Remembrance in the Real Imagination of James Nachtwey

"This man was in an NGO feeding center, being helped as much as he could be helped. He literally had nothing. He was a virtual skeleton, yet he could still summon the courage and the will to move. He had not given up, and if he didn't give up, how could anyone in the outside world ever dream of losing hope?" James Nachtwey, speaking about famine as genocide in Sudan

I was young when I first watched "War Photographer" a documentary on James Nachtwey. As a teenager with a thirst for truth in filmmaking, I found photography especially endearing, and especially those photographers who followed the photography dictum, "the best shot is often the closest" with unnerving deliberation in foreign countries torn by war. Soon after,  I met Paula Bronstein, a family friend, who urged me to enrol in a school for journalism. I didn't. Though today, I often write for independent media on Media Co-op. Today in Canada, the country where I currently live, the nation remembers its fallen countrymen and women who served in war. A veteran and local author, Dr. Arthur Clark, reminds us that we do not only remember our own, but all who have fought and died in war; men, women, children, and the elderly included in every corner of the globe. This year, I've begun writing a creative non-fiction tract based on my grandfather's epic 20th century life, and his service in WWII. I've found a serious self-investigation into our relationship to war, whether through an ancestor, a friend, or in one's own life, is one of the strongest sources of contemplation in our modern lives. May we remember with a full heart and a stout mind!

________

in a city park, abandoned by wartime foment, I see my grandfather, alone after battle, on the plains of southern France, with friends, he is glad, and as he sits, I notice the loosened clothing spells an ease of the loins for the local tail 

For What? by Frederick Varley

he grooms the horizon with searching eyes, and a local Frenchman arrives with a bounty of breads and cheeses for the sweetened mouths and delighted palette’s of my forefather’s company, happy in the autumn sun of deadening leaves, an old history decomposing at their warming feet

________

“The nation’s economical bosom bleeds with childless milk for the ruffian few who glare amuck into the wild spring of the beatific northeastern kingdom”
...
To bruise the English pace in an overtaking sea
With the magic and force of our forested craftsmen
Dreaming up skyline distances

Across the phantom pages of a medieval Columbian map

...

Our aristocratic exoticism
Bearing down on mountainous floods
To drown the ghastly past and its African boats
Full with the god-forsaken ash of a new America
Burning up with the Phoenix of old Mexico

...

Our human plague and its genocidal awareness
In the 21st century of medicated madness
When poverty turned to poetry in the music of her glory

excerpt from "Phantom Page of a Medieval Columbian Map"