Vanitas
Yeah, this is long, and maybe depressing, and totally selfish of me to post. (Because it's so long for y'all to read, and I'm posting it in the hopes of getting some feedback. Yes, I realize that I've been writing for me and not the reader of this blog lately, and I apologize. But I can't promise to rectify that any time soon because everything I'm writing is for class these days.) Sooo. Without further ado...
The sepia tones fade to yellow at the edges. The left corner has been bent and smoothed back down, leaving a crease. The bend occurred in 1972 when the photo slid out of its designated place in the album and was folded by the force of the spine.
The faces are shadowed by the noon sun, giving the appearance of skulls on fully clothed bodies, like vanitas paintings. Reminders of mortality. They’re dead now, the faces in the photo. Long dead. Decomposed like leaves.
The whitewashed stone house behind them has been bulldozed. The horse in the field back there was shot when he got the bloat. The son in the white dress being held by his mother? Died the year after the photo was taken from malnourishment (and the complications of a weakened immune system). But this irrelevant piece of paper remains. This paper and the Sperrin Mountains that rise beyond the house. The Emerald Isle turned sepia.
They are my blood.
That child there standing beside the sheepdog is my great-great-grandfather.
When I saw this picture for the first time, I was six and I cried. I realized that little boys grew up, died, and became people’s dead great-great-grandfathers. And I realized that little boys grew up, died, and were remembered by great-great-granddaughters as sepia-toned, skull-faced strangers on paper. I realized that I would die. One day. And soon, in the general scheme of things.
At six, I understood heaven better than I do now. But heaven has never soothed me.
I was there last summer, in the Sperrin Mountains. Drove through them actually – couldn’t stop. This picture was taken in a pub in Derry. Fifty-six miles away from the bulldozed whitewashed stone cottage. How many kilometers is that? Fifty-six miles from the church in Dungannon, where my blood was christened, where my blood was married, where my blood died. Fifty-six miles from the landscape walked daily by my blood.
In this photo, I’m holding up a pint of Guinness, toasting the picture-taker. It’s a close-up of my face – too close. The flash of the camera made my eyes red. But I Photoshopped that out. So I’m just a smiling American tourist. Just another Irish-American tourist making a pilgrimage to the motherland. But I’m not in the motherland – I’m fifty-six miles away. And, here, with my smiling face and pint of Guinness, I feel farther away from my blood than I did when I was across the Atlantic.
When I saw this picture for the first time, I was twenty-four and I cried. I realized why I felt distanced by the proximity of being in that land. I realized that my motherland was the land of my birth, not the land of my ancestors. I realized that my blood was not in Ireland. It was in my bones. I realized that smiling girls in pubs grew up, died, and were remembered by great-great-granddaughters as digitized, big-faced strangers on paper.
After the house fire, I found the photo album soaked through. What remained, I was certain, would be sopping bits of pulp – gloss here, matte there. But I found these two photographs – the one of my ancestors in Ireland, the one of me in the pub – stuck together. Faces close. Past kissing present. Present kissing past. And when I split them, there were two photographs in my hands, each carrying the same double-exposed image of my smiling face over their home, their faces, their Sperrin Mountains. Each photograph destroyed and beautifully altered.
The sepia tones fade to yellow at the edges. The left corner has been bent and smoothed back down, leaving a crease. The bend occurred in 1972 when the photo slid out of its designated place in the album and was folded by the force of the spine.
The faces are shadowed by the noon sun, giving the appearance of skulls on fully clothed bodies, like vanitas paintings. Reminders of mortality. They’re dead now, the faces in the photo. Long dead. Decomposed like leaves.
The whitewashed stone house behind them has been bulldozed. The horse in the field back there was shot when he got the bloat. The son in the white dress being held by his mother? Died the year after the photo was taken from malnourishment (and the complications of a weakened immune system). But this irrelevant piece of paper remains. This paper and the Sperrin Mountains that rise beyond the house. The Emerald Isle turned sepia.
They are my blood.
That child there standing beside the sheepdog is my great-great-grandfather.
When I saw this picture for the first time, I was six and I cried. I realized that little boys grew up, died, and became people’s dead great-great-grandfathers. And I realized that little boys grew up, died, and were remembered by great-great-granddaughters as sepia-toned, skull-faced strangers on paper. I realized that I would die. One day. And soon, in the general scheme of things.
At six, I understood heaven better than I do now. But heaven has never soothed me.
I was there last summer, in the Sperrin Mountains. Drove through them actually – couldn’t stop. This picture was taken in a pub in Derry. Fifty-six miles away from the bulldozed whitewashed stone cottage. How many kilometers is that? Fifty-six miles from the church in Dungannon, where my blood was christened, where my blood was married, where my blood died. Fifty-six miles from the landscape walked daily by my blood.
In this photo, I’m holding up a pint of Guinness, toasting the picture-taker. It’s a close-up of my face – too close. The flash of the camera made my eyes red. But I Photoshopped that out. So I’m just a smiling American tourist. Just another Irish-American tourist making a pilgrimage to the motherland. But I’m not in the motherland – I’m fifty-six miles away. And, here, with my smiling face and pint of Guinness, I feel farther away from my blood than I did when I was across the Atlantic.
When I saw this picture for the first time, I was twenty-four and I cried. I realized why I felt distanced by the proximity of being in that land. I realized that my motherland was the land of my birth, not the land of my ancestors. I realized that my blood was not in Ireland. It was in my bones. I realized that smiling girls in pubs grew up, died, and were remembered by great-great-granddaughters as digitized, big-faced strangers on paper.
After the house fire, I found the photo album soaked through. What remained, I was certain, would be sopping bits of pulp – gloss here, matte there. But I found these two photographs – the one of my ancestors in Ireland, the one of me in the pub – stuck together. Faces close. Past kissing present. Present kissing past. And when I split them, there were two photographs in my hands, each carrying the same double-exposed image of my smiling face over their home, their faces, their Sperrin Mountains. Each photograph destroyed and beautifully altered.
posted by Lauren | 7:43 PM
6 Comments:
Whew! This caused even me to be introspective. Very thought provoking and well written. I'm proud of you and love you!
Thanks, Dad! Love you, too.
Yeah, Lauren -- it's good. The twist at the end with the photos stuck together is very clever.
I sometimes, think, though, that you need to introduce some longer sentences for variety. You have some fragments in there that add a nice effect of free association, but I'd like to see some more syntactically (?) complex sentences.
I liked it. I can see where Sara's coming from, but it feels like the short sentences are a part of your "thing." I think you need to put in more complete sentences, but again the sentence fragments seem to part of your own particular style. They feel like facets of a jewel, many different glimpses that give an impression of the whole when taken together.
I thought the line about Heaven was interesting but unnecessary. It didn't really seem to fit in the story. If you want to develop that thought more, then I'd suggest either expanding this story or adding it into another.
The imagery is, as always, vivid and beautiful. This felt like a sketch or an essay (in the Montaigne sense), not a story, which was interesting and ties into the jewel/facet thing I was talking about.
Lauren, I had to do the "word verification" thing 9 times. It kept rejecting what I typed in, even though I typed it in exactly as pictured.
Dang security precautions.
Man, I just wrote a really long response to your comments and then my internet went down.
What I said in my really long comment was that y'all are right -- I need to vary the sentence structure more. I was on a roll when I wrote this, and that's why it came out the way it did.
And, yeah, it is a sketch. The exercise I chose was to describe two photographs and make them into a sketch/story that can be expanded. (I might expand it. I might not.)
THANKS FOR THE FEEDBACK! Fo' real.
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