The Naked Eye

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Manly Beach, New South Wales, Australia. On our surf today, the weather took a turn for the better. When I say better, I mean dark rain clouds rolled in from the east while the sun continued to shine brightly from the West at around 4:00 in the afternoon. Not quite late enough for dusk, but late enough for a low sun. As the rain started to sprinkle down, the sun from behind the trees on the shore created the most beautiful rainbow I have ever seen. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and then what seemed like 4 more colors that I've never heard named before by humans. It began its arc way out in the ocean, disappeared up into the clouds, then reappeared finishing its shape in the surf right next to us about a half mile down the beach. The weather had been dark since the beginning of the day, keeping the population at the beach regulated to the local surfers, all of whom stopped paddling, stopped looking for sets coming in from the horizon and just watched as the rainbow grew brighter and brighter and till it finally faded away into the oncoming storm. I heard a swimmer behind me say, "Oh man, I wish I had a camera." I couldn't deny that I was thinking the same thing, but I also knew that the wish left my mind faster than it entered. I used to let that wish overwhelm my conscious mind so much that by the time I got over not having a camera, the moment would be over. Not this time... Not this time. Have you ever been lucky enough to enjoy a moment that you knew would only be experienced by you? You could tell someone about it later on, but they wouldn't have been there. You would also find that in not having a picture, you would have to tell that person not only how it looked, but how it felt. How it felt to be an eyewitness to mother nature, how the waves and the wind picking up sounded, how the salt water that got blasted up your nose on that last wave tasted and the warmth that came over you when you remembered that the water was warmer than the air. If you had just shown them the picture, they might have ooed and awed and flipped to the next picture, but that picture could have been taken by anyone standing there. They have no way of knowing for sure if it was really you that took the picture or if you were even there. An experience is a story or it's a poster. One is making a nature-human connection into a human-human connection. The other gets frayed from being taped to a wall...

I say “how it felt” not “what it felt like”, because the later implies that a feeling, a reaction to a rainbow preceding a storm in this case, could be “like” a reaction to another experience. “What does it feel like” literally means, what can you compare it to that another might recognize. This is the easy way out of describing something. Saying “it tastes like chicken, but chewier.” But how do you describe what red looks like, what salt tastes like. They look and taste like themselves. It’s only the sight of it or the taste of it, in that moment, you can know for sure. When you’re traveling or talking to someone who has traveled, don’t ask them what the beach looked like or what the lifeguard’s whistle sounded like. They can only be themselves. If you ask to see a picture, you’ll only see a 2D representation of one of the human senses and while that one human sense was being captured, the other four were thinking about the camera and how they could manipulate it to see what only the human eye could see. The moment you put a camera between you and an experience is the moment you may as well already be home showing it to someone else. With the introduction of a camera to an experience comes the awareness that you are admitting there will be some time in the future when you won’t be in that moment. It is then you are not in the present moment, but in a moment sometime in the future where you wish you could remember, not what the rain and the ocean tasted like, but the taste of the water. Not what the air felt like, but the chill you got down your wetsuit when the rain started. I didn’t have a camera between my eyes and that experience out floating on my surf board that afternoon. All I had were my ears, my nose, my skin, my tongue and my naked eyes.

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