More than Mel (Gibson)

What is low? Low is down but yet still lower still. Low is the absence of love. It’s blue. It’s that moment when the object is smashed and porcelain shattered. Bah! What can it matter? There is always lower still. Try doing this with a kid and a brain tumor and bellyache. Try death and then some – brothers gone, babies gone, and thousands scarred for life, etcetera. Low is no hope, not even in the horrid pit of death. And it is here that I check my pulse and rekindle a thought.

So why would Jess pound on trauma? She’s writing a book on it from a visual perspective so not a trauma theory but an image theory on trauma with special attention to photography. Which we know by now started well before modern optics (I’m thinking holes in pyramids that peak light on celestials events through time, in tombs, for one). Why? She hasn’t ever even hinted at depression. We’re talking foul muses here; Images of stiletto healed women crushing the skulls of living kittens for sexual fetish and fouler; Death from above, the crushing weight of cluster bombs on terrorized citizens too poor or proud to move aside, shifting realities and false photo-merges that reshape a moment from despair to apparent belief and lives shaped entirely by deformities, outside the bounds of social brevity, outside even pulp or drug store romance novels pumped out by the 80,000 word rubbish heap thousands. The questioning of perceptions of reality and reality of perceptions. If depression doesn’t bring one here, what does? Death in droves. Death, death everywhere so let’s all have a drink! Death from Lupus, the autoimmune hell ride that gives a woman five to forty (days to years). That kind of uncertainty opens eyes. That is certainty, that little fucker. Bye bye Diane (Arbus), you learned too much too soon. Gone. Bye bye Virginia (Wolfe), water won’t save you love. Bye bye, Francesca (Woodman), too close, too soon. The spirit moving through madness in sane states of understanding. Glorifying the doomed? Nope. Understanding the doomed? Yup. The learned of what’s poor. Making sense of it in academic necromancy. Keep watching children, it’s more than Mel.