Matchsticks
By Amy Clark
I was mesmerized this morning by the trees turned white. And yet they seemed so fragile – living things encased in ice and in this way, easily broken. I meditated on them for a while, while I sipped my coffee and stared out the window. How their deep roots sustained them through sleep. How the hard wood learned to bend under the frozen water. And then I was reminded of another chalk-white image – one not as beautiful but just as broken. On the cover of the NY Times a man lay covered in what I can only imagine was cement dust from the rubble. He had once been a citizen of Haiti, of course, and now his body was exposed to the millions of readers who would view the site that day.
Once, my students and I discussed this type of journalism and whether or not it was a necessary form of exploitation. Are we actually seeing, as the photographer intended, the ache after it has left the body? Or are we losing our ability to empathize, becoming inundated with too much information?
I showed them images of Abu Ghraib, exposing a national scandal. And I showed them an image of a young girl being thrown by her mother out of the window of a burning house – the child would live, caught by those on the ground, but the mother was engulfed in flames. Shouldn’t the moments before death be private? Some would argue. Shouldn’t they be between the individual and whatever gods they happen to believe in?
My department, at Iowa State, is about to host a symposium on wilderness and the environment. This year’s topic is “Finding Beauty in a Broken World,” taken from the title of a book by Terry Tempest Williams, who is also a keynote speaker. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet read this work, but I am drawn to its title like a moth to flame. For isn’t the broken world itself what is beautiful? Or the vulnerability of it, the moments in which something is so fragile in the sustaining of life, the moments when a breath that would barely lift a feather could take that life forever…
The great trees are still slumbering through this long winter. They don’t know that the ground beneath them could give way at any moment and uproot them. They don’t know I could choose to step outside and snap their ice-covered branches like so many matchsticks. And southeast of here, where it is not so frozen and fragile, thousands of people stare through tears at the rubble where their homes were, and their capitol building, their grocery store, their bank, their hospital. One more reminder that what we’ve built can always be broken down. And yet – the man’s body lying there is beautiful, in an eerie way. And the faces streaked with tears, fragile arms lying across each others’ shoulders like branches, eyes reaching out to the rest of the world, for those who would see, with something like cautious hope.
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Amy Clark is an MFA student at Iowa State University. As a born and bred Iowan, she is honored to have her work appear on this site. When not writing she can be seen serving friendly folks at the fabulous Stomping Grounds Cafe in Ames. Her work also appears in literary journals such as Mid-American Review and Cimarron Review.
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I think you're right that the newspapers go too far with some of the photos they run. It's not good journalism, they're just trying to sell papers!
ralph
| Jan 19, 2010 10:47 PM
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Iowa Essays
