m still in the same age range as celebrities with their impossible bodies. I’m still targeted by the fashion ads and movie posters…or I’m just beyond their target, making me newly abandoned for the fresh crop of young twenty-somethings that are always waiting in the pipeline. It’s the time when you first have the startling realization as you watch young women on the street that you can no longer tell if they’re 16 or 26. All you know for sure is that you are no longer that young woman and that the world no longer sees you as young as you see yourself.

When I seize up at these realizations, I try to do my best to practice aging gracefully. After all, I’ll be aging for the rest of my life, so no better time to start than now. So, I try to invoke the spirit of Johnny Cash (who continually reinvented music till the very end) and Agnes Varda (whose late films, especially, celebrate her ongoing process of aging) and try to open my arms wide, wide, wide open, ready for anything. Even the age spots and wrinkles.

Back in 2002, I was blogging before the practice had hit mainstream. I was studying abroad in several European countries, and I had begun sending out long-winded emails (which I began calling my “travelogues”) full of descriptions of the places and the people I encountered to my friends and family and people I met along the way.

As a young Southern woman on her own for the first time, I approached the world with a great sense of curiosity and my journals were imbued with a both a sense of humor and whimsy. For instance, the titles of two such entries, one from Poland and one from France, respectively, were titled, “Break Dancing for the Pope” and “Frog Eaters and Freedom Fries.”

Before long, these emails were being forwarded to people I had never met, who would then send their comments and thoughts back to me. It was strange and also satisfying to hear how these strangers responded to my many (mis)adventures as I discovered my sense of independence. Eventually, I signed up for a (now defunct) Diaryland.com site, where my online diary took on more readers.

When my travels ended, however, so did these missives. Once the majority of people in my life were no longer characters just passing through, it was hard to write so light-heartedly about their personality strengths and flaws in so public a manner. And the daily tasks, which had often been the source of a funny cultural faux-pas or encounter (such as buying stamps in a Polish post office) no longer existed. I stopped carrying my little notebooks to jot down funny, overheard conversations or to record my latest thoughts on 17th century architecture. And, despite some encouragement to re-write these stories into a book, my journals remained untouched in the nether of my email accounts. (Thankfully, a dear friend compiled them all into three bound notebooks for me so there is an archive!)

Shortly thereafter, as I wrapped up my undergraduate degree, my interest in filmmaking began. I took my first video class, more on a lark than anything else. But in that first class, I had an awakening:  We watched films by Ross McElwee, Alan Berliner, and Agnes Varda. I had never seen anything like them. Not only were these films unlike any documentaries I had ever seen (my canon had, until that point, consisted mostly of  a collection of Nature episodes on PBS or agit-prop style docs about social issues), but they were drawing upon their own lives, and, in Varda’s case, travels and experiences, to tell stories and pose questions in an essay of sound and image. These films thrilled and inspired me and left me with haunting thoughts, images, and, most significantly, questions about what I had seen and what it all meant.

And so, in that very first class, with the most raw and rudimentary of skills and tools, I set out and made a short film about my grandmother.  Looking back at that 7-minute piece, I shrink with embarrassment. The craft is abominable and the tone trite and self-indulgent. But in that film was the seed for the one I would complete six years later, having finished film school and begun teaching video production as a college professor.

I like to think that this new film is closer in craft and quality to the films that first inspired me so. In any case, it’s a far cry from that first attempt years ago.
It seems I’ve traded my early travelogues for a more labored kind that allow me to use material from my own proverbial backyard in way that doesn’t seem to mock or exploit the people and places I can’t ever really leave behind (i.e. my family and my hometown). Instead, it seems this new form even allows me to celebrate those roots, both the heartwarming traditions and the less flattering truths, that make my stories layered enough (in my opinion, at least) to grace the silver screen for all to see.

Now that this first film is finished, I am once again feeling that call to create, to write. And I wonder what form it should be–another film? fiction or non? short or feature? Or is it maybe time to start over again with a plane ticket, pencil, and notebook?

In this first post, I want to indulge in some personal history–not for pure narcissistic pleasure, but in order to trace the way in which this project has grown out of my life experience. My drive to preserve objects, memories, hobbies, and ideas, in whatever shape or form, is, at its very core, a personal mission.

The Preservation Project began long before I knew anything about film or video and stems from experiences I had at a young age. As early as first grade, I was a compulsive worrier. My parents had decided to divorce, and from that point on, I began carrying a large number of bags with me to and from school. I didn’t think much of my behavior until my teacher, Mrs. Smith, took me aside during lunch one day and asked me why I needed to carry two purses, a backpack, and a duffel bag to school each day. In particular, she was concerned that among those contents was a new, unopened package of girls’ underwear. Stunned by her questions, I could only answer, “I need them just in case…” There was an unspeakable comfort in having all of those precious objects with me–my favorite baby doll, my clothes, my books–and I’m not convinced the desire behind the behavior was all that abnormal. (In fact, I think many adults engage in similar behavior, with laptops, water bottles, PDAs, and backpacks today.) In retrospect, I think I was trying to make sure all the things I valued wouldn’t disappear. I wanted to hold on to what I most cherished faced with the uncertainty of divorce. Eventually the packrat impulse wore off, but the desire to save important things never relented.

Around the time I was in the 6th or 7th grade, my obsessive personality found new ways of manifesting itself. Having been introduced to the ideas of global warming and eco-consciousness in school, I became an avid recycler. I was a tree-hugging nerd. I carried around a stamp that I would put on all my assignments. And when our class went to a weeklong nature camp at Tremont, I quickly became enthralled with a book about mayflies or ephemerals, small insects that live above water for just one day before dying.

Moments like these come back to me and remind me that the path I am on was begun much earlier than the first time I held a camera. I didn’t know it then, but my life’s work was revealing itself to me in those moments of reading about mayflies and carrying around packs of spare undies. The driving force behind my life and the goal of the Preservation Project is to try to preserve things before they fade away. In short videos, films, photographs, and other recordings, I call attention to the small, often simple things, in threat of disappearance.

The intent of placing this project on the web is to make its contents accessible to a wider audience, to document the process of the project’s creation, and to further a collective effort to preserve things, remembered or forgotten, that might hold importance to future generations.

I, like the Japanese novelist Tanizaki, who passionately argues for the preservation of the Japanese aesthetic in his In Praise of Shadows, “ […] have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or the arts, where something could be saved.”