A Southward Tide

Of all the presents I received this year, my favorite was a bright yellow raincoat with fleece-lined pockets. My aunt said she had lost her mind while shopping; she was cushioning the blow for what she assumed would be my disappointment. But just the contrary: it was as if Christmas had been distilled into one single moment, a childlike delight at a discovery of the thing that I had been imagining for some time (a raincoat) and its  superior counterpoint in reality  (the yellow raincoat). A rush of other joys came upon me – the elation of tropical rainstorms, the memory of yellow slickers I wore in Brittany as a child, and even a vision of myself at the windy helm of some future yacht.

My favorite book of Roland Barthes is the slim volume Camera Lucida. With a masters in film studies and a particular bent towards the documentary image, this has always been my kind of text. I’m also a sucker for the morbidly sentimental (read: he discusses dead people a lot). Though the book is light on theory, Barthes does posit a duality in our reception of the photographic image: the studium, call it the biographic information, the explicit and implicit meaning structure, and the punctum, the detail that holds our attention and pulls us into the world of emotions or synesthetic memory.

Instances in reality, be they fleeting sights or sounds, encapsulated moments, sentences, or facial expressions, can create a similar punctum, piercing through the substratum of ordinary meaning. And for me this Christmas, the triumph of the holiday season was a yellow raincoat, glistening with all possible future rains: a simple gift became a multitude.