Chapter I — Raconteur Road
Microstates — What exists before description.
Every photograph is a microstate. One specific configuration of light hitting silicon. The wider you open the shutter, the more microstates collapse into the single frame the camera will keep. Before the shutter clicks, the world is everything. After, it is one of the things the world was.
Swartberg, after dark
I left the shutter open on the pass for the better part of an hour and let the traffic draw itself. Every car that drove the Swartberg in that time became a ribbon of light, white running one way and red the other, and by the time I closed the shutter not one of them was a car any more — only the smear of where it had been. Above it the Milky Way was running the same trick on a longer exposure: a hundred billion suns, none of them seeming to move, all of them just light that left a long time ago.
The pass kept none of the cars, and all of their light.
Bottle Tree, Socotra
I opened the shutter and the night began to spin. Hundreds of stars drawing circles around a point that wasn't there — the north celestial pole, an axis with nothing on it. Except the tree. Standing right at the centre of the universe, as if someone had planted it there who understood the joke.
Circles. The stars drew them. The tree refused.