How many of you have heard the joke about photographers “shooting” and “framing” people? Shooting and framing—these words coil with an excitable vehemence in my mouth whenever I tell the joke, yet I have only recently realized the baggage they carry. A cold, detached, calculated act of violence. Intention. You need to aim before you shoot. When someone points a gun and fires to kill, a living, breathing being filled with potential is reduced to a sack of meat. Point a camera at someone, and you aim to capture an essence you see in your mind. Then you shoot to capture, and all that remains of that particular moment of life is reduced to an object. I also like to think that this is why people in earlier times readily believed legends claiming that taking a photograph meant taking an ornate piece—or even the entirety—of the soul. Photography is frequently described as an act of violence because it is inherently invasive, transforming subjects into objects, and exercising power by ca...
The state of mind in speech is constantly evolving, especially when one’s mental headspace shapes the layer of speech and thought that emerges almost spontaneously. From the perspective of Psycholinguistics, speech is not merely the expression of thought but part of its formation—an ongoing feedback loop where thinking and speaking co-construct one another. At times, I fall into listless speech, as if I am living within a train of thought—struggling to disembark at each station, attempting to make sense of my utterances. It is as though stepping off at each stop might reveal the direction in which the train is heading. Through the lens of Stream of consciousness, this resembles unfiltered cognition, where thoughts unfold continuously without deliberate structuring. This becomes problematic when I have a destination in mind but have not prepared myself—when I have not even checked whether I boarded the correct train. The train, after all, runs on fixed tracks, much like how language cha...