Autumnal

It’s been a beautiful Fall here. No one can say otherwise. Saturday we did what apparently every other person does on a perfect Fall day, go the apple orchard. I know I gave Heath way too hard of a time about the experience. But out past all the traffic and noise, and lines, and garbages swarming with yellow jackets and all the apple commerce, there were peaceful autumn pleasures. Here are just some from the day.

What’s in a picture Part I

How I came in possession of a photograph in which a black man is naked and pressed against the black top of a major city street, with his hands zip tied behind him and taser wire still dangling out of his bare chest and stomach, with one police officer kneeling on his back and another pinning his leg down with the bottom of his boot as a whole gang of officers surrounded him to ensure he is subdued, is really no story at all. I happened upon the scene the same as any other passerby who stood now gawking, laughing or upset.

For an instant, before there are details to answer the why, the only narrative is simply that which is this scene. Before the woman who tells me that she’s carrying the man’s child can tell me what’s happened to him, there is just this – the picture I take, a man in the humiliation of his nakedness – arrested, surrounded, subdued.

Frederick Buechner asks readers to consider truth in this way:

“Picture that then, the video without the audio, the news with, for the moment, no words to explain it or explain it away, no words to cushion or sharpen the shock of it, no definition given to dispose of it with such as a fire, a battle, a strike, a treaty, a beauty, an accident. Just the thing itself, life itself or as much of it as the screen can hold…”

In the case of a photograph, it’s just one frame, one instant amidst many, and now with the image entirely separated from its context, it may become something else. Freed from a background story any meaning can be made from it. Some might see a criminal. Some might look and remember Rodney King. Some might see justice in action. Others might see injustice. Some might see a picture of Jesus.

All the tensions are there, so many unresolved – victim and oppressor, criminal and authority, powerful and the overpowered, black and white. It could be an arrest. It could be brutality. And right at that moment, before any knowing, before any judgment, before the picture is defined, before we define ourselves by the picture and our opinions, there is a space of lesser consequence, a brief moment where this single moment is free of pretense or complete understanding. It is, just for an instant, a silence.

Buechner writes about this silence when he speaks about the Gospel that is truth:

“…before the Gospel is a word, it too like truth is silence – not an ordinary silence, silence as nothing to hear, but silence that makes itself heard if you listen to it the way Pilate listens to the silence of the man with the split lip.”

The viewer of the photograph wants to make sense of it, Pilate as the interrogator wants the truth. One is asking the man constrained by the police “Why are you here, naked and ashamed?” The other is asking the beaten prisoner in his court, “What is truth?”

That moment of truth, the moment before any answer is given, is given in silence. But that silence is rife with all of the noise of a man being made somehow even less than a man by being made a victim. 

 

the refrain that still repeats

an old song has been ringing through my head recently. this is how it goes:

The winter of emotions 
sometimes steals into my head 
It’s the tundra of the shutdown 
It’s the burying the dead 
And I’d like to make my springtime 
but I have no real recourse 
but to wait on some long loving 
from some deep and pure source 

You lay me down 
You whisper somehow 
I can hear it when I’m very still 
You don’t ever touch me or chase away the chill 
but one day soon, you will 

The art of all my problems 
is in how they’re resolved 
I try until I’m hopeless 
and then a hand so soft 
is brushing back my hair
from its clinging to my face 
from crying God I live in 
such a weak and desperate place

   -lyrics, Don Chaffer