more from Startles

I'm not posting all of my startles, but here's a new one. Steve B. suggested the five sentence paragraph form to me.

 

July 31, 2025

I know how to write crisis, but not catastrophe. That’s the argument, lacking detail. The paper bark tree I take photos of in the cemetery wears a yellow ribbon. Ola says they’re going to replace it with a water feature. “This isn’t Disneyland!” I say.

Posit this as crisis, for me and for the tree, so high and healthy. A photograph of a boy who is his bones only is catastrophe. If I describe his body (which I cannot fully apprehend), I have reproduced a crime. If I lament his bones I accept his death as grievable. There’s no word for what goes so far beyond grief.

No grief in genocide, only a horrible joy (on the one side) and desperate need (on the other). An open mouth that doesn’t speak but cries. A body so ravaged no food brings it back to flesh. Some photographs are censored; you have to click to see them. Others pass through the corporate censor like bribes, in the French sense.

Or is the horrible joy simply work, torn from its root as making? Is writing evil’s mitigation, because it accrues? Detention defies design, renders it purposeless. Am I able any more to say anything obliquely, or is each direction forward? Like late Lennon, song stripped to bone.

Lennon’s pockets were full of buttons: red, yellow, green ones. There were also picks inside his blue suit, appropriate for one who plays guitar. My classmate took several; afterwards he said they could talk. How to get past one’s own symbolic value. How to devalue oneself without degradation.

Each child in Gaza has symbolic value (only). There’s no privacy for those who are symbols among us. You take his buttons; you take their photographs. Lennon, too, would die a violent death, one he couldn’t choose to bargain with. His self-grief was a single cry.

These are not my poems of joy, dear Norman, though I do love the light that passes through my husband’s curly white hair as he stands on a ladder to clear the gutter. These are poems of an emotion so tortured it cannot be parsed in language. These are not poems, but statements made as directly as I can. Even oblique light is light, and the dark comprehends all. Let me download that light to look at later on.

from Startles (an ongoing sequence)

from Startles

The curb says, do not park here. It says, storm drain below, says palm tree above, says graveyard, says take my picture. And I do: narrow band of weathered yellow paint, stains born of damage to the concrete, one splotch of red paint showing through. The curb says it might be art, though no one intended it for that. Workers meant to lay the paint down; weather and heavy machinery altered it.

Unintentional art, like a tree’s runnels of sap, chance colors capturing real moths and ants. My photograph gets selected for an “abstract only” exhibit. The print shop tells me it’s blurry, unfocused. My photographer friend says it’s unfocused. Months later, I return to the storm drain, sit on the road in front of it (workers and tourists driving behind me) and take the same photograph. Too much light.

Later, under cloud cover, I hurry back, several steps in front of the blue sky coming toward the mountains. I sit; I take; I take more. Downloaded, there is less light, but also less abstraction. As my friend John says, “hyper-focused, it looks like, well, a curb.” Reality, you see, is clear.

Back I go to the first, the beautifully muddled image, less curb than canvas. Guy at print shop says AI software sharpens it. I go with the artificial clarity, sharper than the first image, blurrier than the last. It’s the curb photo’s equanimity, the middle path between smudge and careful syntax. A good story, my second friend says.

AI writes: It seems you're interested in the blurry elements present in some of Dorothea Lange's photographs, particularly her famous "Migrant Mother". I’m addressed as if I’m real, and can be taught. There are reasons for the blurs, it seems. But the images are evocative! Do blurs make them more or less “real,” or does the sharp focus?

The curb doesn’t talk to us about suffering, nor about itself as the subject of our regard. The curb refuses introspection, which is one of its virtues. What it does to us is difficult to name. Abstraction is what runs, like paint, leaving bits of story like a red island poking through yellow. Napalm girl might also have been out of focus.

In Italian, no one “takes” photographs. That’s our vernacular, this taking of. Your image is now mine, though you keep what hides behind the blur. It’s a strange form of decolonizing, this being out of focus, Improvised Expressive Device. It hurts the certain eye, but bathes the uncertain one in dull light.

 

Organ donors

 

The mortician at Valley of the Temples, dressed in blue, was gently chiding a maintenance worker who'd parked his John Deere vehicle in the wrong place. "Need a diplomat?" I asked. I remarked on the mortician's black shoes, not the nice ones I remember. Those are in the car (a red Mercedes), he said. They have posts in the heels so he can't pronate; the ones he had on leaned to the side like skiffs in a stiff wind. "Do you guys do the autopsies?" the maintenance guy asked. "No, we mostly close them up. The worst are the donors; they really get cut up." "But isn't a good thing that they donate and help keep someone else alive?" I asked. "That's what they want you to think. You donate your body and someone else makes money," he responds. 

 

"Do I have to disbelieve everything?" I ask.