The winter forest pulls me closer.
I see leafless branches sagging
under the weight of long-held snow.
Simple harshness captures me, like music.
Trees no longer stand monolithic;
They are now just brushstrokes
on God's cold, white canvas.
I sit with my pad and pens.
My face is red and my hands shake.
I feel the snow-chilled breeze
against my side, as if He's telling me
to get out of the way
so this still life can be perfect.
I consider walking away from the scene,
until a sparrow lands on a nearby branch,
freeing it from the canvas.
My sin no greater than his, 
I pull out my pens and 
in a few strokes,
trap the bird
under snow
of my own.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

-- Exodus 20: 4 (KJV)

I once had a man die under my hands while I was on the street. He had been shot multiple times in the chest, shortly after lunch. Not much I could do. Soon after the man was gone except for a burgundy stain on the sidewalk, an eruv of yellow tape defining his universe.

I went to a work meeting that evening--it did not go well. When it was clear it was not going well, I mentioned what had happened. Folks mumbled, I had made them uncomfortable. I do not talk about it much anymore.

When you see a photograph, you have the option of looking away. We are surrounded by images. Don McCullin could not look away.

We like numbers, quantification. How many died?

3000?
                          110,000?
            160,000?

6,000,000?

I do not have that kind of imagination. No one does.
I have watched a child die. And my mother. Then my father.
My sister died, but I did not hold her hand. I like to imagine it was not too painful as her chest filled with blood.

---

Someone here sent me Don McCullin's autobiography. Don McCullin takes photographs.

The aborigines believe a camera steals your soul. McCullin proves it. Like the executioner who performs his job admirably because he is affected by it, McCullin captures the souls of the dying. Or at least he did. It got to be too much for him. Now he does landscapes.

During Biafra's brief (and futile) struggle to break from Nigeria, most folks starved.

McCullin had a natural eye for composition, but that is not why he took pictures, at least if he is to be believed (and I believe him). Otherwise he would just be another pornographer.

You may have seen the picture. McCullin had traveled to a hospital for war orphans. The children are grotesque, large heads and bellies balanced on insect legs.

This child is an albino--and he has been ostracized by the other children. He carries an empty tin of corned beef, as well as its lid, stamped with the word "FRANCE" He is leaning over, barely able to stand, supporting himself by holding his right knee. He has on a tattered long-sleeve shirt and underwear. His eyes reflect sadness deeper than I can imagine.

Yes, the composition works, the angles and the light, the artistic dominance of the child's head in the frame--to focus on this, to intellectualize this photograph, to make it "arty" helps you step back a tiny bit from what McCullin witnessed. To step back from a child suffering is obscene.

I'm not a person who wants to go stealing images of other peoples grief, and things like that.... I don't sleep well, I think sometimes.... I wake up and think about things like this. I can still remember the day I saw a man shot in cold blood in front of me. And sometimes, it's not always convenient but these memories come back at the most terrible times. Sometimes at night, sometimes even on a beautiful sunny day when I'm sitting in my garden, or walking through some woodland. And you know, photography has been very very generous to me, but at the same time it's damaged me, really.

Don McCullin

We are visual creatures. But we are not loving ones.

---

Don McCullin, Unreasonable Behaviour, An Autobiography, Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1990
Matt Kime, in a review of Don McCullin, A Retrospective, in TVcameramen, http://www.tvcameramen.com/lounge/Don_McCullin.htm

The hospital is five minutes' drive from the hospice center; the hospice center is five minutes' drive from the mortuary.

In this case I speak of Santa Ana, California, but I could be speaking of nearly any city in America. Entrepreneurship exists more for pragmatism than beauty. Embalming people is a trade -- an organized one. You go to school for it.

There is nothing beautiful about replacing blood with preservative, or massaging dead facial muscles to give the appearence of serenity. I have seen people in caskets before. They are not themselves. I am not one to muse over the loss of spirit that occurs at death, but I am one to mourn the loss of the neural connectivity which held the memories and experiences that contributed to a person's body language.

Does that make me an empiricist? Probably.
Does that make me cold?
I don't think so.

The only hospice I have ever seen -- a wing in a rest home off Tustin Avenue -- did not have an air of rest or peace, but fear.

I learned there that you can tell immediately when someone about to die has accepted death. I also learned that the great bulk of people have not, and will not.

My sister and I spent months one summer visiting our grandmother, who after nearly three decades was preparing to succumb to congestive heart failure. And in time we began to recognize and get to know a little the people who lived there, and the grief counselors who came by once a week to make sure we were parsing everything adequately. People disappeared quietly, taken away by nurses, all traces of pre-mortem violence neatly hidden. We heard much of this talk that one hears with a dying relative, about death being another phase of life, something to come to terms with.

Relinquish control. For us, this was easy. We were not dying.

We knew our grandmother had passed because she had stopped panicking for the first time in months.

A good way to tell how much pride a society has is by how much it tries to sanitize death. Humans are prideful creatures. As Márquez might say, we are creatures who cannot stand the smell of our own shit. But to fault humans for fearing death is an act of incredible hubris. I'm scared, and always will be.

Cubans mimic European tradition -- all the nuance of Catholicism, with undertones of African spiritualism. We know that for centuries, each Saint was a cloak for some aboriginal deity: robes and piety covering a virile, indigenous creature. But we had a wake, the whole family together, dressed very nicely, in suits and everything, and there was an organ. Very ritualized, very Catholic, very clean.

We have our wakes and our funerals and say our rosaries, but every Cuban I know over the age of thirty has photographed a corpse at a wake. When I told some friends in Connecticut this, they were horrified.

After they'd transported our grandmother from the hospice center to the mortuary for the wake, my sister placed her hand on the body's chest, noted the stiff feel of paper, laughed a little, and said, "Did they stuff her bra?"

Nonchalance. Healthy nonchalance.

As my sister's hand encountered the same papery feel just beneath our grandmother's ribs we remembered, probably at the same time, that her driver license had had the small pink sticker on its corner reading DONOR.

For the first time that week I saw my sister cry.

Closed casket is synonymous with not pleasing to look at. But you can't see paper sewn under skin wrapped in a best blouse. It's only when one places a hand over a cold heart, tries to experience only a small piece of a world which no longer exists (always making sure) that they learn the ugliness of death can be observed by things much, much more profound than sight.

I don't like photographs of dead. And I don't like organized mourning. They say these things are an important part of coping. They probably are. We need to be morbid. But I don't like graven images.

Somewhere, the mitochondria in my grandmother's organs continue to produce warmth, and the myriad cells continue to play chemist with oxygen, creating carbon dioxide. Somewhere, the carbon dioxide is taken in by green things. Today I replanted a cactus balanced on weak roots on the side of a rocky hill. This is illegal in California -- I should have let it die. But I like green things.

The blood carrying those compounds around, and that mitochondrial heat, is the blood of a stranger. This is okay with me. The paper doll I looked at five years ago is not.

Does that make me an empiricist?

Probably.

But not cold.