this sky looked beautiful to me last week on my walk.

seems the only thing i take pictures of anymore.

i get zero pleasure from taking pictures lately. zero.

i am painting, though. silly little loose paintings, quick and simple. seems the shit of life takes the majority of my energy. i'm sorry if I'm a downer, here. i don't think anyone reads this anymore, anyway.

let's keep going...to see where it leads.

today...a friend told me a story.
she is a health care professional, and was working with someone, when he started showing signs of a stroke!
he couldn't answer questions, started sweating profusely, and slumped over.
his eyes were open, but he was otherwise unresponsive.
she called 911! for the first time in her professional career.
she followed the instructions given to her...to perform a neurological check on the man.
he failed at every turn. as she waited for the medics, she decided to sit and talk to him, to remind him that he wasn't alone, and that help was on the way. she was particularly bothered by the look of fear in his eyes.

as the medics arrived, she felt a mix of relief and anxiety.
three of them came into the room and clumsily lifted him onto the stretcher. (she thought, 'they're a little bit stupid and careless'. why did she think that??) she also had the strange thought, 'how do these guys see all the shit they see day after day and remain sane?...

anyway, she felt sick on the way home, not knowing the outcome. she finally reached the daughter on the phone and tried to calm her down as the ambulance drove away.

once home, her legs kept shaking for a couple hours. all she could do was text a few friends who had similar experiences. then she made supper (and it was good).

she got a call after supper that he had been admitted to hospital and was doing better. he had no memory of the event.

she took a melatonin and went to bed.

-------------------------------------------------

she told me another story recently.
it was about a man her own age, in his 40's.
he was married with four young daughters, lived in a crumbling house, and worked a minimum wage job.
he had diabetes but couldn't afford insulin, so years of high blood sugar levels caused him to have a stroke.
the stroke robbed him of the ability to swallow, so he had a feeding tube placed directly to his stomach.
he was unable to work because of his delicate medical condition, and was threatened with eviction from his crumbling house.
what a pisser!

---------------------------------------------------

we can't leave it on that note.

my friend also told me this:
after she got home, her youngest daughter sang a song for her,
and "helped" her cook supper.
and afterward, she talked her ear off about school and just life in general.
and then, she curled up next to her in bed.
and she inhaled deeply the smell of her daughter's clean hair,
and felt the fullness of joy at the energetic, emotional,
dramatic, hilarious, loyal, loving, clumsy child in her arms.
and she remembered that Love is REAL.




Comments

Thersites said…
Moments frozen in time...

I will quote Jorge Semprún, who reported how he witnessed the arrival of a truckload of Polish Jews to the Buchenwald concentration camp. The Jews were stacked into the freight train almost two hundred to a car, traveling for days without food and water in the coldest winter of the war. On arrival all in the carriage had frozen to death except for fifteen children kept warm by the others in the center of the bundle of bodies. When the children were emptied from the car, the Nazis let their dogs loose on them, and soon only two fleeing children were left. Then, I quote from Semprun a passage, “The little one of the two children began to fall behind. The SS were howling behind them and then the dogs began to howl too. The smell of blood was driving them mad. And then the bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller. Together they covered a few more yards, until the blows of the clubs felled them, and together they dropped, their faces to the ground, their hands clutched for all eternity.”

What should not escape our attention here is that the freeze of eternity is embodied in hand as partial object. While the bodies of two boys perish, the clasped hands persist for all eternity like—tasteless parallel—the smile of the Cheshire cat in Alice, of Alice. One can easily imagine how this scene should be filmed in a movie. While the soundtrack renders what goes on in reality—the two children are clubbed to death, torn apart alive— the image of their hands clasped freezes, immobilized for eternity, while the sound renders temporal reality the image renders the eternal real. The frozen image which insists over reality rendered by sounds stands for a kind of positive ethical image of eternity.
-Slavoj Zizek
Jen said…
Beautiful. That really is the magic of photography, and I'm not sure why I'm not drawn to it lately. It just feels obligatory.

Anyway, stay warm up there!!
I suppose it's difficult to capture "the eternal real"... for as they say, "appearances can be deceiving."

The ice storm passed last night. The polar vortex now cometh... :(
Jen said…
Seems impossible (to me) to capture what is real.

I'm headed south to Big Bend (Terlingua) next week. The forecast says high 80's! We'll see...
I'll send some sunshine your way. ;-)
Thersites said…
Thanks! We could use it!
The "nature" of reality is that it's definition has come to represent that very portion of itself which escapes cognition...

...so don't feel bad if you can only capture its' traces. It's all we can ever hope to capture.
It's the traces that persist in our hearts that REALly matter!
btw - Yours was a beautiful story. It brought me muck closer to that reality we all seek. Thanks for sharing some of your 'gold'.
Jen said…
Thanks for recognising it for what it is. Xo

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