Cameras and audio recorders. Video and still.

The idea of capturing that which we experience is fascinating to me. We don’t experience visuals in a frame by frame mode, but someone thought to capture a single moment in time (although, initially, that moment was actually a few minutes – no such thing as candids in the beginning). Along came the phonograph after that, and audio was captured. Quality improved over time, and then film cameras captured moving pictures, and then VHS, CD, DV…

But even the sci-fi worlds and their holograms are lacking in three of the five senses: there is no smell, no taste, no feel. And scientists have figured out how to break things that stimulate those senses into chemical components, and so you have air fresheners that smell like baked apples, candy that tastes like lemons, and materials that feel like whatever fruity thing you want to fill in here to finish the metaphor.

So much of what makes a memory is more than sight and sound, though. Photographs are great, and listening to tapes of myself and my kid sister when we were toddlers is fun, and watching the old videos of my first wedding and early gigs with bands is a great walk down memory lane. But not really; these things are reminders, but nothing more.

I stood outside the building today, taking a smoke break and watching the cars whip past on University. It’s very much a spring day — low 60s, an occasionally gusty dry breeze coming through city streets. The air is fairly clean, not heavy or unusally poisoned today. The sun was beginning to set — that hour before moment where you can almost look directly at the sun itself, shadows falling soft and hazy. And I pulled out my camera phone to capture it, and realized that it was pointless. Not that the sunset wasn’t beautiful, but rather that the sunset wasn’t what was worth capturing.

I can pull out pictures, and they bring back memories. Not just of people, but of specific times and places in my life. There is a series, for instance, of Maria and Cassidy; I was in the first week or two of my relationship with Maria, and Cassidy was brand new, to me and to the world. I can fill in the blanks in between those pictures, and on some levels I can recreate that hour or two, as we sat in my den in the apartment on 18th Avenue and enjoyed the summer day, Cassidy playing with the tiny Piglet doll that outsized him and crawling all through the holes in Maria’s jeans.

But as much as I can recreate about that moment — even as much emotion as I can recall, and almost feel again — it’s not the same. I do remember that, during that one hour, I had the same feeling (more than emotion, more than senses — a combination of the two, and then something more) that I had standing on the sidewalk earlier, the same as I had driving around Southside a few years ago on a perfect fall day, the same as many Mondays around the time I first met Melissa. It’s a perfect feeling — I’m not sure that I’m even capable of putting it into words. Not too much nor too little; not happy, but definitely content. It’s like a very mellow high, maybe. A feeling of promise and hope. Knowing that you’re headed in the right direction, or maybe just facing it.

These are the things that make the promise of a virtual reality so interesting to me. Sure, creating realistic environments from your deepest imaginations is intriguing, but not nearly so much as recreating those moments from your life that put you in that perfect, indefinable moment. And even if not recreating them exactly, playing with the variables until you can put together the exact combination of parts to make the puzzle fall into place at will.

Throw all the cameras and 24 tracks away. I’ll gladly give up making movies and multitracked music in return for a camera that captures every detail of a single moment in time, and allows me to revisit that moment on command.