How to Talk about Bad Stuff

 

4 March 2022

He sits at the end of a very long and narrow table. Men in suits sit at the other end, but we can’t see them pre-pan. Tibetan flags hang in a vacant but well-tended lot, wet, on strings; blue and yellow masks look out from ohia trees. One is wrapped in wire, its face a cipher. Another has a long ceramic chin, bent like a banana. A horse strides across one flag, through which I see light blur. From close-up, language turns to wires that hang between trees.

He wraps his girlfriend in newspaper after a shower. On her belly the headline about a man who killed his three year old and then himself. It’s not wet enough not to be legible. It’s not legible enough to grieve.

Lilith goes chin to chin with a pink flamingo beside a small tree. Label in front of flamingo reads “lime.”

The oligarch’s 600 million dollar yacht was not taken, but it’s not allowed to leave the harbor of Hamburg. Plus it has maintenance issues. Some sanctions are accidents.

I have a hard time reading the computer’s small print. I’m told I have a “good eye.”

Is that a civil defense test in Volcano or an air raid siren in Kyiv? Is the television on or off?

The affect of her reading perhaps out-weighs its content, which is not to say that the content isn’t embedded in our time, like a reporter in a tank in Iraq, or the man who tweets out each morning that he’s alive in the Ukraine. This is not a criticism: I can feel her words’ import, always in conjunction with the time. The screen on my DSLR reads “cleaning contacts” and shivers, at least when the digital screen works. Otherwise, look through the narrow tunnel of the view finder to compose what has already been composed. To compose in this case is perhaps to frame, and to frame is to turn time into space. He took photos that made the earth stop, sun moving across it.

Each camera has its own eye. I compose according to its eye, as much as my own. Bryant has cleared one camera’s eye; no more black blobs on blue sky. If you look at the sky past the yellow diamond “No exit” sign, you see Volcano as a Ukrainian flag.

Lens and eye rhyme. Layers of a mechanism points and shoots and comes back a bit altered each time. My father’s photograph on a steel ball set in the crook of a hapu`u fern blurs like taffy. Too easy to say it symbolizes time’s passage, or forgetting, or remembering. They’re all of the same piece. I took the prayer flags so I could bring them home, stare at them on a screen. Many of the prayers had dissolved, but I can’t say them anyway.

How to talk to your kids about Ukraine. How to talk to your kids about child sexual abuse. How to talk to your kids about gender identity. How to talk to your kids about being canceled. How to talk to your kids about bullying, and the toll it takes on their mental health. How to talk to your daughter about the soccer player who killed herself. She’s been on a suicide watch (not her own), so she knows.

“I hope I was not too forward.”