when i got the flu shot a few weeks ago i expected to be safe from all hazards. cancer. corns. stupidity. alas, i caught acold somewhere along that long walk on saturday, whilst winds blowing 50mph and cooler temperatures penetrated what i thought was the impenetrable fortress of the new fleece jacket i got at costco. i don‘t think the fleece jacket failed me as much as it was not up to the challenge of those particular weather conditions. or maybe it was the ticks and diseases flying out of thevacant nudie bars.
i set up Big Pictures through the 3rd week of November, stopping at a picture which gave me pause, made me think, made me languish in the waters of my own self-centeredness. it was a shot of some graffiti, the side of a wall spray-painted with the words “THE BIGGER PICTURE“. i don‘t know what that means, if anyhting, but i interpreted it as being addressed to me and my Big Pictures project which has lingered since 1997. a friend of mine is a photographer and he remarked to me recently that his web site photo project is coming up on its 10-year anniversary. he has been in the photo world since youth and his stuff is good, though as we both felt free to observe, his format for the web site is a little archaic by modern bandwidth-gluttonous standards. in other words, if mine are ‘the big pictures‘ then his are the small pictures, because they fill only a small part of the screen and are tagged virtually not at all with explanatory searchie-edible text. the site is virtually invisible to search-engines in spite of its age and the quality of the work therein. i was sort of surprised, though, to hear him complain about having never received a single bit of fan mail or commentary, not once in a 10 years. the lack of feedback did not surprise me but his frustration did. why care? why do anything for the feedback or adulations? i mean there is a level at which one‘s work demands contact with reality, with an audience, and an audience of one can summon more insights than all the raves of the teeming millions.
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i have started work on a new web project, one which includes a dip into local Astoria history. i find myself in possession of a stack of old papers from Astoria figures whose names I know from seeing their tombstones at a churchyard burial ground. i now know that those peoples‘ livelihoods centered on a street near that graveyard, the streetname since changed and, i assume, the old buildings all gone. i know that area, though, an had always sensed a stillness of history there, ghosts of presents past inhabiting the street with an obviousness ignored by most.
the papers i have include a list of funeral expenses, totalling about $300, including a coffin, body on ice, advertising for the service, et cet. i imagine those expenses are associated with a burial in that churchyard, and I think i know exactly which burial it is. i know where the bodies are buried. oh yeah.
they do not put bodies on ice so much these days. in fact i think that practice was eliminated years ago, though the option may still be available for purists. i read a book called Cemetery Walk (I think that‘s the title) in which the author re-told a story about a woman whose life had been haunted by the memory of her grandmother‘s funeral. it was at an un-air-conditioned church and as the services went on the woman (who was a young girl at the time) heard a dripping sound. the dripping became louder and more pronounced and she was horrified at the sound. she thought it was her grandmother‘s body melting. she thought it was the flesh dripping, oozing from the body to the floor. the woman told this story, 60 years later, to a funeral director, a man who was visibly baffled by the woman‘s account until it hit him: that was the ice melting. the grandmother‘s body must have been on ice, as was typical in those days, and the young girl heard the sound of the ice melting and thought it was the flesh of her dear sweet grandmother. the funeral director declared “with God as my witness, I swear to you, what you heard was the sound of ice melting, the drops of water falling to the floor, nothing more.“
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i have been cobbling together a sonnet about Johnny Cash. i saw a video of him and Kris Kristofferson, a perfectly innocuous seeming video of the 2 singers on stage doing a song, smiling, performing, all that. at the 1:07 point, though, Johnny Cash‘s grin turns to mud. For a split second the stageperformer‘s phony grin is wiped away and his face turns to a snarl. He looks offstage, toward who I do not know, someone in his entourage, and Kris Kristofferson‘s grinning face is left looking like a phony chucklehead. It fascinated me. Now I try to write a sonnet about the dilemma between public life, the public persona, and one‘s disdainful regard for their chosen path.
