Barely slept last night, thanks to Roland Barthes's words and voices in my head. The intense experience of reading Camera Lucida got me emotional (I shed many tears in the second half of the book, for the tremendous beauty and profundity of Barthes's thoughts), as I felt pulsing behind my eyes the grief, love, pity, regret, sadness he expressed with such poignancy.

Barthes -> The Winter Garden Photograph -> His mother

Certain Photographs hold a punctum, the personal, wounding detail that breaks through the image and touches something inside you. And for Barthes, the Winter Garden Photograph (a photograph of his mother as a child), specifically, holds a punctum that becomes a portal through which he processes his grief for his dead mother.

The Photograph is violent, because it is factual evidence to the existence of a time, a moment that no longer exists, has died, passed. It is a cruel reminder of Death.

And when confronted with it, there is nothing to do but to grieve, to mourn.

This became a source for my own reflection: have I ever experienced grief through a photograph? Have I experienced grief at all?

Fortunately, I have yet to experience the death of a close, loved being.

Nonetheless, I found myself still digging into and tracing back my own thoughts, because I was sure I had experienced something akin to what Barthes had through the Photograph--a deep, profound, piercing sense of grief and sadness that completely robs you of words and instead leaves you with an overwhelming sense of pure emotions of helplessness and disorientation, not knowing just how to navigate amidst this immense but cruel truth of Death, of things in passing.

And then I realized, yes, I have experienced Death; it may not be a literal death of another individual, but Deaths of friendships, connections, a possible future, a chapter in life.

Me -> Brooklyn Bridge -> My past self

Why have I wept so much looking at the Brooklyn Bridge?: a question that I have been having trouble finding a satisfying answer to. I have surely had some theories in mind that have given me momentary relief, but not something that I felt had reached the deep truth.

Barthes's generosity of sharing of his most personal, intimate encounter allowed me to reach a revelation that feels fundamentally deeper and more truthful:

I was grieving, mourning the Death of myself that no longer exists.

Why does the Bridge become the portal to the Dead self?

Because it places me in the here and now, holding the unbearable truth of the Self that I had murdered, by choosing to move here.

The Bridge wounds me, throws a full-throttle punch at me, by being a reminder of the irreversibility of time.

The Bridge does not narrate, speak, explain, or teaches me of anything--like the Photograph--and like the Photograph, it is violent because it is a factual evidence (which no one can deny) to the Death of my former self and life.