Erasures

15 July 2022

We witness after before before: the bent, ruined carriage where a woman and her daughter were in the photograph we see now. Photograph from above, mother of daughter, carriage beside them. We don't see what the words record: body parts in the street. We see only objects. Stand-ins, voters by proxy, shareholders of a walk down a street somewhere in the Ukraine. It must have been sunny.

Both photographs are of things we don’t see, but know were present. Images of absence: the stained white wall between photographs. It’s at once what’s censored and most there. “Cause of death still unknown” in at least three instances. The disappearance of poets goes without saying because our mouths are taped shut. Silence is more of a temptation than speech.

“A womb serves no purpose to a woman,” the elected official opines. “It’s a sanctuary.” Her body has already been exploded into pieces, those that are hers and those that are sacred. A man put his child in a dumpster in Illinois to protect him from bullets. The dumpster-womb held the boy until the rain ended. It was a sacred space.

Is it worse to play the Uvalde audio, or to erase it? We know children were screaming, but somehow not hearing what we know absolves us of suffering. Our suffering, not theirs. They were trapped in a classroom-box as now in silence. A cop is seen inside the school, holding his big gun, smiling.

Laughter is the explosion of smiling. Links have been located between terror and humor. Kafka laughed, while the Mona Lisa smiled. Civil defense sirens are public laughter designed to protect us from the weather or each other. What we fail to see will hurt us tomorrow. Communications systems were migrated so that only the relevant texts went missing. A lousy excuse is a veil over excresence.

My friend gets “deplaned” for wanting to shift items from one bag to another bag. The other passengers look appalled. She and her dog spend the night at a motel, where she meets a woman who (also) lost her son at a young age. Silence is best guarded by those who don’t know. The rest of us walk around the block, whispering to one another, knowing time erases our guilt.

Where words are considered cudgels. What happened is as ordinary a question as there is, but it’s taken for violence. Do not ask and you will not hurt anyone. But the hurt has been accomplished, one suggests. It’s flown to all of us out of the eyeball of a minor god. Portable rocket launcher sits in a field beside an old barn. We see it from above, without the means to erase it, unless in the download. That comes after the twisted metal a mile away. Men clean out used tanks for the next crew to die in. Little boxes.

There is such pleasure in words. Dydasko means to teach. True and Caprice Dydasco play soccer.