(16th September 2007 post continued)
I curse myself then for not knowing my equipment better, for though it is light enough to see clearly outside through the hunting slits, inside it is still very dark. I imagine I must have something incorrectly set ("perhaps I have the manual light metre on and have it set too low…perhaps, perhaps"). This carries on for some time as my fears spiral out of control until I realise that I am panicking. "Ok, this is panic" – I name it.
So I slow my breathing and think – and remember that I have my small stills camera with me. I open this (more impossibly loud Velcro noises…) and turn it on (even the mechanism, it is so loud!) and – once again the screen is blank as if there were a lens cap on (only this camera has no lens cap to forget). They can’t both be broken. I look out and realise that actually it is still much darker than I think, but that my eyes have grown accustomed to the dim light. The way I am blinded by even just the blank LED screens on my cameras confirms this hypothesis, so I turn all equipment off and relax.
Half an hour or so after my panic I see that it probably really IS light enough now to film and turning my camera on confirms this. Again as I am filming I do as much looking within as 'without'. I enjoy the framing, the seeking out of details with my lens – the shape of the gun, the camouflage flapping in the wind, the shapes in between the trees.
I notice within me a lack of 'belief' saying already "I don't think we will catch anything today". I think once of again of what I have learnt – that Guido hunts several times a week all year, making only a few catches in the year. I think of the confidence needed with those odds to get up and out by 4am after a long shift in his restaurant, knowing he has another to do the next day too.
Not for the first time I think that there is many parallels between this, and the kind of love and faith I see in artists undertaking their practice. This returns me to my own current lack of faith – in both the hunt today and often in my own practice – I notice the thoughts whispering in the silence "we won't catch anything today, there is nothing in sight, not a whisper of an animal, I have scared them all off with my noise" etc etc. I think that perhaps I have come all of this way simply to confront something lurking deep within myself, something that is not helping me in my work.
