The fake flowers of Highway 11

 

24 April 2022

Do I shoot wide or narrow? Take in the filthy stuffed bear and the slightly cleaner pink pig? Linger on the crosses supported by rusted bed frames, wheels dangling? Take a portrait of the portrait of the man named below, beside the cross that bears his dates, camouflaged by flowers? Cross the highway to see the memorial from a dispassionate distance? Aim my camera at the cars that streak by? Make sure they blur? Look for the passengers looking at me, but not the gloves, the stethoscope, the smudged notes? Notice the not noticing by taking pictures of it. One memorial consisted of artificial flowers—appropriate to the tropics—rimmed with dirt from mowers and car spray. Behind the memorial lay an upside down fake anthurium, its green plastic stem standing up. Nowhere was there a name, a bear, a note; the memorial was itself unidentified. What feeling do you get from the memorial stripped of any recollection?

A Ukrainian woman on twitter posts the photograph of a young blonde woman. Putin’s gift, Zelenskyy calls it, her death by bomb on Easter weekend, along with her baby, shown with mother, with bottle. We think: good for propaganda. We regret that thought. There’s no dispassion in my looking at her, only in counting the dead on a street I’ve never walked. But numbers, too, bleed. Leave all the feeling to the audience, the teacher says, but I require content.

I wrote a confession to Norman. I’d listened to Kathie’s dharma talk while watching my Cardinals on the computer. Needed two devices to manage this multi-task. She was talking about dharma ancestors, and I heard the words “Home Run.” I looked at the closed captions and saw “Home Run.” When they lack commercials, they run three mlb zens in a row. Mike Trout, in super slo mo, picks up a ball and inside the frame of a diamond hour glass, throws it the other way.

From the road you can’t see that the firefighter was Jon Hara, that he liked to fish, that he used a stethoscope, that his teeshirt had his name on it. I took the wrinkled teeshirt photo, still in my phone, and thought of Marie Hara, her husband Jon. When I turned on instagram, the first photograph was of Marie’s daughter. The second was of Jon.

Does every entry of a war diary require scenes of horror? Do Americans think of the ordinary world as necessarily banal? Is horror what we demand in place of boredom? At least horror poses lots of questions, right? This morning’s rain, the trailing wind, dog’s ears sticking from her nest on the couch, bird song. This is enough not to understand.