11 December 2023

Attention is flesh, wisdom skeleton.

Outside the physical therapist’s door, a skeleton is turned to the wall. What might be a face leans, hiding a massive overbite.

A man and his daughter were just in Samoa, travel next week to Vegas. He’s learning to walk with a prosthesis on one leg, from knee to metal foot tucked neatly into a running shoe.

I with my crutches challenge an older woman with a walker to a race down the tiled floor.

Empty plastic boxes hang on a wall. Above them, a sign indicates Health and Wellness Resources. Underneath, a faux modernist couch on which couples sit, one or another favoring arm or leg. Our pain signs itself, like the wide receiver trash talking in ASL after scoring a touchdown.

Andre 3000 says he plays the flute, but is not a flautist. He’s not an artist, but a respondent. A photographer plays the camera in this way.

Witness is a form of attention that asks more of us than insight. Out sight is not out of sight or mind, but a vision of what sits right in front of you. Vision as in the giant letter E, not William Blake rolling on cobblestones chanting mantras. The photographer was killed by a sniper, as was an 8 year old boy playing soccer in the rubble.

To hear is to see. In the new film about Auschwitz, you see children playing in a fenced yard. What you hear are screams and machines of death unimagined by them but not their parents. A lawn mimics a rural field; the death camp cannot mimic anything. It is relentless industry. If I wanted to write about birds, I would have to get away from bombs, the Palestinian poet wrote. If I wanted to show the death camp, I would make it my sound track. The jumpers on 9/11 looked free until they hit a roof, thud. When the movie turns violent, I hide my face behind a pillow, but I can still hear. Eye witness ducks what ear witness cannot.

Blind Murphy dog brought a dead rat inside the house. “We had no idea,” they all said. The images came to them on railroad tracks, but all they knew was the clattering. A train is a neutral object; what it carries is only theoretical in cases where the non-witness requires abstraction to evade the rest.

So much depends on inattention. Our politics, for example. Inattention is difficult, so we invented distraction, speed. No one actually watches the Indy 500; it’s too fast. They wait for the pile-ups to see where the cars line-up. We pay attention to accident.

I mean to write about witness, but I pursue evasion instead. Too much telling results in a showroom with no cars in it. If we did have a car to show you, it might be red with a black roof. The electric cars would be as quiet as a budget hotel without wi-fi. The sign says they’re a “Concept Hotel.”

The engines of industry resume; it’s our property that’s so intensely managed. A neighbor put up a sign that reads, “Scoop your poop!” It sits beneath a tree adorned with ornaments, in a field of candy canes. They were 99 cents each. The tags tell us so.