Photo without Person

 

30 March 2022

The cave of the heart is mist-full this morning. Wistful in an underexposed way. There’s more information in a dark photograph than in a bright one, so I make clouds dim, ocean dim, and spinner dolphins spin out of focus. What was intended as cross-species portrait is a blurry splash of sea water beyond a crabbed tree, clinging to a lava rock. Mustard gold lichen, cleft in the black rock, as to the right a woman throws a ball into the water for her one dog, and then the other. The first dog drops the ball before getting to the slippers she points to; the ball starts to roll back toward the water. Dog picks up ball, deposits it on her two brown sandals. Another throw. “We are thrown” into what were causes and effects, now chance operations without the synchronicities. She tells us to put our dominant hand below our navel, the non-dominant on top of that. So I alternate, like any Libra-handed soul.

The Russians are pulling back, or the Russians are simply regrouping. Their supplies are exhausted, or the heroic Ukrainian army pushes them back. You are given two choices for every instant of the narrative, and neither one ends the war. From above, Mariupol appears completely destroyed. That’s the only angle we’re given in this news cycle. Trump calls for Putin to help him destroy Biden. Again. A canary’s weak outcry gets buried in a coal mine.

I know hypocrisy when I see it in others. I play the scales of my own hypocrisy, awaiting a diminished seventh to finish it off. The spectrum of our self-salvaging is wide. A. Navalny sits on a prison bench. His suicide is survival, a living martyr to facticity.

In the city of fact, there we feel free, or at least stable, even when the earth occasionally shakes, or the ocean trembles afterward. The defender has the advantage in street fighting, and a ruined building’s as good as a new one, when your role is to sit in the crotch of a window frame and fire your weapon onto the street. Can you imagine, many soldiers don’t even consult their scopes? They just fire wildly at buildings, because buildings signify human beings, each one framed by an absent window. If glass is transparency, then broken glass is not, is our confidence shattered, shuddering. One street fight led to a sniper who proved to be a young girl. Her accuracy was no surprise, but her smooth face was. The mother hen wears a skirt of chicks that ebbs and flows as she—stiller point in a moving universe—walks.

The empty window frame is also a screen. You can shine nothing on it that stays, as if you were to keep your aperture open so long that arms and torsos and legs melted in air and you were left only with shoes hitting an approximate concrete, the only fixable images. The photograph, however contrived, doesn’t lie. We are our own ghosts on this walk; one photograph stuns time with its shutter, while the other lets it go. Time is the not-image of a woman walking down the street in a bombed out city. Three weeks ago the sun shone on a public square where people walked slowly through their lives’ still frames. A man runs with his suitcase toward a train, heading west. Inside the still coherent window, a girl smiles at him. End of photograph.