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Here’s another before I go to bed; a window and a loft door from the same building as last entry. It was a fire station at the turn of the century. I have always loved this building and I don’t know why. Maybe I worked there once in another life. It’s amazing what one can see through those windows…
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Cold as can be, here. Joint-aching cold, and windy, too. I was outside around sunset playing with my new camera. My fingernails are still throbbing.
This one was an accident; I thought the windows were in focus, not the branches. I set everything else manually, except the focus. I figured the good ‘ol auto focus will just set up on the wall, and won’t even notice the skinny little branches. I’m learning.
Used to be, on really good days, some mundane thing would present itself to me as a vision, and I would wish I had a camera. That was back before I did have a camera. Such visions presented themselves as perfectly composed images that lacked only capture by a gentle hand. It almost seemed that first there was a perfect image, then reality conspired to make its presentation in the physical world as if hoping that someone might find it, recognize and appreciate the beauty in it, and save it. This made me want a camera.
I look at everything a little bit differently now, or maybe just a little more closely. I see into things. Even without a camera in my hand. I look for light, for clarity, for perspective. I am on the lookout now for images that would be orphans, produced by reality according to a truer, more perfect plan that exists outside of reality and casts itself like frozen branches into our view, hoping that we will see.
Even accidentally.
I woke up, started the coffee, and heard a helicopter go over my house. I folded the futon and heard a helicopter go over my house again. I poured my first cup—oh! that first cup is always so glorious—and my windows and walls shook from a helicopter again passing over head.
I became curious.
You know a helicopter is close when you can hear a ringing whistle sound from it in addition to its throbbing bass. Such high frequency sounds do not travel as far as the lower pitched sounds, and are usually drowned out by them. As I took my first piss I heard that shrill ring from the air machine, and I thought, “I have to get outside.” I grabbed my new camera.
It made seven more passes after I got outside. It had probably made twice as many flyovers while I was puttering indoors. I must say the best photo is the very first one I took. I didn’t even know how to set the camera for a daylight shot—or for any shot for that matter; it’s brand new. I just spun the mode dial to the symbol of the little green camera as I ran through the front door. I looked up and shot.
My house was on the southern extent of a small circular pattern which the helicopter was following repeatedly. At its furthest from me, it was only about a quater mile, and it was banking to the left throughout its course. I thought I would feel awkward, standing on a street pointing a camera in these code orange days. I suppose if it had been marked clearly as a police helicopter, I might have felt naughty photographing its surveillance—but I would have anyway.
But it was not marked clearly, and in these post 9/11 days the unexpected behavior of aircraft gains a whole new significance. I felt almost patriotic, standing in the street, camera braced against a no parking sign, brazenly setting up for a N824AH, and after some web searching, I was able to locate still other photos of my mysterious airborne visitor’s siblings:
policeHelo2.jpg
policeHelo5.jpg
And lastly, this very informative page.
In this image, a dangling square structure beneath the body of the helicopter, directly in front of the floodlight, seems to me to be perhaps the airborne equivalent the directional antennae arrays I see on the roofs of some police cars used for locating stolen cars.
Need I say more? I love my camera.
I realize the protection of copyright is somewhat important. Though it is not orange alert stuff, it is still significant. But in America, if you are rich and don’t need a tenth of what you possess, then your right to continued amassment of wealth will enjoy the protection of the US Justice Department, and other Federal lackeys, who once were not the errand boys of the entitled, but the servants of the People. If you are not rich and powerful, and connected, then you can wail and moan, and though you are right, you not only won’t win, you also won’t get any assistance from Federal law enforcement.
Isn’t seizing a website a little heavy handed? And doesn’t anyone else sense in this excessive action the attempt to terrorize free-thinking and free-speaking people? I don’t even know the details of the case, and I never visited the site before it was seized, but these actions by the Justice Department are theatrical, and that scares me. Why not just pull the plug on the servers, and be done with it? Unless of course you want to ‘send a message‘ to intimidate us uppity website owners and discourage not only unlawful activity, but unwelcome discourse as well. John Ashcroft, in great discord with the freedoms he is charged to defend, has done much to discourage free speech. Personally, I think he views that as no small dividend of this action. I reserve no greater contempt than that which I hold for those who act unlawfully under color of authority.
I would today wear the disapproval of John Ashcroft as a badge of honor, and it is tragic that I am compelled to say that of the Attorney General of the United States.
There is a division of power between the governed and their government. It is an intimate and delicate interface between the freedoms and responsibilities of the individual and those of the state. In a perfect union, the state serves to preserve the individual’s ‘life, liberty, and pursuit of hapiness’. But even a perfect union between the people and the state is only a marriage of convenience which must be abandoned when its benefits no longer justify its burden. Recent events seem as harbingers to tell us that the once noble state has become an historic artifact. Even abusive cops will likely find a warm place in the halls of the By Nicole Chardenet’,CAPTION,’thevoicenews.com’);” onmouseout=”return nd();”>hidden breasts of Lady Justice.
Seek not that which sustains. Seek instead that which destroys—and stay behind it.
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This scares me. I wanted to be a professional photographer—actually a photojournalist—even before I wanted to be a firefighter. The first camera I fantasized about was a Pentax with a couple lenses. I couldn’t muster the courage, or the money, to pay what that cost, and eventually I began lusting after those beautiful Minolta SLRs with all their built-in electronic assistance. Such electronics were new then, in the late seventies, and nobody had yet heard the term ‘digital still camera’.
A passion postponed goes into a dormancy of desire. And it waits. Some lusts are powerfully fulfilled, others miss their mark and flail against the wall as they slide to the floor. But some never are allowed to make an effort toward consummation, and for those desires, their postponement may be right. I can only hope that postponement will prove to have perfected the desire when finally comes the long-delayed launch of my ever patient urge to make a picture.
Wish me luck.
Just woke, too early. Feel like Lazarus. Have to meet Stephanie in a half hour. I am cranky and miserable, and it is not just because of the moment. I have venom running through my veins.
Good morning.
Fifteen minutes. That’s all I have right now. Let’s see how much I can say without slipping into nonsensical-ness.
It is all OK. It doesn’t matter what you do, and it doesn’t matter what I do. Everything is perfect. Tragedies. Ecstacies. All the shades of boredom in between. Perfect.
I get mad at stupid men with power who do stupid things with guns. But I am no different. I have done stupid things. I get frustrated at all I do not know—the evil machinations and cowardly conspiracies that are concealed from me, like friends talking behind my back or shadow governments manipulating the electorate. But I do not need to know the details. This vague uneasiness is perfect just the way it is. Even if absolutely everything is riding on it. Just perfect.
If we really knew, and stopped trying to impose our arrogant little intellects onto everything as if we knew, then we would see that it is all OK. Just the way it is. We could simply be, and thus relieve ‘do’ of all the angst we heap upon it. In all of human history, when ‘do’ is so relieved, it has simply had no limits.
I am so sick to death of everything that I think of to say, that all I can come up with is this stupid diatribe. I ask the guiding entities what the fuck I should do, what should I write—or at least what should I write about. And there is silence. They do that well, the guiding entities; you probably don’t even know they exist they do it so well. But I have this stupid website, and what is one to do with a stupid website but fill it with stupid blither and infantile bellowing. So here we are.
I wonder why I do not have any interesting links to code-up for your viewing pleasure. You know, like those fascinating links to really quite delightful sites which seem to only be discovered by the most intelligent and smooth-skinned, emotionally well-balanced young boy- and girl-geeks. They’re cool people, and human and witty and droll and ever ebullient within a bemusedly subdued exterior, and they have lives and they go to school and to work and they go from day to day as if everything is somewhere else and they are on their way. Impossible for me to immitate.
Some kind people seem able, on occasion, to identify something here of marginal value, some sort of decent or comendable quality which I, quite honestly, am at a loss to recognize. But I like it when others see it, so I keep bumbling along, reciting doggerel and hoping to produce again by some clumsy accidental alchemy a bit of wisdom or truth in bright and gleaming gold—maybe platinum.
And maybe I am just distraught. It is a cold, dark night, with a crystal-clear black starlit sky, a moonless void, a vast impenetrable vacancy on what is for now the dark side of the earth.
The memories acquired earliest in life are the most fond to us. The feelings and emotions most familiar to us from our first experiences are dearest to us, and when they return they have greater access to our hearts than all the rest. I have the blessing (or the curse) of just such an affinity for tragedy. It touches me more deeply than any joy ever could; I am never so alive as when confronting anihilation and disaster. No pleasantness, nor mild ecstasy, no sublime comfort nor trembling shaking orgasm can do as much to connect me to the juice of life. To witness the extinguishment from this world of Imagine, for Willie McCool.’,CAPTION,’RealPlayer clip’);” onMouseout=”return nd();”>a little bit of hope eternal is, for me, to know beyond knowing—it is to understand without any question or doubt what truly matters.
This is dull to you. Disinteresting. Predictable and obvious. On a cosmic scale, emptied of time, nothing really matters, so why should this? And it doesn’t.
There’s six inches of fluffy new snow on the ground. Snowflakes are sticking together as they fall, forming big snoflake-matrixes that hover and drift, then hesitate and fall.
Depression is like snow on the poppy fields, like in the Wizard of Oz, only it doesn’t wake you up. Snow-depression wants you to stay asleep—and it wants to bury you. It makes you want to be buried.
My favorite was Willie McCool, the pilot of Columbia. I didn’t know much of anything about him until he was dead. I have spent the last week scouring the NASA human spaceflight site, and all the images, videos and sounds archived there from the last days of these remarkable people and their remarkable journey. Before the crash I knew they were up there, vaguely. I wasn’t even sure, before the end, that they had not already come home—until I saw the headline; Seven Die.
Some TV news anchor interviewed some psychiatrist in 1986, at the time of the Challenger disaster, and the psychiatrist made sense, and I have always remembered what he said. We, who never knew these people, and never tried very much to know anything about them really—people like me—we mourn because these events stir our own buried griefs and cause our own experiences of tragedy to re-emerge. Our loss in the deaths of seven astronauts is not a conjured lament, nor is it a pretense of loss for something which was not our own. It is our loss, for we recognize in the public tragedy an infrangible connection to our own, perhaps secret, tragedies, and we are helpless to stem the tide of tears. The premature end of a life, especially ones like these, recorded with such intricate detail right up to their end, focuses in one aching spot in my chest the termination of all the hopes and dreams I once had, dear things which I saw killed, and precious opportunities which I allowed to die.
There is an affinity of grief for grief. Tears apart seek to join. An unfathomable emptiness here nudges me to move closer to your unfathomable emptiness there. I am bawling my eyes out because it is one of the saddest things this life will ever know.
This is doublespeak. There is no need to consult your old tattered copies of 1984, just turn on CNN and watch with stunned disbelief as the president of the United States makes real Orwell’s 1984, by Eric Blair, aka George Orwell.’,CAPTION,’www.orwelltoday.com’);” onmouseout=”return nd();”> fictional nightmare.
I don’t know who I am, or where I live, or what the purpose of my life is supposed to be, any more. This is almost too tragic to be true.
Almost.
In this article, John Moyers catalogs some of the most glaring deceits perpetrated by our servants in high government. My problem is this: What the hell is to be done besides the writing of Op-Ed pieces which merely chronicle the abuse? Doing so does not even cover the story completely. I realize there is a space and time limitation; not everything which is wrong can be addressed or digested in a 1000-word editoial. But highlighting only the most prominent obscenities, like the breathtakingly Orwellian Total Information Awareness program headed by a convicted felon, or the blatant paying off of big business through refunds of the Corporate Minimum Tax, or the hijacking of the judiciary for political gain, or the naked adventurism of prosecuting a war for the achievement of very dubious objectives—these stories are only the whitecaps on the surface of a catastrophic flood, which has already washed-away many of the freedoms of people like you and me. Highlighting these stories distracts us from recognizing the greater underlying disaster.
Even now, when so much damage has already been done, still there are no demonstrations in the street. As I sit and type, my country lies quiet; there are no bullhorns, no searchlights, and there is no sound of boots outside my door. Some might say that my ability to say these things without arrest is proof that our democracy is viable, and that dissent is still protected. I might say that it proves my point; that the government which strips our freedoms does so with the consent of the governed and therefore has no need to fear informed dissent.
There is a catastrophic tide among us, sweeping the majority aside for the benefit of a few, and we are complicit in its success. That disaster is the real story. The population elected these monsters. Citizens have tolerated their abuse of constitional authority with nary a whimper, often taking up the abusers’ cause and helping them justify their crimes. In a call to a BBC radio program last week, a Colorado woman cited the September 11 terrorist attacks as justification to invade and conquer a sovereign nation. Again. Iraq has no more connection to the terrorist attacks than Germany; the al-Qaida cell in Hamburg helped plan the attack. I couldn’t listen long enough to find out if she wants to attack Germany as well—I shut her off.
They are Muslim. They are Arab. And they have the oil. These are the reasons that the current Great Empire will attack them. Iraq will never be able to damage us as much as we have already been damaged from within. The land of the free and the home of the brave is neither any longer. We have abdicated our freedoms either in favor of our 401(k) accounts and our personal wealth, or because we are too overwhelmed with poverty to care much about freedom.
And brave? We are bigger and stronger than any of our opponents. Of all the bullies I have ever known, I don’t remember any I would call brave.
You and I are accessories before the fact.
I am depressed. The fresh-face and bright-eyes of youth have given way to hairy ears and bad skin. My faith and optimism from another time is now dark doubt and cynicism. I may have chosen incrementally to make it so, but I don’t like it. The beautiful earth is more paved and more poisoned than when I came. The vale and stream, mountain and forest where once I met the Spirit is inaccessible to me now. The trees and rocks are still there. The clear, cold streams still flow and the air, on good days, is still fresh and pure. But the things I have learned in life have left me inconsolable even in the presence of the Spirit, even in the gentlest, most tender hollows of Spiritplace.
I am a lover. As my beloved physical life deteriorates, soon to hang in ragged shreds, it thus reveals an invisible structure that never decays, which has always supported all that lives. There is a memory of the pure, unsullied flesh, but everything tells me to let it go, that it is not the true object of my desire for it will one day be gone. I love eternally, therefore the object of my love, once found, will be outside of time. It will remain after these rocks and stones have ceased their song. It will remain when this dear earth and all its blue beauty exists no more.
And so not only can I tolerate, but I can participate in all the follies that life presents, both those caused by me as well as those inflicted by others upon me, for they cannot obstruct my contact to what really matters. There are no obstacles, only distractions. I need to write this down, for in the face of the horrors in which I participate today, I need the reassurrance of these words.
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