While Michael Moore is obnoxious with his in-your face tactics, I usually agree with him on most issues. I’m certainly in favor of gun-control and agree, as Moore pleads, that America should not look away from the gruesome results of our inaction. But this somewhat veiled call he makes for releasing Sandy Hook school crime scene photos is disturbing.
There is no doubt that photographs can and often should be used to effect positive change. Moore includes many memorable ones in his article. These images taken by photographer Ron Haviv during the Bosnian war are evidence in the Hague War Crimes trials. Just recently, I wrote in this post about being moved by the late Tim Hetherington’s legacy.
But there is something fundamentally different about releasing police photos from a crime scene without the consent of every one of those affected families. Do they want those horrible images out there? Here are some of their voices. (and a petition, if you’re moved to sign)
Imagine those photographs and imagine your children seeing them.
I can, if only a little. When I discovered my husband’s body in the garage, I managed to get my 8 year old daughter out of the house without her seeing the gruesome scene of his suicide. Although she knows how he died, she has no visual. A decade later, her memories are of her living, flawed but loving, handsome father. Only one image of how he died exists and it is imprinted in my mind – not hers. That feels like a blessing.
I hesitate to draw a comparison between my personal tragedy and the horror in Newtown. Except that all parents want to protect their children. And sometimes we can’t. But when it is possible, this right should not be taken away – and certainly not from these families.
* Update: The photos will not be released. Connecticut comes through again. Bravo.
I seem to be experiencing vicarious ‘senioritus’ as my daughter counts down the days until graduation and mostly moves on cruise-control through school. Certainly she’s savoring social events more than the study ones. These last weeks are full of concerts and award ceremonies to mark the end of her public school career.
Busy, busy. This is a reason I give myself for my recent writing hiatus.
Also, Spring clean-up is overwhelming around here as we do so little autumn maintenance. Last year’s leaves have rotted nicely under the hedges and in the corner of the driveway and can now be raked right into the vegetable garden. (We are good environmentalists thanks to our laziness.) Hedges need clipping, vegetables – planting.
The list goes on. There’s so much to do!
Of course, these excuses for not writing are complete bullshit. So what’s my problem? I beat myself up with doubt: any writing-mojo I ever had is just gone, I’m a fraud – I can’t write! But rationally, I know it’s simply a lack of discipline.
I’ve been goofing off.
When it comes to being creative, it’s rarely a bolt of inspiration that gets me working, it’s simply sticking to a routine. A time and place in my daily schedule when I sit my ass in this chair in front of this screen – and very importantly: stay off the internet!
Still, life happens and I allow these excuses, to cut myself some slack. I remembered a silly philosophical discussion from my days as an art student — if a piece by Michelangelo and a dog were both in the middle of the road about to get hit and you only had time to save one, which would you save? Of course, we agreed that we’d save the dog, choose the life over art.
I’ve thought about why I was so affected by this man, this story of Tim Hetherington. It doesn’t hurt that besides being extremely smart, charming, kind, and of excellent character, Tim was also handsome. With all of this, how could one not fall a little in love with him? Clearly everyone – women and men – did. But there’s something else about him that got under my skin, something sad and familiar.
In Junger’s film, there is footage of Tim during his first experience of war in Liberia. Visibly buzzing from shock and adrenaline after a very close-call, he says something about feeling stupid for taking the risk – ‘all for a fucking photograph’. Yet he kept at it, making his way to war-zone after war-zone, with his clunky, old-style camera. He took the risks repeatedly, although his images were primarily faces, portraits of intimacy, capturing something internal, not typical war-action shots.
At a weirdly prescient talk in Moscow given not long before he was killed by mortar shrapnel in Libya, he tells his audience that the odds of staying safe the longer one kept at it, were not good. He knew. He knew early on in his career and yet, compelled, he continued, going closer and closer to the edge. Huffman writes that Tim recognized a pattern of behavior among soldiers and “He also saw the same patterns of behavior in himself. They were all looking for a sense of purpose, which the extremes of war gave them…”
In the film, one of the scenes that moved me the most was Tim with his family. The room brims with love as Tim kisses his mother, embraces, and holds his father. This footage was as affecting for me as the images of violence. He was so loved by family, friends, his stunning, smart girlfriend. Why did he leave them to knowingly move towards death? What did he seek? Yes, he left a powerful body of work behind — but it cannot outweigh the tremendous sense of loss that this fine man is no longer with us — too young. Read Huffman’s book and see Junger’s film and you will feel it too.
Something infects those who go to war – a kind of madness with no apparent cure. An essence of human nature is laid bare only out in those fields, amidst the mortared rubble. The weird and compelling intensity is like no other and impossible to adequately describe to one who has not experienced it. But Junger and Huffman have each done as brilliant a job as their subject did, in their loving, honest portrayals of the remarkable life of Tim Hetherington.
My remarkable friend Naomi in Kyoto, has generously featured a collage of mine on her website’s Chasing Writing in Art link.It’s humbling to be there with so many amazing artists.
Here’s my collage and a few words. Please check out Naomi’s site here.
Return from Journey Collage 1998 24 x 36 inches / approx. 61 x 91 cm
I painted this piece at my home in Connecticut about two years after returning from living and working in a war zone. From June 1992- June 1996, I was with the United Nations Peacekeeping Operation in Former Yugoslavia and UNICEF in Croatia and Bosnia. During that time, I met and married my husband and Molly was born.
I remember setting up my paints in front of the fireplace, imagining I’d capture a peaceful image. Instead, what I see now in this image, is torment. I recall the turmoil and demons we were living with, even as the trappings of our life seemed ideal. It was a struggle for us – especially my husband – to switch gears to a normal life away from war. The supposed tranquility of a chair in front of a fireplace – this scene that should be cozy, looks like the center of a storm.
Indeed, it was.
I still live in this house and love sitting by the fire. Twenty years on since the Balkan wars ended, almost ten since the death of my husband and these days, ghosts have mostly settled and my life is serene. I write more than paint. But I should attempt this interior again to see what would reveal itself. I imagine it would be an image of warmth and peace – butwho knows? The subconscious reveals itself almost in spite of us.
The groundhog is lurking and ravenous as ever. A mysterious volunteer has appeared (does anyone know what this is?) next to the asparagus bed and it must be something good since the bastard has already been munching on it.
We’re trying a new trick this year and it seems to be working: pinwheels. Apparently woodchucks are frightened by shiny, moving things. (Old CDs strung up with fishing line might also work ) So far, so good – these plants are recovering nicely and have yet to be munched on since we set up the spinning sentinels. Yesterday, we visited the dollar shop and loaded up on American flag pinwheels for our own version of homeland security.
Newly planted pea seedlings are pushing through the dirt and a few random bonus patches of lettuce, chard, cilantro and other herbs are emerging from last year. With a fresh layer of topsoil to cover the crumble of leaves ignored last autumn and we’re ready for planting.
For over a decade now, bastard (I’m sure it’s the same one) has been decimating my lettuce, soybeans (a groundhog favorite) broccoli, cucumber, squash – you name it. And every spring, in spite of my previous heartbreaks, I plant again. I refuse to give in to the bastard. For me, it’s become not as much about my wish to harvest vegetables as it is about not giving up. The garden as a metaphor of hope. Worth fighting for.
Why aren’t we terrified to get out of bed in the morning? How is it that we can send our beloved children to venture out into the world on their own? Where do we find the courage when, like this past week in Boston, our world erupts in violence and a fog of fear descends? How is it that even when it is our own disaster, when we are at the epicenter of the storm, we carry on, eventually, finding at least a modicum of joy again?
That light can eventually penetrate the darkest night of the spirit, fascinates and inspires me. Religion is the key for many, but I find no comfort nor convincing explanation there. I’ve seen up close, soldiers wearing the icons of their religions, pumping their AK47s in the air as they sped towards the front line, off to kill and maim under the guise of the superiority of their own belief. The righteousness that religion inspires feels divisive and dangerous to me and personally, I find no comfort in it.
No, what fascinates and moves me is the grace to be found in uncertainty. The ability we have to move on in our not-knowing. To just keep moving. It seems that this is what survivors do – (and we are all eventually survivors) as dark as our individual night might be, instinctually, as long as we might cling to sleep, wish for our own oblivion, eventually, a crack of light breaks through.
It is this transcendence of the human spirit that touches me. Passing through the darkest siege, even with awful losses, violent memories, we continue. Time — terrible, wonderful, time keeps us shifting forward through the bleakest winters, through the insanities of war. And one day, we meet the spring – more beautiful than we remember – we go on, stepping forward, into and beyond the fear. A force of nature, of spirit, of love. A beautiful mystery.
The chunk of time and solitude I find necessary to write a blog post never appeared last week. Some mornings I managed to grab a half-hour or so before work to hack away at my memoir (still!) but I need a little more time than that to write something completely new.
Finding the time to write between the demands of my job and home is always challenging, but becomes more so as the weather warms and the garden also needs attention. But lately, it’s the space part I’ve been fantasizing about: having a room to write in at any time of the day or night.
Soon, I will have one: the room off of Molly’s bedroom that used to be closet space. It feels like a treehouse in there – with the big oak right outside the window.
Although you have to walk through Molly’s bedroom room to get to it, for some reason we always called this little alcove ‘the private room’. During particularly bad times in my marriage, I retreated there to sleep. It felt safer than my own bed and I felt soothed by the whisper of Molly’s gentle, slumber-breath only a few feet away. Mornings in summer, the sunlight fills the room and the leaves of the oak tree create mesmerizing waves of shadows and light against the walls.
Ready to go to college in September, my daughter seems to already have one foot out the door and not much interest in her home space, so the room is a mess. (I won’t post a picture of it now.) Mentally, I’ve begun to claim it as mine. I will paint the walls a more serene color and barely furnish it – only the sweet desk I found on the street. That can go by the window and maybe in one corner, a comfy little couch to curl up on. At least while my daughter is off at school, it will be a space for me to work in. A private room.
Don’t get me wrong — I am glad to still have Molly here with me and don’t mind waking early to claim my solitude, but I really can’t wait to have a room of my own.
These last (I hope) wintry days, I want to hunker down and hibernate. Call me when the daffodils are in bloom and all the last chunks of snow have melted. I’ll be reading. While not able to hide out under blankets by the fire all day, I have been reading quite a bit. And books I love so much, I must tell you about them. Last week was Ruth Ozeki’s new novel and this week, an amazing memoir.
The thought of losing a child is too awful to contemplate – but worse yet – your entire family? Unbearable! But survivors live on. It seems remarkable that the impossible weight of such sorrow can be carried, that one day, the bereaved again feel some pleasure in the warmth of the sun, can smile. Miraculous. And true.
There is the woman who lost her children and parents in the Christmas fire in Stamford a few years ago who I’ve written about before here. The anguish seems unbearable and yet, she bears it.
What about being on vacation and having your entire family swept away in a wave and somehow, although you have been swallowed by that same wave, you survive? That’s just too much, isn’t it? Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala is that terrible true story. Breathtaking in tragedy, and in beauty. It seems impossible. Yet Deraniyagala, who lost her husband, two young sons and her parents in the tidal wave that hit Sri Lanka in 2004, has created something beautiful out of that terrifying story.
Beyond the incredible scope of the facts of being hammered by a terrifying surge of ocean, her recollection, her rendering, is stunning. We are swept away with the author by the wave that continues to drown her in unspeakable, maddening grief. She holds the reader in the vice grip of her memories.
Deraniyagala did not want to live without her beautiful boys and her husband and only the vigilance of her family in Sri Lanka prevented her from ending her life. Finally, she does what, in the flash of the second we might dare to imagine: she carries on. Cheryl Strayed (author of the brilliant memoir, Wild ) gives details and a fine review of Wave here in today’s Sunday New York Time’s Book Review.
Wave is deceptively slight, a tiny book with a simple black cover. Inside is a diamond exquisitely carved from the author’s rage, her heartbreak – but most of all, her fierce and beautiful love. A love that lives on, lucky for us, with her.
The Brazilian guy who cleans the bookstore, speaks only a few words of English. I always say good morning and make small talk, but he’s not friendly and I think he’d rather I didn’t. He wears one of those blue-tooth phones that fit in your ear, vacuuming around customers browsing books or right next to where the morning staff meeting is being held, all the while bellowing in Portuguese to whoever is in his ear. I suspect he doesn’t mean to be annoying but that he is in a kind of oblivious state of other-ness. I remember when I lived in countries where I did not speak the language, how hard it can be. (although I think he might also just be a jerk)
I have lived in 3 different countries where initially, like the Brazilian man, I spoke barely a word of the language. Anyone who has been a tourist can get this stupid feeling, but when it’s your day-to-day life the loneliness, otherworldly feeling, is profound.
Life with UN Peacekeeping in Croatia and Bosnia was insular – my life and relationships existed mostly within the international community. My understanding of Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian (virtually same language but for different words for bread!) never grew much beyond the superficial greeting, shopping, weather chats with neighbors, sometimes against the backdrop of not-so-distant shelling and machine gun fire. My time in Italy was briefer but my isolation even more intense as I spent 3 weeks by my daughter’s hospital cot in Brindisi hospital when she was born prematurely. That was some zone to be in.
So I imagine I know something about how the Brazilian cleaner feels. I remember the apartness, the feeling of kind of living an incomplete experience. So many nuances around you are undecipherable.
A bewildered looking me with Watanabe-san and Suzuki-san in the early 1980s.
But it’s mostly my years in Japan I recall. Although I studied Japanese in my feeble fashion, so many Japanese people wanted to speak English, it was easy to be lazy about learning their language. And even as I became fluently-flawed and gathered Japanese friends and boyfriends, I remained an outsider, oblivious to the reality and details of my Japanese neighbors – and they, to mine.
Still, for all the loneliness and discomfort, something still draws me to that expat existence, to that strange-state of being, the challenge to find a place. My focus, by necessity, turned inward, I filled journals with ramblings. My recollection of those sometimes uncomfortable times, was the richness of my interior life. A consciousness that, now in my familiar, task driven day-to-day existence, I strive for. A state of being alert in time.
Ruth Ozeki’s long awaited beautiful new novel, A Tale for the Time Being has really gotten under my skin and I think it’s not only because I love her writing (My Year of Meats is also a favorite) but because she captures this bubble existence – this weird sense of being, of being somewhere but not of it. We all are in that place at some point but some, by dint of the harshness of society, the struggle to exist in a world you do not feel part of, is often not by choice. Striving for … place? peace? love? Sometimes, giving up.
In A Tale for the Time Being Ozeki poetically takes us along on her quest to discover more about Nao, the Japanese teenage author of the journal she picks up out of the flotsam of a Pacific Northwest beach. I fell in love with Nao and Jiko, her ancient grandmother who lives as a Buddhist nun in Sendai right at tsunami ‘ground-zero’.
While reading this, I returned home from work each day to immediately pick up from where I’d left off, retrieving my book from beside the bed, where fighting sleep to read, I’d dropped it the night before. Perhaps because Ruth of the novel is Ruth the author, I felt sure such a diary really exists, and worried right along with Ruth (s), that Nao had been swept away in the tsunami… I’ll let you find out.
What have you read lately that you loved? This question is often asked of me in the bookstore. I’m usually reading at least two books so you’d think I’d always have an answer. But I often can’t even quite remember or at least, I can’t say I LOVE whatever I am reading. But I LOVE Ruth Ozeki’s new novel A Tale for the Time Being. What a beauty. I finished it a few days ago and the magic of it still lingers with me. Read it!
Yesterday morning I shuffled out of the house to walk Tetley, simultaneously grouchy about and awestruck by the beauty of the snow that had fallen overnight. My neighborhood looked like a black-and-white movie
Twenty-four little hours later, I pulled into the driveway after work and caught a glimpse of color in the corner of the garden. I stepped across the now soggy brown lawn and found these. A promise of spring.
March 9
That’s March, isn’t it? A crazy month of winds, rains, dramatic light changes, time changes. The calendar tells us it’s Spring even as we still shiver and our breath lingers like a cloud in the frosty air. Still, we made it through winter – the proof is in the brave croci. We are in for wonderful changes – right? Notice, I hesitate. That’s the way I’ve been recently.
Lately, my old enemy – anxiety – has been lurking around ready to pounce on me at anytime, grabbing my throat and giving me a gut punch. My daughter is a senior in high school and we are waiting for college decisions, financial aid offers. Where will she be accepted? What will I be able to afford? You get the picture.
The uncertainty of major changes, so much being up in the air like this, makes me hold my breath, my chest gets tight. Like any parent, I want my daughter’s life to be perfect – for her to get what she wants – or at the very least, what she needs. And in this case, there is very little I can do to control that. So I have become a worrying, anxious mess. I hate myself like this and my daughter, the picture of calm and acceptance, thinks I’m crazy.
These 24 hours in nature (as always, my favorite teacher) reminds me how fast things can change and how most of the time, there’s not a damn thing you can do about any of it. Depending on how you look at it, this fact can be a comfort or, if you are me, a terror. That’s the key: it’s how you look at it. Any of us who have lived on the planet for any time certainly have experienced both the joys and sorrows of change and how fast things can happen.
Within 24 hours you may meet – or lose – the love of your life, win the lottery – (I’m waiting…) or lose your fortune, be diagnosed with cancer or given the all-clear. Shit happens and much of it is beyond our control. Better to not get in a tizzy, right? Better to wait and see what life will bring and meanwhile, try to live in the present. Seize the joy of a blossom or just relax and delight in the peace of a snowy morning as sick as I may be, of winter. Breathing is so much easier without the vice-grip of anxiety around my throat. And besides, this morning, it smells like spring.
