Open a video in an editing programme and the timeline shows you frames. Individual pictures, laid end to end, each one still and complete and meaning very little on its own. Press play and they become a film. Stop, and they are a row of pictures again.
I have been thinking that a life runs the same way, and that we never get to press play.
The frame
What you actually have, at any moment, is one frame. This room, this light, whatever your hands are doing. That is the entire footage available to you.
Everything else is memory or expectation, which are not frames. They are notes about frames. You cannot go back and watch last Tuesday. You can only consult what you wrote down about it, in a format already compressed and colour graded by whatever mood you were in at the time.
So the film of your life, the thing you point at when you say “my life,” has never been screened. Not once. Not by you, not by anybody.
That much is obvious once you say it out loud. The part that is not obvious is where the rest of it went.
The cut is made while the camera is running
In a normal edit there are two roles. Someone stands in front of the camera and someone sits at the desk deciding what to keep. In a life those are the same person, working at the same time, on the same frame.
You are in the room having the conversation, and you are also deciding, as it happens, what the conversation is going to mean. Which parts you keep. Which sentence was the important one. The cut is being made while the footage is still being shot, by the person being shot.
Which is why two people leave the same afternoon with different films. Neither is lying. They cut differently, live, and neither noticed they were doing it.
It went into other people
A few frames of me are in my wife’s film. A few are in a man I worked beside for a year and have not thought about since. A few are in somebody I was short with on a train, in a city I no longer live in, who does not know my name and will never think about that morning again unless something reminds him.
None of them have the whole thing. Neither do I. What exists of my life exists in pieces, distributed across people who each cut their own version, for their own reasons, using judgement I was never consulted about.
And it keeps happening. Everyone who walks into your frame takes some of it when they leave and leaves some of theirs behind. The merge is not optional and it cannot be undone. A four-minute conversation in 2011 is still in somebody’s film. A relationship of ten years may have been trimmed to a montage in theirs while it runs at full length in yours.
You are not the author of your life in any sense that would hold up. You are the subject of a large number of very short films, most of which you will never see, made by people who were not paying full attention and had their own reasons for keeping what they kept.
There is no master copy
I assumed for a long time that the version in my head was the original. Slightly unreliable, but the real one, and everyone else was holding rough cuts.
There is no reason that would be true. My version has the same defect as theirs. It was assembled in real time by somebody who was inside the scene, distracted, and already deciding what it would mean while it was still happening. I am not the archive. I am one more person holding a partial edit, with the disadvantage of being emotionally invested in it.
So there is no master. There are only copies, and the copies disagree.
That has a practical edge I did not expect. When somebody remembers an event differently to you, the instinct is to establish who is right. Usually neither of you is, in the sense you mean. You are comparing two edits made by two people who kept different frames for reasons neither of them chose deliberately.
Most arguments about the past are arguments about editing.
What is left
The film runs once, at the speed it was shot, and the only person in the room is also holding the camera. No second viewing. Nothing approved at the end. Nothing handed over.
But it is not lost. It is scattered.
It lives in fragments in other people, and it stays alive exactly as long as one of them still holds a frame, and then it does not. Not destroyed. Just no longer held anywhere.
That is not sad and it is not comforting. It is closer to the way light behaves. It leaves in every direction, lands on whatever happens to be standing there, and none of it returns to the source.
Which leaves one strange available act. You cannot control your own edit and you certainly cannot control anyone else’s. What you can affect, slightly, is what you put into their frames while you are standing in them.
That is the whole of it. Not a life well lived, whatever that means. A life well distributed.
