…gives with the sunsets my friend K asks late one evening from across the table at a noisy restaurant/night club.  The why in a voice hangs on the foam in the beer on the table. Two people furiously grope each other near the washrooms. The dj’s arrive and the music begins to rise around the din of people, floats as ordinary thoughts leaving the no longer rational brains of those no longer sober.

Right. What was it that made me post a record number of shots of the same thing– the sun, setting. I suppose I could merely say it is a part of the obsessive compulsive disorder, and rather than picking up previous bad habits where I left them when I obsessively stopped them, I began a new obsession about recording the  last summer of 2008. Maybe I could say they are beautiful, here as well as there, as well as everywhere and anywhere. Maybe I could say that my fascination stems from the symbolism behind the sunset, the connection with death. I do think the sunrise is beautiful too with a charm all its own, and it too connects with symbolism, of birth/renewal, but for some reason, the sunset is more striking to me than the sunrise. The patterns in the sky, against the clouds, the fluctuating hues of reds, oranges, and yellows create such a warm embrace of sky.

I find that although the connection with literary symbolism is always present in the orange glow in the west, the warmth of that glow, the calm about that glow, the serenity in that parting seems to work against the notion of death, or at least it does in my perception of it. The idea that even though there may be clouds for more than one day that block the view of the setting, the sun is still setting in the distance, and on another clear evening it will be where it was, though never quite the same as it was before. And yes, posting all those pictures is very much the same repetition, it’s cyclical: wake, sleep, life, birth, death, rise, fall, breath, and breathe. Although things end, they continue. A snapshot in the distant future of something we may never remember, may never know, but may only understand through life and beyond. The repeat of recording the sunset is the mimic: how eternal everything appears to be.