Persistence of Vision

Persistence of vision is all about the eye, the way it follows a film, remembers an image, holds on to it, until the next one appears to replace it, so that we are never conscious of the stutter of frames—the space between. Image after image flows past us leaving ghostly fingerprints on shell-shocked retinas. Our mind races, slower than light, and we see through the past into the present, just as that present no longer exists. And so we imagine the future.

With the old projectors, a glitch could shake that sequence free. Suddenly, we might glimpse a momentary stutter that we’d suppressed—a mother, torn and fractured by a creeping darkness, a loved one felled by another’s lifelong expectations, violence inflicted on a child so that he turns himself inward and disappears.

Persistence of vision works through memory—a remembrance of forgetting, and inevitable return. There is no journey forward without ghosts; there is no telling without fear. We tread lightly through the stories, but leave prints wherever we happen to go.

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Persistence of vision. You see forward through the past. The steps you take you place in footprints that are probably no longer there— they’re ghostly images, suggestions for paths to take or paths taken—for identities formed once, for words spoken, but which are only echoes, not the words themselves. Sometimes you are brave to step into those moments, those signatures, to keep the film intact.

Often you are braver not to.