image
Among the Narcissi
by Sylvia Plath
Spry, wry, and gray as these March sticks,
Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi.
He is recuperating from something on the lung.
The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing:
It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy
Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks.
There is a dignity to this; there is a formality-
The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending.
They bow and stand : they suffer such attacks!
And the octogenarian loves the little flocks.
He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing.
The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.
poem
Day 100
I guess this diary marks a milestone, at least if we go by the number 100. But it's not really 100 in the strict sense, because I've missed a couple of days here and there. I even took an entire week off until just a few days ago.
And this war has been going on for longer than I've been posting pictures and poems.
Maybe the whole concept of observing milestone days is antithetical to this diary anyway. One of the main ideas of this `daily witness' is the simple and unavoidable regularity of it all, in the way that anyone with the ill fortune to be caught in this war is made to suffer endlessly every day from the extremes of numbing deprivation and sheer terror, for no good reason at all save for the fact that they are there.
I caught myself starting to write "in the same way that anyone..." but how can that even be possible? There's no way that anything I see or feel can be the same as what the Iraqi people and American soldiers see and feel every day.
I'm not suffering, but I have to keep telling myself that they most certainly are.
Every once in a while I go back to re-read some of my earlier entries, and when I do I can often recall what I was thinking and feeling at the time I first put the diary together; or when I read a series of them in sequence, I can follow an arc of thoughts and emotions, or maybe even sense of aesthetics, if that's not too fucked up of a word to use in this context.
Because as crude or weird or heartless or irrelevant or dilettante-ish as it may sound, I'm driven in this series by an attempt to apply some sense of art and aesthetic, or to look towards the artistic as the way for me to move beyond simple facts and make sense of what these images actually convey, and of what this war really means to me in my heart and soul.
That's certainly where the poetry came from. I was never into poetry before I started these diaries, but somehow the poems that I first stumbled upon, then started to seek out, made more sense to me than news photo captions. Initially, they were very often battlefield poems, written by soldiers, often from WWI, about their firsthand experiences. There's no doubting their credibility, or depth of involvement and feeling.
But as is often the case out here on the internets, one thing just kept leading to another, and frequently the poetry, and sometimes the images, slipped more towards the abstract, or at least weren't so obviously related to the direct experience of war as to more universal feelings of grief and loss.
I guess you can see that right now, I'm in my Sylvia Plath phase.
We all experience loss, we all grieve. They're normal and unavoidable phenomenon. I don't always do my best to cope with my own personal grief, or to resolve or accept it and somehow keep moving forward, but mostly I want to try.
I don't think that I can stop this war. I wish it were otherwise. If there's a way, I don't know what it is. But I do believe it's important to try, and for me that first means seeing it. After that, I'm not so sure.
one way to support the troops
another way to support the troops
one way to support the Iraqi people
many other ways to support the troops and the Iraqi people
one way to support victims of torture
one way to witness every day
