writing_shadows

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
-- "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats

In the end it comes down to money. It always comes down to money. There is no problem in the world that isn't started, and ended, by money. I was there as an impartial observer, an eye for the rest of the world, and what I chose to highlight wasn't as telling as what I chose to obscure.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. It's not, really. Pictures and words are apples and oranges. I can show you a face, a moment in time, a shard of emotion or reaction. That's all. A single slice of this larger thing, meant to represent the whole. But it isn't the whole. It isn't even a real fraction. Just a crumb. Just a beginning. An ending. No middle.

Consider this my confession. An admission. Not of the facts, but that I have a thing to confess. If I'm lucky, you'll never know I hid it from you. And if I'm not, we have greater things to worry about than whether or not I am at fault. If you find out the truth, I've already failed, and to quote the Operative (since I'm a sucker for pop-culture) "there's nothing left to see."

click.

If you've never been ankle-deep in blood, this part won't make any sense to you. But I can get into a zen behind the lens, and nothing touches me, so I didn't notice that my combat boots were squishing on the floor. I barely noticed the smell, I was too busy waiting for the perfect moment. I knew it would come, I knew there would be an instant where I'd get a face reflected in a window, and I could sum up this whole conflict.

His eyes haunt me. I can still see them, when I close mine. Brown and deep and full of sorrow as he muttered in some language I didn't speak. An apology? A prayer? Or just the raving nonsense of a man who's been fighting a war so long he doesn't remember what peace looks like?

click.

I can't sleep these days. I've never liked to sleep, always been afraid I was missing something, but now I'm really unable. I've learned how to compensate, how to push myself until I'm at the edge and sleep is an abyss that mimics the capital A, and I fall into the inky darkness and at least there are no dreams. It's the only way.

Sometimes I give in and I take the Ambien I was prescribed. When I know I've got to store the sleep, because I have a shoot coming.

Some of us disassemble guns to relax, I wind rolls of flim. Obsessively polish lenses. Make sure the shutters click, and the winder forwards. I prefer to shoot on film, although I carry a Nikon digital, to capture things when we're moving too fast.

click.

I've been nominated for awards, for the pictures I've shown. But what they should reward me for is the horrors I've protected you from. How many things I've seen and refused to show you, illustrating it instead in the tears of a child, the grief of an old woman. They're not what wars are made of.

War is the cold detachment of a man ordering genocide. War is the pile of dead just outside your house. War is the rubble lining the street from your hotel to the helipad where soldiers look like angels as they help you into the vehicle of your escape. War is the color red, so red it's black.

War is not grief and tears, war is hatred run so deep in a man it takes him over. War is knowing you will not live to see another sun rise, and cursing it when you do because it's one more day. One more cycle of suffering and pain.

click.

These days I live in the US. They call it a sabbatical as I take pictures of flowers, and politicians kissing babies, of puppies and rainbows and snow storms. But I was there too long. I know the truth of people now. They pay me to hide the revulsion in a man's eyes as he kisses a baby darker than his suit. They pay me to hide the fear in a woman's smile as she holds up her prize winning orchid, afraid her husband will call her pride hubris.

I know there will never be a world without sin, a place without pride or hate or fear. But if I edit long enough, if I pick the right angles and push the button during the split second when only the frame I want is visible...

Maybe you'll learn to believe in a world of love.

click.