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You can get a lot of information from this picture if you
examine it closely. Notice the well-boiled baby boy.
His name is Tenny, although he will eventually be known as Lionel
Kearns. You will have to wait for a later screen to get the stories
behind these names. Back to the photo. It was taken by Frank, also
known as Charles Francis, CFK, or C.F. Kearns, and sometimes, in
print, as Charley Brennan. He is the baby boy's father. If you
look carefully at the photograph tacked on the wall above the tub,
you will just make out the image of CFK leading a pack train of
horses across a swollen river in the Rocky Mountains. That was the
kind of thing he did. The mother is present here as well, although
she offers support without intruding directly into
the picture. Her strong and steady arm enters stage left. She is Dot,
or Dorry, or Dorothy Welch, or Dorothy Kearns after she married CFK. The tub has a
chipped pale green enamel exterior, and sits on stand in the kitchen of a
house on the corner of Second and Anderson Streets, in Nelson,
British Columbia, Canada. There is some evidence that this
photograph was taken Feb.16, 1938, on the boy's first birthday.
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Between
these images lies a life of wonder, and feeling, and darkness
and light. You might say that I own this life, but that is not entirely
true. This life, in all its complexity and contradiction, just is.
Sometimes I am inside this life, floating, merging with its conflicting currents,
sliding along its smooth and shifting surfaces, trying to move through it,
or against it, or with it. I am not alone. This life is full of other people
and things and events and love. It is a medium that carries meaning. To be in this
life is a privilege, but not an easy one, because it also contains pain
and loss. This life is too vast to possess, too intricate to measure, too
cloudy to comprehend. With its numberless points of intersection, its uneven
intervals, its variation and variety, this life spins beyond my grasp. All I
can do is use what I have at hand, language and its peripherals, the
technologies of consciousness, to lay down a few reflective strips that
catch the flicker of these moments as they flash into being and are
gone.
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In theory, this old fellow is the same individual as the boy in the
tub. How could that be, when every molecule of every cell in his body has been replaced several times during the last sixty-seven years? Is there any resemblance here? Not much, although he considers himself to be the same person: Lionel
Kearns, a bit heavier and a lot worse for wear, but still breathing and thinking and talking. It is a
matter of identity. DNA analyses will reveal a continuity of residual
pattern and design, at least for now. But what will become of all this in a
year? Ten years? One hundred years? Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Structural break down. Entropy.
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