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A Gaza Photograph

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Here is a photograph of the al-Tuffah neighborhood in Gaza City on July 29, 2014:

A Gaza Photograph

When I first saw the photograph (referred to as “the Gaza photograph”) on July 29, the effect was of experiencing something overwhelming, as when some part of reality, or the reality of something in the world, or of the world itself, seems to bend and outstrip one’s capacity to understand – in this case, as if what I knew or thought I knew about the world in which I live were fundamentally inadequate. It struck me that my understanding was wholly inadequate to accommodate what is shown in the picture, where “what is shown” is not a representation or interpretation but (a piece of) the world itself on a particular day. If we human animals are distinguished from other life forms by our ability to speak, an experience that leaves us speechless leaves us insecure in our humanity. A feeling of being suddenly insecure in one’s own humanity – or equally a feeling of being suddenly exposed as merely human, implying that the concept of humanness is essentially insecure or unstable – now seems an accurate description of my first encounter with the Gaza photograph almost two years ago. Furthermore, an experience that leaves one insecure in one’s humanity may be said to allow an insight into the essential inadequacy of the solutions that human beings have proposed to those problems that occur uniquely as human problems. In our world, explosions are often proposed as solutions; so what is the problem?

                  The purpose of this essay is to ask about our relationship to the photograph, and since a world, or part of our world is made present in the photograph, about our relationship to the world insofar as it is revealed in the Gaza Photograph. The structure of this essay is as follows: We begin with an abbreviated description of the 2014 military assault on the Gaza Strip known as “Operation Protective Edge.” The point is to suggest that together with its other objectives, one of this operation’s purposes (or less provocatively, one of its calculated effects) was to create a public spectacle, such that the world’s relationship to historical events would be as viewers, as an audience. But what is an audience? The next section suggests that the in our time the answer may be found in the way we look photographs, a way of looking that is implied or required by certain aspects of the medium of photography as described by Stanley Cavell in his first book on movies, The World Viewed (1972). But since one of Cavell’s central claims is that the medium of photography is revealed only particular photographs, the essay investigates the structure of viewing implied in several photographs of subjects related to Operation Protective Edge. The essay concludes with a return to the Gaza photograph, suggesting that what is happening in or to our world may be not just understood but actually determined by what we do (or fail to do) when we take views of it rather than the reverse.

                  Finally, I should note that the personal perspective from which the essay approaches the subject is deliberate and I think essential insofar as the writing rises to the occasion of philosophy. The autobiographical approach is thus intended to suggest a methodological point, namely, that the nature of viewing, while derived from necessities inherent in the photographic medium, is disclosed not by any general theory of photography (e.g., the photograph as index or as fossilized trace) but in and by one’s experience of particular photographs. Photographs have to do with pastness, and therefore with memory, and therefore with the way in which the presentness of the moment forces itself upon us, requiring us to respond to what is shown or to forego response, and that in itself amounts to a way of responding to or claiming our own lives, or not. In other words, the autobiographical tone of the essay reflects the fact that nothing could possibly count as a medium of photography unless it is given human significance in the experience of specific photographs.[i]

Operation Protective Edge

                  The Gaza Strip is an area of 139 square miles in which 1.8 million Palestinian people live under a comprehensive blockade enforced by Israel since the “disengagement” in 2005.[ii] It is one of the most densely populated places on earth with one of the world’s youngest populations with an average age of 18.2 years. Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” was launched on July 8, 2014. The stated aim of the Israeli operation was to stop rocket fire from Gaza into Israel, which increased after an Israeli crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank following the 12 June kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, which may or may not have been planned by Hamas commanders. Conversely, Hamas's goal was to bring international pressure to bear to lift Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, force the release of Palestinian prisoners and overcome its political isolation, after, it is claimed, Israel was the first, on June 13, to break the ceasefire agreement with Hamas that had been in place since November 2012. After seven weeks of bombardment, a ceasefire was announced on August 26, 2015.

                  During the seven week assault between 2,142 and 2,310 Gazans were killed, including at least 1,492 non-combatant civilians (70 percent of total casualties), among them 547 children, and between 10,626 and 10,895 were wounded. The wounded included 3,374 children, of whom over 1,000 were left permanently disabled.[iii] One three-day period saw a child killed every hour. By the end of the war, an average of 11 children had been killed each day.[iv] On the other side, 67 Israeli soldiers, 5 Israeli civilians (including one child) and one Thai civilian were killed and 469 IDF soldiers and 261 Israeli civilians were injured. On August 5, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) stated that about 520,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (approximately 30% of its population) had been displaced, 485,000 in need of emergency food assistance, and 273,000 had taken shelter in 90 UN-run schools. The UN calculated that more than 7,000 homes for 10,000 families were razed, together with an additional 89,000 homes damaged, of which roughly 10,000 were severely affected by the bombing. Rebuilding costs were calculated to run from $ 4 to 6 billion dollars, over 20 years. As of the date of this writing, Israel’s continuing blockade of Gaza has prevented even a single home from being rebuilt.[v] OCHA estimated that at least 373,000 children required psycho-social support,[vi] and according to a World Bank report issued on May 22, 2015, Gaza’s economy is “on the verge of collapse” with the highest unemployment rate (43%) in the world.[vii]

                  Some of the most disturbing incidents involved the IDF’s repeated and apparently deliberate attacks[viii] on places where civilian non-combatants were gathered, including hospitals, a rehabilitation center, open air markets, playgrounds, and United Nations (UN) schools where Gazans had sought shelter from the violence. According to a report released by the UN on April 27, 2015, Israel attacked seven UN schools, six of which had been designated as emergency shelters, killing at least 46 civilians (including 10 UN staff). “All coordinates of United Nations installations were available to (Israeli) units on the ground and were clearly and visibly marked on maps. The board noted, though, that, in spite of such measures, (U.N.) facilities were hit” according to the report.[ix] The shelling of designated shelters must be understood in connection with another of Israel’s military innovations – the so-called “knock on roof” policy. “Roof knocking” is the equivalent of a warning shot for aerial bombing; a non-explosive or low-yield device is fired on a building’s roof warning occupants to leave, shortly before the building itself is bombed a few minutes later. While Israel presented the roof-knock and other forms of warning as a humanitarian measure designed to minimize civilian casualties, it is undeniable that many of those fleeing their homes following the warnings were subsequently bombed in the very shelters in which they sought safety.

Images and Talk

                  As the assault proceeded day to day anyone with an internet connection was flooded with horrific reports and images of the carnage, providing anecdotal and documentary evidence (gathered by amateur as well as professional journalists) of each atrocity almost as soon as it happened via social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. To a much lesser extent television viewers were given somewhat sanitized versions of these images in carefully measured doses. The cumulative effect of this deluge of visual reports was strangely unsettling, at least for me. Viewing images of the mangled and incinerated bodies of women, children and the elderly in the bombed out remains of a UN shelter, I found myself asking, “How can this be happening? How can this be permitted to happen?” But it was happening, and each successive day seemed to bring yet another atrocity, another image and yet another, each more horrific than the last.

                  At the same time, our television screens were dominated by an endless parade of “experts” tasked with justifying, excusing, denouncing (depending on the political viewpoint represented) or otherwise explaining what we were seeing and reading. This explanatory function was carried out in the mass media by the staging of daily “debates” involving diplomats, generals, public relations professionals, politicians, university professors, bureaucrats, journalists and other “experts” on the Middle East conflict, in print and on the major cable news and radio networks. The debates revolved around a short list of familiar moral and legal “issues”.

                  Representatives of Israel and its supporters explained that the IDF’s use of overwhelming lethal force was necessary as a self-defense measure to stop the unprovoked firing of thousands of home-made rockets at Israeli towns from inside Gaza; that civilians were (regrettably) hit because Hamas fighters were hiding amongst them, but that the IDF was taking unprecedented precautions to minimize civilian casualties; that Hamas was storing weapons in hospitals, schools and mosques; that Hamas was parading the dead bodies of children for the news media as “cynical propaganda” when Hamas bore ultimate responsibility for their deaths; that Hamas’ goal was to destroy the Jewish state and by extension the Jewish people; and so on. Palestinian officials and intellectuals responded that Israel had provoked the rocket fire by using the hunt for the kidnappers of the three boys as a pretext for jailing Hamas leaders; that Israel’s response to rocket fire was “disproportionate”; that the IDF’s claims regarding “human shields” were false or exaggerated;  that there was no or very little evidence of weapons caches in bombed hospitals and schools; that Israel could “do more” to protect civilians; that attacks on UN designated shelters were not “accidental” but “intentional”; and so on. Officials for various human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN Commission on Human Rights were careful to maintain their neutrality, issuing more or less bland statements to the effect that while Israel’s bombing of civilian targets was deplorable, Hamas’s rocket attacks were “indiscriminate”, and blaming both sides for putting political and military goals above the welfare of civilians. Meanwhile amidst all the talk the carnage continued without interruption – with Western politicians advising “restraint” on both sides and Israeli politicians and generals expressing “regret” for needless deaths – until the IDF basically ran out of targets.

                  As they were discussed in the media, the “issues” which defined and delimited the ongoing debate – identifying which considerations were relevant, impliedly excluding all others – seemed to be given, in the form of an unalterable list, and the assumptions underlying these “issues” – such as the assumptions that the conflict involved opposing armies of roughly even strength, that the political history of Gaza including the blockade was not immediately pertinent to understanding the conflict; that a country enforcing a comprehensive blockade against stateless people is entitled to claim “self-defense” as an explanation and justification for the use of state violence; that non-combatants who have been warned to leave a target area become legitimate targets if they fail to leave; that it is acceptable to kill civilians including children who happen to be in the same area as enemy fighters; and that it is an unusual or extraordinary event in our world when women and children and the elderly are blown to smithereens for vague and rapidly changing political reasons – these assumptions were and could not questioned. These assumptions were, so to speak, built into the view presented by the mass media to its consumers – us. As a result, the rigidity of that view meant that anyone who sought to bring unlisted considerations into public discussion was immediately dismissed as “off topic” if not unhinged. The provenance of such lists and their underlying assumptions remains mysterious.

                  A fruitful topic not addressed in this essay concerns the relationship between talking and viewing. I refer to the fact that the tremendous volume of talk accompanying the steady stream of digital images seemed designed to blunt the visual impact of the images, as if the official media’s inability to control and filter instantaneous dispersion of images required an interminable cascade of words spoken by experts could absorb and disperse and ultimately dissipate the visceral effect of those images and our knowledge of the reality they recorded, allowing us to forget something we could not help knowing. (We see a similar dynamic at work whenever a mass shooting or other “terrorist event” occurs in here in the United States, even when photographic images are suppressed; the sheer volume of talk broadcast via official and social media sources – demanding that each of us instantaneously adopt a “hot take” on and “debate” the shooter’s motives and the event’s implications for “public policy” (e.g., gun regulation, Islamic theology, etc.) – seems as if designed to suppress our capacity to absorb the meaning of tragedy in our world.) But if that were the purpose of the excessive talk, the risk was that it could also produce something like the opposite of the intended effect. In fact, the more analysis I exposed myself to on television, the Internet and in print, the more strongly I felt myself affected by the truthfulness of certain images – specifically by a sense of the disconnection between the endless talking and the reality to which it purportedly referred. As if the residual and ultimate effect of the very plethora of explanations proffered (whether they were meant to justify or to denounce what was happening) was to leave the reality pictured in the photographs even more striking, even more inexplicable than it would have been without any explanation at all. “If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation” (Haruki Murakami, 1Q84).

                  I believe that what I will call the “talk effect” was generated by one’s sense that by the latter part of July 2014 (if not earlier) all of the relevant facts were already widely known, or at least publically available, so that what was needed was not more information of the sort being recycled again and again by talking heads on television, but a way to assess the significance of those facts – a way of seeing the reality of what was happening that was all but occluded by the expert analyses presented in the mass media. The unspoken assumption underlying expert analysis was that one’s position with respect to the reality presented in photographs was necessarily inadequate – as, according to the modern philosophy of the subject, all views of the world are necessarily “subjective” and therefore partial – and this inadequacy can only be repaired once “all the facts are in” and assessed from all possible perspectives according our quasi-scientific sense of fairness and impartiality. As if I cannot really know that the desk at which I am apparently sitting is actually there, in the world, because after all I cannot see those parts of the desk that are not presently visible from the perspective of my chair. The effect of the officially-sanctioned talk about Operation Protective Edge was to imply that there was something about what was happening in Gaza that we did not (yet) know (until informed by expert analysis), and that implication served its purpose if it effectively precluded consideration of the possibility that what we did not know could only be something we refuse to know. But discovering something that we refuse to know means discovering something about ourselves – something we fail to acknowledge.

Theater of War

                  The photograph reproduced at the outset of this essay shows an explosion in the Al-Tuffah neighborhood in the northeast section of Gaza City on July 29, 2014. On the preceding day, ten people including eight children had been killed when shells hit a refugee camp near the beach in Gaza where families had gathered to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, a Muslim holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.[x]   Everyone knows that in war there are explosions, and what knowledge could be more common than that men and women and children are incinerated, decapitated, disemboweled, maimed and blown to bits? One might go on to evaluate the particular explosion shown in the image, whether the launching of the bomb that caused it was defensive in nature, or whether the attack amounted to a “disproportionate” response to provocation, whether the military significance of its target justified the use of a particular ordnance, whether the risk of collateral damage was excessive, whether there might have been less risky alternative courses of action, and so on. And one might conclude, based on all available evidence, that the resulting destruction was either justified or not, morally and legally, more or less. But the Gaza image suggests that this way of knowing does not account for our relationship to the reality shown in the photograph and that in fact we know much more about that reality (and much less about ourselves) than our considered judgment can record.

                  It has become commonplace to observe that contemporary corporate media blur the distinction between “news” and “entertainment”, and television and online coverage of Operation Protective Edge confirms this truism. But my claim – hardly original after Guy Debord, etc. – is that the theatricality of the conflict may be seen not just in the way real events were presented, but in the way their reality was constituted, because the events themselves were to a large extent conceived and executed as performances – performances for a variety of audiences, depending on who was involved the action. Buy who was the audience?

                  On the most superficial level of politics, there is no doubt that the Hamas movement in Gaza was motivated in part by a desire to demonstrate – by showing – the truth of certain propositions to various audiences including  the people of Gaza, to Israel and its military, to the world at large, and to themselves. They wanted to show Gazans (among others) that Hamas remains, notwithstanding its political isolation (vis-à-vis the Palestinian Authority and various other factions) and relative military weakness, a viable and effective resistance movement. The “terror tunnels” were used (among other purposes) to show Israelis that despite that country’s high-tech security walls, fences, and surveillance capabilities, it is easily infiltrated, and that as long as Gazans are threatened, so will be Israelis. On the other side, the Israeli government and the IDF wanted to show Gazans and especially Hamas that resistence is futile, and that every act of defiance will result in vastly disproportionate pain, death and suffering. And Likud Party politicians in particular wanted to show Israeli voters (and their American and European supporters) that only their party was willing to undertake the difficult and internationally unpopular kind of action needed to protect the Jewish state and its aspirations as “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

                  On the plane of politics, none of this was new. Wars are always, among other things, rhetorical acts made to demonstrate the validity of various polemical points. However, in recent years the theatrical nature of military operations – the sense in which systematic violence provides a vehicle of communication between human beings – seems to have entered a new phase. I am referring to more than simply the now widespread practice of terrorism, which is intended to convey to the terrorized population the message that its government or security forces are unable to protect them, thereby undermining the credibility of that government. It seems to me that today state-sponsored military operations, especially Israel’s, are conceived and executed for the purpose (among others) of actually altering the way in which violence is perceived and taken in by an audience consisting of the people of the world, just as a dramatic or cinematic performance can alter the way in which events and indeed human action generally is understood. Violence is deployed for the specific purpose of altering our perception of violence – for example, by normalizing it, weaving it into the fabric of ordinary life so that instead of being experienced as a disruption that dawns and then subsides (allowing normalcy to be restored), war and the threat of war are used to transform our ordinary lives into a more or less permanent exercise of crisis-management. The geographically and temporally unlimited “war on terror” – like terrorism itself – is essentially theatrical in that it positions civilians as an audience, as if sitting in a darkened cinema watching a slasher movie.

                  What was the point of Israel’s repeated and undeniably deliberate attacks on civilians during Operator Protective Edge – if not to permanently alter the way in which such attacks are perceived and understood? Consider this statement of former senior Israeli military lawyer Daniel Reisner following Israel’s attack on southern Lebanon in 2006:

‘What we are seeing now is a revision of international law,' Reisner says. 'If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries. If the same process occurred in private law, the legal speed limit would be 115 kilometers an hour and we would pay income tax of 4 percent. So there is no connection between the question 'Will it be sanctioned?' and the act's legality. After we bombed the reactor in Iraq, the Security Council condemned Israel and claimed the attack was a violation of international law. The atmosphere was that Israel had committed a crime. Today everyone says it was preventive self-defense. International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal molds. Eight years later it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy.’[xi]

Based on this quotation and the ongoing behind-the-scene activities of military lawyers and “human rights” policy wonks in various international institutions including the United Nations, it is plausible to interpret at least some of the more disturbing incidents of Operation Protective Edge as deliberate attempts to alter international norms that determine what is and what is not acceptable conduct during military conflict, attempts that have been successful to the extent that they have not (for now) resulted in prosecutions for war crimes – where a failure to prosecute implies that the action in question not only was not a crime but is on the verge of becoming acceptable and appropriate conduct.

                  As an example, consider the “roof knock” warning policy mentioned earlier. International law strictly prohibits deliberate attacks on “protected persons”, principally non-combatant civilians. By warning building occupants shortly before the building is destroyed, the roof knock policy appears to respect the prohibition because it provides non-combatants with the opportunity to escape. Thus, its proponents used Operation Protective Edge as an opportunity to brag about how “humanitarian considerations” shaped the IDF’s tactical thinking. However, that rhetoric deflects attention from the policy’s more subtle effects. Anyone who, in response to a warning, either refuses or is for some reason unable to leave on very short notice automatically becomes a legitimate target – allowing a protected non-combatant to become magically and instantaneously transformed into an unprotected enemy soldier, even if that person presents no threat whatsoever.[xii] In some cases, the target was destroyed between 30 seconds and one minute after the “roof knock” – far too short a time for people to escape.[xiii]  In other words, the same policy that at first glance respects the distinction between civilians and hostile forces effectively blurs that same distinction. To the extent the roof knock policy is viewed as an acceptable military tactic (like “targeted assassination”), the Geneva Convention’s boundary between legitimate and illegitimate attacks has already shifted, perhaps irreversibly. If I am correct about the policy’s goal – namely, to blur the boundary between legitimate and illigitimate attacks – it follows that the actions implementing the policy (i.e., attacks on unarmed civilians who fail to leave when warned) must be open to view and seen, such that the observer’s failure to challenge the legitimacy of the attacks constitutes achievement of the goal. In other words, the attacks must be performed for an audience that, like the audience in a movie theater, is silent, immobile and invisible.

                  The testimonies compiled by the Break the Silence organization (cited in footnote x) reveal that some Israeli soldiers in Operation Protective Edge at times experienced the battlefield as if it were a movie set and they were film actors. For example:

When you shoot at a house it doesn’t totally collapse. They stay standing. I was surprised by how long it takes until they fall. You can take down three walls and somehow they remain standing despite the fact that they’re all blown to bits, it’s all ruined. It’s like “Call of Duty” (a first-person shooter video game). Ninety-nine percent of the time I was inside a house, not moving around – but during the few times we passed from place to place I remember that the level of destruction looked insane to me. It looked like a movie set, it didn’t look real.

At that stage, we returned to pretty much the same area in which we were stationed before, and we didn’t recognize the neighborhood at all because half the houses were just gone. It all looked like a science fiction movie, with cows wandering in the streets – apparently a cowshed got busted or something – and serious levels of destruction everywhere, levels we hadn’t seen in [Operation] ‘Cast Lead.’ No houses.

And that’s how it was, really – every tank just firing wherever it wanted to. And during the offensive, no one shot at us – not before it, not during it, and not after it. I remember that when we started withdrawing with the tanks, I looked toward the neighborhood, and I could simply see an entire neighborhood up in flames, like in the movies.

We saw Gazan civilians only once, in daylight. They just came over, with their hands up. One Friday morning I saw a family going out to the street, their hands up, like in the movies. Right when we had just arrived. Eight or 9:00 AM in the morning. You could see them coming out – there was this more central area with no buildings in it – and they come out wearing white clothes and with their hands up. It’s funny seeing people with their hands up, no one does that in reality. You only see that in movies. There was something comic about it.[xiv]

                  It is hard to know exactly why these soldiers’s experience of the battlefield experience struck them as cinematic – “like in the movies” – but we can assume that at least at those moments, they did not feel themselves to be in imminent physical danger – in no more danger than a film extra feels in an action movie. Their testimonies suggest that the soldiers did not feel bodily or even emotionally implicated in the destruction, perhaps because of its sheer scale, the automated nature of the weaponry deployed and the alien appearance of the utter devastation and ruin it caused. In any event, let us say that the soldier’s cinematic experience of violence meant that they were somehow absent from the scene – that while the enemy was there to be destroyed, the soldiers felt themselves to be invisable, all but immune to their enemies’ attempts to resist. The idea of that state-sponsored violence can or should be risk-free, and that risk-free violence can produce peace, is related to the idea that our relationship to the world can or should be one of seeing without being seen, hence of taking views of it, hence of knowing.[xv]

Photography and Audience

                  Concerning the invention of photography, Stanley Cavell has written that film “could not have impressed itself so immediately and pervasively on the Western mind unless that mind had at once recognized in film a manifestation of something that had already happened to itself” – a cultural trauma that produced “a sense of distance from the world”, a “terrifying recognition that reason as such, language as such, can no longer be assured of its relation to a world apart from us or to the reality of the passions within us.”[xvi] As a result of this trauma, our consciousness interposed itself as a barrier between us and our presentness to the world, so that  “[o]ur subjectivity became what is present to us” and “individuality became isolation.”

                  According to Cavell, photography expresses a need to overcome the chasm that around the time of Descartes and Shakespeare opened up between consciousness and world – not by restoring our old immersion in the world but by allowing our alienation from the world to be experienced as a natural fact rather than a traumatic event. Photography restores the world’s presentness to us but only by engineering our withdrawl from the world made present. Our alienation from the world is defeated by repositioning the human subject as a spectator, so that our withdrawl from nature feels as natural as projecting or taking in views of it. And it feels natural because it is not possible for us to reach the world projected on film, and therefore not possible to fail to reach it either.  “Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, as if from behind the self … as though the world’s projection [on a movie screen] explains our forms of unknownness and of our inability to know … The screen … makes displacement appear as our natural condition.”[xvii]

                  Cavell’s description of the structure of viewing provides a way of seeing what is shown in the four photographs reproduced below.

Group of people in Gaza

Credit Andrew Burton/Getty Images

In the first photo, we see Israelis seated in chairs arrayed on a ridge near the town of Sderot overlooking a lowland where an adjacent area of the Gaza Strip is being attacked. Most of the figures are shown in profile staring straight ahead to the viewer’s left where the attack is in progress. Although we cannot see the attack, we may assume from the intensity of the some figures’ rapt attention that the proceedings are dramatic – perhaps jet fighters firing missiles at ground targets, tanks launching artillery shells, buildings exploding in spectacular conflagrations of fire and smoke. We get a better picture of what the spectators are viewing in the second photo, taken at night.

 Spectators watching Gaza

Image credit: AFP

                  These images (dubbed “#Sderot Cinema” by Danish journalist Allan Sorensen, a veteran Middle East correspondent for Denmark's Kristeligt Dagblad Allan Sorensen, a veteran Middle East correspondent for Denmark's Kristeligt DagbladAllan Sorenson[xviii])Kristeligt DagbladKristeligt Dagblad make literal the ontological fact that first condition of the filmed world’s being present to us is our removal from that world. The images make perspicacious the distance between what is viewed and its viewers – whose shared absorption in the act of viewing is made possible by their physical and psychic withdrawal from a reality that has been transformed into a view. We might say that these photographs – in the depicted attitude of casualness toward lethal violence – take as their subject what Cavell refers to as the naturalness of our displacement from the world.  To the extent that human subjects exist as an audience, the world exists as theater, as performance. Nothing better epitomizes that naturalness than the sofas and lounge chairs that provide a familiar “drive in” movie experience for the audience, and it is this position of casual disengagement that gives them the freedom to observe, take in and interpret the visual data at hand as the unfolding of a cinematic production. Theirs is, both literally and figuratively, an ideal viewpoint, not unlike the vantage point from which the expert “talking heads” on CNN interpreted events in Gaza from a great distance, or for that matter, the position from which we view CNN in the comfort of our living rooms.

                  If the photographs of people enjoying the spectacle of mass destruction from distance confirm the casualness of our displacement form the world, the next photograph challenges that casualness.  A Palestinian boy is shown during a quiet moment following the devastation described by Israeli soldiers in the “Breaking the Silence” collection. The boy is sitting one some rubble on the rooftop of a bombed out building in Gaza City.

 A child sitting amidst rubble in Gaza

Credit: Ahmen Hjazi, Pacific Press/BI

Behind the boy and all around him one can see a city reduced to rubble in every direction all the way to the horizon. But for a group of three or four people barely visible below and at mid-distance just right of center, the boy is alone as the once bustling city has been evacuated.

                  The boy is gazing directly at the camera and therefore at the viewer, but he cannot see us because we are invisible. The photograph’s effect is unsettling. While we might wish to comfort the boy, we cannot confront him because we are not there, and we cannot go there; we cannot make our present his present, not now. But these facts do not imply that we cannot acknowledge the boy. We need only think about what acknowledging the world made present on film might mean, how it might be accomplished.

                  Whatever the boy knows about Operation Protective Edge is known in ways that are fundamentally different from the way the spectators shown in the first photograph know – which is also our way of knowing, relaxing in front of our television sets watching the experts debate the tactics and ethics of war. We might say that whereas in the first picture the observers’ knowledge is derived from data gathered through the eye alone, in the second picture the boy’s knowledge is embodied, absorbed through flesh and blood. The observers in the first picture seek more information to satisfy their curiosity; the boy in the second picture suffers from a surfeit of information. No set of facts could teach him anything he does not already know. The boy’s gaze directly into the camera asks what we the viewers know or think we know of Operation Protective Edge, and how we know it; his gaze does not allow the viewer to deflect the fact that he or she is no less of flesh and blood than the boy himself, exposed and vulnerable to a knowledge that exceeds the capacity of our concepts to contain. His eyes seem to express resignation about the future, both his own and by implication ours. Is his life over, and if it is, what about ours?

                  Although the boy’s gaze is directed toward the camera, confirming his awareness of being photographed, he is not posing. Were he posing, the boy would be representing himself to us, his audience; he would be subjecting himself to our need to take in the world by means of views. I feel like saying that the boy does not have the freedom to pose because his situation is too dire. Although his body survives, we may assume that his life, like the buildings surrounding him, has been reduced to rubble, and his future is in doubt. The boy’s bodily attitude, his  large sad eyes expressing not so much emotion as resignation, manifest a state of being vulnerable and above all exposed – as if his exposure to our view finds its visual equivalent in the way the interior of the bedrooms and living rooms inside the four-story building behind him – a few days or weeks prior, the scene of intimate family interactions – have been opened up and exposed to our view by having their walls blown out.

 Living Room, Gaza City, August 2014, Credit:

Living Room, Gaza City, August 2014, Credit:

As if the primary agent responsible for the destruction of buildings, the obliteration of families and the victimization of children is not bombs but our eyes, specifically our insistence that boy make himself available to our views of him and his world. But the boy’s eyes, the look he casts in our direction suggests that our removal from the world is not, cannot be natural.

                  The boy’s air of resignation indicates that it is his world that has been reduced to rubble. Acknowledging the boy in the photograph would then mean acknowledging that his world is also our world; and acknowledging his world as ours would entail taking responsibility for what has become of it, what we have done to our world by doing nothing. In short, acknowledging the boy would mean repudiating the vantage point from which we theatricalize the world by taking views of it, and in so doing, choose to remain its audience, silent, immobile and invisible[xix].

                  To say that photography allows our displacement from the world to be experienced “as our natural condition” is to say that in viewing the photograph we feel our absence from the world on film to be an inevitable and essential fact – a fact of our human constitution, rather than something that we have chosen and might come to reject. A photograph’s capacity to naturalize our displacement from the world is a characteristic of the medium of photography, what makes something identifiable as a photograph – specifically, the fact that a photograph projects rather than represents reality. The camera does not produce a likeness or representation of the world; rather, every last visual detail within that segment of the world found within the viewfinder is made present in the photograph, such that what we see in the picture is sensuously indistinguishable from the world in which we live – the same but for the fact that it doesn’t exist (now)[xx]. That the world projected on film doesn’t exist (not here, not now) means that while the world is made present to me, the viewer, I am not part of that world. I can see the world on film, I can look at it, but I am not and cannot be of that world.

                  (According to Cavell, our non-presence to the world on film is a consequence of the fact that a photograph is produced by mechanical rather than conventional means. A representational medium provides images of the world by means of the conventions that establish that medium. What counts as a painting is determined by those conventions (e.g., perspective, contrast, chiaroscuro, and so on) which at any given moment in this history of painting are accepted as ways of representing the world by means of paint applied to a flat surface. By contrast, what counts as a photograph is a matter of the technology used to create photographs (which doesn’t exclude the existence of conventional and unconventional uses of photographic technology, or the existence of radical innovations in that technology such as the replacement of analog by digital images). Unlike paintings, a photograph is able to make nature present without the mediation of human agency and all that goes with it – for instance, the inevitable flaws in human perception and judgment that at a certain moment in Western cultural history, seemed to condemn conventionality as such as arbitrary and subjective, cutting us off from rather than allowing access to the world.)

                  The fact that the reality made present in a photograph is sensuously indistinguishable from the world in which we live implies that the world on film is our world – the objects it contains (even if displaced from their normal positions) occupy the same space that we occupy while viewing the photograph. Therefore, if we are barred from entering the photographed world, it not because that world is located elsewhere, but because the photograph shows the world as it was at the very instant light entered the camera’s lens, and that instant has passed by the time we view the photograph. “The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it; and a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless not present (through no fault of my subjectivity) is a world past.”[xxi] The present of the world projected on film, no matter how familiar or intimate, is gone forever.

                  This phenomenological fact accounts for the peculiar poignancy of certain photographs, a poignancy that is, I think, unique to the art of photography. In freezing a present moment that has now (i.e., in our present when the picture is viewed) irrevocably passed, photographs reveal and confirm the pastness of the past, and therefore the evanescence of the present. The awkward word “pastness” is meant to indicate that the past revealed in a photograph is not the historical past (although a documentary photograph may function as a witness to what happened), but rather a mythical past, like each of our childhoods[xxii]. Photographs reveal and confirm, one might say, that for us earth-bound humans, our experience of each moment is utterly specific, if only we have the courage to make ourselves present to the moment in face of the fact that time is always running out. That this mythical sense of pastness – which may be experienced as a feeling that something has been irretrievably lost – is an essential feature of the medium of photography is demonstrated by the fact that it can be effectively evoked in photographs depicting the historical present rather than the past.

The Gaza Photograph

                  With these thoughts about our absence from the world projected on film in mind, I will conclude this essay by returning to the Gaza photograph reproduced at the outset, asking once again about its disturbing effect. (I mean, of course, its disturbing effect on me; since what counts for me as evidence for a proposition of philosophical criticism need not count as evidence for you, the validity of the proposition assumes that my experience of the object is in some way exemplary and there is no more guarantee that this will be the case than there is guarantee that you will understand the implications of my uttering just here and now in your presence words that are part of our shared English lexicon.)

                  The composition of the Gaza photograph is in many ways the opposite of that shown in the  picture of the Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus, Syria reproduced below (and discussed in “A Yarmouk Photograph”, see In each picture, I as the viewer find myself excluded from the world shown in the photograph, but in ways that seem fundamentally different in each case.

 A crowd in Gaza

While the space shown in the Yarmouk picture is filled with people, the Gaza scene is completely depopulated; and while the visual orientation of the former is “vertical” – receding away from the picture surface into deep space according to classical perspective – the Gaza photo is laterally extended as bombed-out buildings occupy the foreground from one side to the other, although the dark space within the cloud of smoke just above the fire seems to recede into infinite depth, like the entrance to a dark cavern. Finally, the Yarmouk picture’s composition strongly implies a specific position from which the camera must have taken in the scene – namely, to the right of the back of the UN worker’s head slightly to the left of center, just to the viewer’s side of the picture plane. At the moment when the picture was taken, the photographer stood on the same ground that is occupied by the desperate hoard of humanity, and the viewer, also standing on that ground, feels as if he or she might step into the picture’s space – if there were room (but there isn’t). The effect is that the viewer is excluded and isolated, suggesting that our doing nothing in the face of massive suffering is something we are doing, namely, allowing it to happen.

                  By contrast, the Gaza picture shows a panoramic view of the landscape from no particular vantage point, as if the camera were suspended in the air. Perhaps the photograph was taken from a ridge, or perhaps from a helicopter hovering at low altitude, but there is no visual evidence of either possibility and the camera’s implied position occupies a groundless place one can hardly imagine being occupied by a literal human body. In viewing the picture I feel dematerialized, rendered abstract, and this vertiginous feeling corresponds to the subject in view. The viewer is not so much forced out of the world depicted (as in the Yarmouk picture) as absented from it – already evacuated from the world revealed in the picture, like the people who once lived and worked in those still-standing empty buildings now shrouded in soot and ash. In this sense, the Gaza photograph literalizes the condition implied in the photographic medium generally (as described by Cavell) – that the world on film is made present to us insofar as we are absent from it.

                  Can we still make ourselves present to the Palestinian boy gazing out at us from the ruins of his life, is there still an opportunity to acknowledge that his destroyed world is the same world that we have allowed ourselves to destroy, or has that moment too passed? Can we still find a way to understand that our relentless pursuit of information about objects and events in the world has undermined our capacity to acknowledge others in it? The Gaza photograph suggests that we have withdrawn from the world in order to make it present (in the form of views) and cannot now imagine entering the world made present there because there is no place, no “here” from which we could go there. The Gaza photograph shows to us a world in which our absence really is our natural condition – a world within which, as a result of our own habitual ways of taking in views of it, we are no longer capable of acting at all.

                  According to the United Nations, the Gaza Strip will be uninhabitable by year 2020[xxiii]. Although this conclusion is based on a specific set of measurable criteria (e.g., density of population, poverty, access to essential goods and services), I find that the Gaza Photograph reminds me that the concept of “habitability” – like that of “human” as noted in the first paragraph of this essay – is not defined by measurable criteria. It would seem to follow that our mere survival (as evidenced by the act of viewing, for example) does not supply proof or guarantee that the world we have made is tolerant of human life. A world from which our displacement is fully natural, meaning a world that is completely present to us only as viewers, is a world that is uninhabitable. I want to claim in closing that the Gaza Photograph outlines the implication of that observation, namely that there is no humanly comprehensible position from which such a world could be viewed. And this suggests that as we sit in our living rooms observing debates about whether the bombing of hospitals in which women and children have sought shelter from bombs is or is not “disproportionate”, of for that matter debates about the reality of climate change or what to do about the threats of nuclear proliferation, terrorism and massive influxes of refugees from war zones, we may be failing to acknowledge the possibility that catastrophe is not something imagined to be just around the corner as much as something that has already occurred.

[i] Although this essay proposes what one might call an “aesthetic” interpretation of the formal, compositional and thematic aspects of certain photographs, none of the photographs discussed purports to be “art”. Rather, the pictures are instances of “photojournalism”, and I know nothing about the photographers responsible for their making or their respective intentions. I realize that there are current debates in academic circles concerning the question of whether photographs can be “art”, given that what happens when one “takes a photograph” (e.g., what appears in the photographic print or image) is never fully controlled by the agent’s intentions when the camera’s shutter is triggered. See for example the contributions to the current issue of, entitled “Photography and Philosophy II”, available at This way of describing the medium (which really describes analogue more than digital photographs) distinguishes photography from artistic media like painting, where every detail of the painting can be presumed to have been intended by the painter. As an example we might consider it highly doubtful that any of the individuals responsible for the pictures discussed here specifically intended to create the significance attributed to the pictures in this essay. Therefore, it is legitimate to ask, “can the photographs possibly mean what I say they mean?” This way of asking about significance seems to me misguided because it derives meaning from theory (or rather theories, of photography, intentionality, art, etc.) rather than one’s experience of particular pictures, from what must be – given our understanding of what a photograph is – rather than what is – given our experience of any particular photograph. I am as it were confronted the effect of the Gaza Photograph as I first and continue to experience that effect, and in the grip of that experience, it would hardly clarify matters to classify the picture is classified as “art” or as “photojournalism”, or for that matter to know about the photographer’s specific intention. To trust or believe in or claim one’s experience of a photograph as primary data for thought implies that perhaps we don’t really understand what a photograph is in the first instance, and therefore, since what a photograph makes present is reality itself, perhaps we don’t really understand the world in which we are assumed to live.

[ii] Perhaps the best description of Gaza following the disengagement is found in Darryl Li’s “The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagement”, published in Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XXXV, No. 2 (Winter 2006), pp. 38–55 and available at: See also Li’s “Disengagement and the Frontiers of Zionism”, published in the Middle East Research and Information Project on February 16, 2008 and available at:

[iii] “Operation Protective Edge: A war waged on Gaza’s children”, published by Defense for Children International Palestine, April 16, 2015, available at

[vi] “Occupied Palestinian Territory: Gaza Emergency” (as of September 4, 2014), available at

[viii] To say that an attack on a hospital is “deliberate” does not imply that the hospital was the intended target of the attack, although that possibility is not excluded either. It does imply that those responsible for the attack had reason to know that the hospital would be hit regardless of the intended target.

[xii] Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organization of military veterans, released on May 4, 2015 a collection of testimonies from nearly 70 soldiers and officers who participated in Operation Protective Edge. The booklet of testimonies is available online at The testimonies confirm that under the IDF’s policy, any person remaining in an area where warnings were given was considered a legitimate target. For example, an infantry soldier deployed in or near Beit Lahia described a typical incident in this way:

There was one time when I looked at some place and was sure I saw someone moving. Maybe I imagined it, some curtain blowing, I don’t know. So I said: ‘I see something moving.’ I asked [permission] to open fire toward that spot, and I opened fire and [the other soldiers] hit it with a barrage …

Q: What were the rules of engagement?

A: There weren’t really any rules of engagement … They told us: ‘There aren’t supposed to be any civilians there. If you spot someone, shoot.’ Whether the person posed a threat or not wasn’t a question; and that makes sense to me. If you shoot someone in Gaza it’s cool, no big deal. First of all because it’s Gaza, and second because that’s warfare. That, too, was made clear to us – they told us, ‘Don’t be afraid to shoot,’ and they made it clear that there were no uninvolved civilians.

Did the commander discuss what happens if you run into civilians or uninvolved people?

There are none. The working assumption states – and I want to stress that this is a quote of sorts: that anyone located in an IDF area, in areas the IDF took over – is not [considered] a civilian. That is the working assumption. We entered Gaza with that in mind, and with an insane amount of firepower.

[xiii] “The head of the cell was there for sure, and a decision was made to ’knock on the building’s roof,’ … and then immediately after that drop a bomb on it.” Asked by Breaking the Silence what he means by “immediately,” the soldier replied: “Not enough time for everyone to leave. Somewhere between 30 seconds and one minute.” Id., p. 208.

[xiv] Id.

[xv] The ideal of risk-free state violence seems to be the inverse of the ideal embodied in some non-state terrorist acts, for example, so-called “suicide bombings”, which presuppose that the terrorist not just risks death but is certain to die. The latter ideal is related to the imperative that the terrorist act be witnessed publically by the widest possible audience in order to achieve its effect of terror.

[xvi] Stanley Cavell, “What Photography Calls Thinking,” in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 116.

[xvii] Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 40-41.

[xix] “To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may – in ways we might prefer not to imagine – be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may be linked to the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.” Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York 2003), pp. 102-03.

[xx] Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 24: “There is no way the projected world differs from reality apart from the fact that it does not exist (now).”

[xxi] Id., p. 23.

[xxii] “When someone says that we cannot have been present at the events projected on the screen apart from that projection itself, it does not follow that reality has played no essential role in the origin of that projection. All that follows is that any role reality has played is not that of having been recorded. But reality is not so much as a candidate for that role, because the projections we view on a screen are not in principle aurally or visually indistinguishable from the events of which they’re projections – what could be more distinguishable?” Id., p. 183.

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Jak Inhibitor Alopecia Cost

Jun 25, 2021In their report, it was demonstrated that particularly in the USA, the ACOT of JAK inhibitors if approved for AA treatment, will be approximately $50,000 per patient. 78 This,.

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Highlights of My 2013 [★]

December 31, 2013

Today's the last day of 2013! Wow, time really flew very fast. Maybe this is because I really had a great time this year. Here's a rundown of all the good things I have experienced this blissful year of 2013 (as documented here in the blog):

(Event) I got to meet the author of the 'Travel to Korea in KPOP/KDRAMA Style' in a book signing at NBS! :D

(Travel) I went to Baguio with my colleagues!

(Concert) I saw the CNBlue boys during the presscon and their concert here in Manila!

(Life) I transferred to a new work, which is a huge jumpstart to my career. :D

(Goal) My piano recordings became better because I discovered new methods in capturing the piano sounds of my keyboard.

(Goal) I enrolled myself in a yoga class, which I thoroughly enjoyed for a week. (Unfortunately, I haven't practiced ever since. ><)

(Concert) I saw Super Junior in the flesh during their Super Show 5 concert here in Manila for FREE!

(Event) I was also able to see Nichkhun in person! (Is this my KPOP year? xD)

(Event/Concert) I also got to see Lunafly perform during the KPOP Convention this year! This is indeed a KPOP year for me!

I am so happy with everything that happened this year. I must say this year has been a turning point for my career and my blogging activities. I am very happy with what opportunities life has given to me.

God answered a lot of my prayers, and I am very thankful.

I'm excited on what 2014 has in store for me. Happy new year guys!~

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Bravely Choose Your Own Adventure

Updated: Sep 9, 2020

Remember those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as a kid? My friends loved them. They said you could read them over and over again and it was like multiple books in one.

I found them stressful.

Because what if I chose wrong?

I’m realizing how deep that fear has actually run through my life. Wanting to choose my own adventure…but fearing choosing the wrong path. What if I choose the wrong school? The wrong friends? The wrong relationship? The wrong career? The wrong house? The wrong gym? The wrong fill in the blank – because the possibilities are endless.

One of the lessons I’m learning is to truly believe there is good in every path. Let that sink in... There is good in every path.

Regardless of the path I take – of the adventure I choose – there will be times where I mess up, times where I do things wrong, times where I get hurt, times where I feel stuck, times where I want to give up, times that are hard, times where I am afraid…

And when that happens, I’ll be okay...

If I mess up – I’ll be okay.

If I do things wrong – I’ll be okay.

If I lose money – I’ll be okay.

If I get stuck – I’ll be okay.

If I want to give up – I’ll be okay.

If I do give up – I’ll be okay.

If times are hard – I’ll be okay.

If I’m afraid – I’ll be okay.

If I get hurt – I’ll be okay.

Whether I bravely choose the unknown of an adventure I want, or choose to play it safe, I’m going to experience all of the above.

So why not experience all of that while pursuing what I truly want?

What I’m sitting in now is the realization that there is good in every path. Even the ones where it seems like I’ve messed up or done things wrong or things don't make sense or it just really sucks – there’s still good in there somewhere if I’m willing to look for it and remember that I’ll be okay. Especially if at the end of the day, I know what I want is on the other side of whatever hard thing I'm facing. Wow, the freedom that brings.

There is good in every path.

I’m reminding myself of that – and I encourage you to embrace it too. There is good in every path. Have grace for your journey, and the one everyone else is on too.

Take that risk, go on that adventure, step into the unknown without all the answers, go after what you want even if it scares you - there's good there; and remember - everything will be okay.

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Stewart’s Remote Internship Experience

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Project Attended:South Africa Remote Internship - Business Development & Entrepreneurship

“My experience working as an intern has been phenomenal, and I never realized how great of a learning opportunity it would provide. Despite not being able to go to South Africa, the internship has helped to provide all the same benefits and cultural learning. Additionally, despite the scarcity of internships for the summer, Kaya Responsible Travel made it quick and easy to have a meaningful and fulfilling summer experience, providing more than I would have ever been able to figure out on my own, and placing me into a top-notch internship. I have always wanted to travel and have a cultural immersion experience, however, Kaya Responsible Travel has made it possible to do from the comfort of my home, and I recommend the opportunity to all who even have the slightest bit of interest in it.”


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A shoreline in Angoon in 2017. The community announced its first confirmed case of COVID-19 on Monday. (Emily Russell/KCAW)

Angoon has reported its first confirmed case of the coronavirus.

The City of Angoon’s Emergency Operations Center announced the case Monday evening in a press release on Facebook. SEARHC notified the city of the case. The Angoon City Office is closed until further notice, and the city plans to begin community-wide testing Wednesday.

The Admiralty Island village of around 450 people has asked residents to “hunker down and avoid contact with anyone outside of their household until further notice.”

Students in Angoon were scheduled to start in-person classes on Tuesday. Because of the new case, Chatham School District Superintendent Bruce Houck said students in Angoon will work online until Aug. 31, and all staff will test weekly.

Earlier this month, Angoon’s mayor issued a mask requirement following the first reported case of COVID-19 in the neighboring community of Kake. He also proposed a resolution at a city council meeting to bring travel restrictions back to the remote community, but the resolution was tabled.

Erin McKinstry is a Report for America corps member.


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2nd floor space which encompasses the 2nd level of 637 W Main St as well.
Could be divided if less sf is desired. Beautiful views of Main Street from the front windows and lovely river views from the north windows!

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If you don't read anything else today...

...read this. Seriously.

I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated
Children are afraid to challenge the repressive ideology that rules our school. That’s why I am.
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A Cacophony of Lies


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Confessions of a Kickstarter Delinquent

I’m a Kickstarter delinquent.

Yep, that’s me. I Kickstarted my Book Lush project. The campaign was wildly successful. We raised over $9,000 with 141 backers supporting the book. Cue tears of joy and supreme optimism for how literary projects are valued by our society.

Yet, it’s been FOUR YEARS and I still haven’t delivered.

Curse of the Smelly Otter

Another weekend with Foam. This time, I brought along Kiddo and Kiddo Number Two (K2). We arrived after dark Saturday night. The kids oohed and ahhed at our pretty pirate ship.

“What’s that smell?” said K2.

Damn. “Watch your step. The otters were here.”

The Foamy Sea Captain

foamyseacaptainThis fall, I adopted a wooden boat named Foam. I know nothing about boats. A dream to own a sailboat stubbornly lodged in my brain from the time I lived on one when I was 14. This experience created enough naive optimism and panting desire to take on the ambitious project. My beautiful new boat was built in 1963. A 41' ketch designed by William Garden, a famed Pacific Northwest boat builder.

Foam is in rough shape.

Most people refer to boats as she. Taking on this particular boat was an entirely emotional decision. Foam is likely to take my time, urge me to spend my money and cause jealousy in close personal relationships. Foam is clearly a guy. I refer to him in the masculine pronoun.

Want to hear how it goes?

Note: What follows was written 11/5/15.

I launched my press on the historic Virginia V steamship two nights ago. A great success, as far as parties go. 152 happy, talking, drinking, snacking, catalog-browsing people. Now the day has passed and my mind turns to Foam. I won’t be able to get back to my boat until Sunday, Saturday if I don’t mind arriving in the dark.

The morning after the party, I allowed myself a slow start. I lazed in bed and read my boat maintenance book. So much to learn.

I need electrical tools, and a multimeter to test voltage. I need a scraper and a hot air gun to remove the chipped varnish from my beautiful teak banister. I need a long-handled, soft-bristled scrub brush to clean my decks without removing any of the “soft material” in the wood. I need a dehumidifier to pull moisture out of my cabin during the long, sedentary winter months.

Many of these things I did not know even existed prior to acquiring my boat, or more accurately, my boat maintenance book. My knowledge on how to effectively and appropriately use these things is markedly infantile. At least the book I selected to guide me has numerous illustrations, tools strewn across the page with small type labels just like characters in a Richard Scarry Busy Town page.

The people that name boat things seem to go out of their way to make sure these nautical artifacts come with a vocabulary completely different from what landlubbers might use, or even guess. They aren’t ropes, they are lines. That’s not a canopy, it’s a dodger or a bimini depending on coverage. I am amused to find that this “hot air gun” I’ve heard reverently referenced in varnishing tutorials appears in my book as a heavy-duty hair dryer, of course sporting more masculine colors than the one shoved in the back of my bathroom shelf.

In the single day of cleaning my sister and I were able to put in last Sunday, we did not make as much progress as I had expected. We rid the decks of otter poop first, unable to work in air hanging heavy with a scent not unlike month-old seafood gumbo. Otters shed worse than German Shepherds, apparently, and hosing the short, prickly hairs off the bow and top deck took some time. My sister labored bravely in the galley, reaching into dark spaces to inspect and judge the mysterious items recovered. She filled three garbage bags, much of it rusted pans and cracked plastic plates, plus about 15 bottles of liquor, wine and beer all at varying levels of supply.

Inch-by-inch we baptized the cabin with Simple Green, until our arms ached and the smell of cleaner drove us topside.

We discovered water seeping in through the forward mast and devised a complex covering using elegant white tarp, Gorilla brand duct tape and about 13 bungee cords. Once finished, we stood back to proudly survey our fix and found that the tarp ended about half a foot above the place we actually need to cover. With a sigh, I wrapped cheap garbage bags around the area, belting it duct tape.

My sister's collie stuck her long beak in my face as I worked, curious to find me laboring at her level.

“This, dear Molly,” I said, “is called restoring a wooden boat.”

That was it. The front stateroom remains a mystery to me. I still haven’t tried the electrical system. I have no idea where the water the auto bilge pump dumps into the galley sink actually disappears to. Plus, I have a sneaking suspicion that when I arrive next Sunday, I will find that the otters have chosen my boat as their favorite in the marina.

Read what happens next, or take a gander...

Favorite Foam Photo 11012015 (1)

The End of Self-Sequester

080315_End_of_self_sequesterPart 1: Finding a goal worth the risk

Part 2 to be posted 8/15/15: How to hit the reset button after creative burnout and disappointment

The effort of maintaining a public persona births special kind of exhaustion. This weariness finally caught up with me, overwhelmed me. I slowed and quieted. My blog posts became fewer and father between until they stopped entirely. My social accounts focused on trivial games or industry updates. I ceased Facebook entirely. I made no new videos, scheduled no social events, published very little.

At the start of the year, I rigorously challenged my assumptions of myself and my place in the world. When I could have succumbed to the down flow, instead I gathered smart, supportive people around me. I read thought-provoking books, tested out new theories and models of living.

Once fully vetted, I latched on the passion I know that will not only sustain my family, but also meet my needs of challenge, art-making and intellectual engagement.

So now is the time to come out of hiding, to show and speak and share again the project I have been privately pouring my heart and mind into. Yet, I tremble and pause.

Always, there is a risk when you step into the arena.

What if I fail? What if what I create isn’t as good as I hope it will be?

My twitter profile describes me as “hopelessly happy”. How true and easy this was when the stakes were low, when there weren’t other people depending on me for their paychecks, then my failures weren’t so painfully public, when all I needed was to show up on the job and be slightly better than the schmo’ on my right.

I come from a cowgirl family. We get back on the horse after a fall. We feed the animals before we feed ourselves. If the gelding kicks you in the chest and breaks your ribs, as it did to my mother, you shut your mouth, finish your chores and go take a handful of ibuprofen.

You do not feel sorry for yourself. You do not cause any additional burden for anyone else. You take care of things and do what you have to do. If you fail, or if you drink, or if you feel pain, or if you drink, you hide it away and we all pretend not to know about it – out of respect for you.

I’m proud of my cowgirl family, of our tremendous strength and resolve. I am so thankful that I can take a hit and stubbornly stand to try, try again.

Yet also, I need help. And if I hide my losses, I may not fully commit myself to the next big win. So here we are, at the edge of yet another arena.

I close my eyes, take deep breaths and visualize bravery. Pause. A small voice whispers: It’s safer to stay on the sidelines, to do regular work that brings the regular paycheck, to apologize, acquiesce, condense, quiet.

No. That is not the life I’m built for.

It’s good to be back in the saddle again.

Deep Thaw: Escape, Endurance and Bobcats in the Colorado Rockies

deep_thawThis story was intended to be told live, on-stage at a Moth event in Seattle. Despite my recent foray into mental stimulus drugs, I still managed to miss the date and lose my chance to tell my story. However, since I've been practicing these lines over and over as I drive around town, I figure they have to come out somewhere. So here, for my blog readers' pleasure, is my story of survival in the Colorado Rockies. Trigger warning: References sexual violence and failed justice systems.

The Moth story prompt was cold.

When the freezing chill seeped its way through my truck cab, into my sleeping bag, and through my four layers of clothing to wake me from my sleep for the 15th time that night, I realized I might not make it to sunrise. At just past midnight, I sat up as though slapped, blinking in the dark. With a move now well-practiced, I clambered into the drivers seat and turned the key in the ignition. It took about 5 minutes for my truck to warm up. Another 5 for the heaters warm the cab to something survivable. I left the truck running an extra minute as indulgence, eyeing the gas tank now less than a quarter full, before shutting it off and falling instantly back to sleep. 15 minutes later, the cold conquered once more and I repeated the process.

I had pulled my truck off an unnamed forest service road deep in the snowy cleavage of a couple Rocky Mountain peaks a couple hours outside Denver to make camp. It was early March and temperatures plummeted after sundown. I was alone.

I'm a tough camper girl. My mother took me camping every other weekend in the Pacific Northwest where I grew up. Later, I backpacked through the Middle Atlas Mountains in Morocco and spent solo days in the Yellowstone backcountry. I'm not afraid of a little discomfort, wet and chill. However, the frigid Colorado winter rendered all my previous camping experience obsolete. I had no idea what I was getting into. I hadn't bothered to bring a tent, thinking it would be warmer in the truck. My sleeping bag boasted a -5 degree rating, which had kept me toasty in mild Washington. With three layers of fleece I should be fine, right? Had I done any research before leaving, I would have learned that the National Park Service was forecasting -40 degrees for my area that night.

But I haven't done any research. I barely knew where I was. I had simply put my finger down on a map and driven there. I didn't tell anyone where I was going and didn't ask for any advice. That was the whole point. I wanted to get as far away from people as possible.

A few weeks earlier, I turned 21. I celebrated with friends by drinking a single shot of something buttery and sweet. I still see myself there in that Denver dive bar, tilting my head back and laughing with my friends - one of those shimmering memories when life neared perfection. A week later, I was raped by a gentleman poet.

You may be confused as to how a gentleman poet may also be a rapist. I assure you, this threw me for a loop as well. So disbelieving was I that I shut down during the act, became something small and quiet. He drove me home after, told me to lose my friendship would be the worst thing ever. I wandered, dazed, into my building and went to bed. I stayed there for three days and three nights.

On the fourth day, a friend who had wisdom in such things, sat gently on the edge of my bed and asked if I wanted to report it. He asked without asking me what happened. He simply knew.

This wasn't supposed to happen to me. I'm a good girl. Not only that, I view myself as infinitely powerful and mighty. If I say yes, it happens. If I say no, it doesn't. As well, I had recently made a deal with God that should have exempted me from this kind of trauma. While I had accepted that religion and I don't go so well together, I still had strong faith and an authentic joy in my belief of a God of Love. So, I would quit youth groups, prayer workbooks and shocking sermons and instead gave myself in a life of service. I had left college and volunteered at AmeriCorps. At the time of my rape, I was earning about 15 cents an hour working at a detention center tutoring emotionally and behaviorally disturbed teenage girls during the week. I spent weekends on environmental cleanup outings.

Self-satisfied holiness practically oozed out of my pores. I had also conveniently avoided all questions of how I would support myself in my grown-up years while claiming the life of a pseudo-saint.

So you can see, this wasn't supposed to happen to me.

On that fourth day after the rape, that gentle friend of mine led me out of my room and to the local hospital. I was taken to a room filled with strangers, where I was stripped, laid back on a table, and asked to point to all the placed the poet's penis had come in contact with my body. Everywhere I pointed, they scraped off a layer of skin and plucked exactly three hairs. To survive this humiliation, I simply left my body. I hovered up near the fluorescent lights with some imagined angels and watched the scene like it was on TV. Prime entertainment.

When the crowd filtered out, I entered my body again to pull clothes over shaky limbs and take a ride to the police station.

They made my friend stay in the lobby, took me alone to a little grey room with a steel table. There were two cops. They asked me to tell them exactly what happened. I told my story from start to finish, sentence cohesion causing me difficulty as now I'd been awake for days. They brought me papers to press charges.

"Wait, I said," remembering what happened at the hospital. "What happens exactly if I press charges?"

The cops looked at each other. One left the room. The remaining cop acted out another scene I was certain I'd seen on TV before. He paced, he yelled, he puffed out his chest, he banged his fist on the table. He told me if I didn't press charges, the man would certainly rape ten more girls at least and it would all be my fault. I stopped making sentences. I cried. On cue, the second cop appeared, told his partner to take it easy. Cooed at me. Told me he knew I was tired. He knew it wasn't my fault. Just sign right here sweetie and we'll take care of this. I signed.

After another week of interrogations, a request from the hospital to repeat the exam since they lost my rape kit, and well-meaning advocates that asked me to tell them everything again, and again, and I could I please start at the beginning again, I finally got word that the prosecutor declined to take my case. My word against his. Too hard. The good cop told me I could still feel like I was raped if it made me feel better. The advocates disappeared, no longer returning my calls.

I returned to my room, thought of dying. Instead pulled out my map, closed my eyes and put my finger down. Kelsey Creek. No shit, really? I squinted at the map, confirming my name peeking out from under my fingertip. Amazing. Kelsey Creek it would be. As long as it was remote enough to not encounter a single, horrible, human, I would be happy.

In my freezing cab that night, I could have surrendered. I could have closed my eyes and let the cold be my excuse.

Instead, I popped up like a jack-in-the-box every fifteen minutes and flipped on the heater. At dawn, I had just enough gas left to make it back down the mountain, so I decided it was time to get up and get moving. Desperate for fresh air, I opened the truck door and poured my many-layered, chilled-to-the-bone self onto the ground outside, landing on my hands and knees.

There, not eight feet away from my face, stood a stunned Bobcat.

My heart stopped. The bobcat blinked.

In all my travels, I had never seen a wild cat. No other animal strikes me as more magical, terrifying, elusive. My body trembled and cracked, but I willed myself to stay as still as possible so as not to startle the beast.

He stared me down. White rimmed his wide eyes. Black tuffs of hair topped his ears. His spotted legs stood braced, ready to sprint.

I blinked. He spooked.

I sprung to my feet and gave chase. Adrenaline surged through my veins. It could not have been instinct that spurred me after the beast, as surely such an instinct would have killed off my ancestors long ago. Rather, a deep desire to keep eyes on this animal as long as possible, spurred me to sprint across the ice-covered snow. Had I any breath, I would have yelled, "Don't go."

The bobcat pulled ahead, turned beneath a large boulder outcropping. Somewhere deep in my fuddled brain, rational thoughts surfaced one by one, popped like bubbles on the surface of my consciousness.

Don't wild cats attack from above?

This bobcat looks smaller than I expected.

What if his mother is above me on those boulders?

My feet came together. I stood watching the wild cat bound away. I climbed the boulders, thinking perhaps I could see where he went. The cat disappeared into the white, but when I climbed the outcrop, my breath caught in my throat. The morning sun crept over the eastern slopes, turning the sky a wild red. Thin clouds picked up the color, placing lines of hot pink kisses over head. The grey snow lightened, reflected the color. I felt as though I had tumbled into the glittery end of a child's kaleidoscope.

From my perch on the rocks, my little brown truck looked so small and lonely in the vast white forest. I jumped down and ran to the cab, started up the truck and rocked my way out of the snow trench that had formed overnight. As fast as I dared, I drove down those winding roads, heater blasting, desperate to find someone, anyone, whom I could tell about what I'd seen on the mountain.

Balance: The Art of Mixing Pleasure with Business

balanceThe start of the new year provides an excellent excuse for life planning and goal prioritization. As Queen of the Epic Spreadsheet Collection, the past couple of weeks I have indulged is a great many flights of fancy, carefully tracked to specific metrics. From my time in the corporate world, I picked such pearls of business wisdom-ish such as what gets measured gets done and if everything is important, nothing is, and 20% of your effort provides 80% of your results, plus many more. The supposed infallibility of data seduces me.

In writing fiction or memoir, I dwell in grey areas, expound on emotion. Aside from word counts and deadlines, there are few definite qualifiers in the artistic world. How glorious to know when you are on track, when you're doing good. Numbers comfort me. Proof. Evidence of achievement in my creative endeavors, even if qualifiers of quality and value still elude me.

So let's set our creative goals for 2015 using all our best business practices, shall we?

Metric of success for 2015:

  • Create works that touch the hearts of readers, inspire empathy and increase the amount of love, understanding and pleasure in a meaningful sample of the human population.

No. This is no good. I can hear old boss #23 pushing me to define a "meaningful sample." Does this mean ten people? One hundred? Ten thousand? How will I create a baseline for empathy and track the change? Try again.

Metrics of success for 2015 - take two:

  • Publish three original blog posts on my site per week.
  • Increase web traffic by 100% each month.
  • Multiply social media following by a factor of .1 each month.
  • Write a minimum of 500 words per day.
  • Write 20,000 words per month.

Clear. Concise. Easily measurable.

The gurus tell me to visualize my success. Closing my eyes, I see that backlog of blog posts published on time. I see the little number on my Google analytics dashboard proving my internet popularity. I see all the pings and dings on social media alerting me to new followers.

I see myself pushing back my cramped shoulders and groaning from hours spent in front of the computer. I see my eyes glazing over and my ADD kicking into high gear, the garbage truck out my window suddenly riveting. I see myself jump up at 2:10pm, grateful for the task of picking up kids from school to save me from my drudgery.

When asked, what did you do with your life, I might be able to prattle off a list a metrics such as I increased my unique web visitors by 300% in a two month period, or I published 100 blog posts in the year of 2015, but so what?

Perhaps it's not what, it's why. Why did you do with your life.

Aside from grammatical awkwardness, that is harder to answer. Hm. Back to the spreadsheets.

Job: Author / Publisher Seeks Marketing / Admin Assistant

Hiring-marketing-assistantI'm hiring! Incredible projects pack my calendar for 2015 and I can't do it alone. I'm looking for a clever person to join me and assist with marketing and administrative projects.

Projects you'll be a part of:

  • Book Lush promotions
  • Kelsye.com campaigns
  • Launching a new press
  • Social media campaigns
  • Publishing projects for Kelsye's clients
  • Review reader management
  • Webinar management and marketing
  • Client communications
  • PR and blogger outreach
  • Administrative tasks such as mailing, working with spreadsheets and internet research

Mandatory skills and traits I'm looking for:

  • Organization and self-motivation
  • Basic social media skills
  • Strong desire to learn new things
  • Interest in books and publishing
  • Positive attitude (or amusingly clever snark)
  • Proven ability to work on detailed, multifaceted projects
  • Excellent grammar
  • Comfortable learning new technologies

Training provided! You bring your brains, creativity and skills and I'll show exactly how I run my social media, marketing campaigns and project manage publishing clients. This is an excellent opportunity for someone with basic skills looking for direct experience on live campaigns and book projects. While the super powers listed below would be great, I'm really looking for someone smart and pleasant that can grow with the projects.

Super powers that put you at the top of the list:

  • Writing ability
  • Desire to be an author yourself
  • Graphic design skills
  • Experience with WordPress
  • HTML knowledge
  • PR experience
  • Prior marketing positions
  • Publishing experience (for self or others)
  • College degree

Nitty Gritty Details:

$20/hour - independent contractor

10 hours a week to start (Very likely would expand for the properly skilled person.)

Work from wherever you want. (With the exception of kick-off training and occasional check-in meetings.)

You need to have your own computer and a reliable internet connection.

Sound awesome? Don't delay in applying. While I'll leave the application open for a week or so, if the right person applies I won't delay in hiring. I need help ASAP.

Apply here.

Know someone perfect for the job? Share this page using the social share buttons.

Year in Books: Spotlight on Authors I worked with in 2014

Hello bibliophiles! What an incredible year in books it's been. Since leaving Writer.ly in Abby's capable hands, not only have I been able to write my own books, I have also been lucky enough to work with a diverse group of talented authors in assisting their publishing and book marketing efforts. Here is a spotlight of authors I have worked with this year, as well as a sampling of their incredible works. Happy reading! XO, Kelsye

Historical Fiction by Gerard LaSalle (Published by Avasta Press)

Lush, richly-detailed story-telling at its finest. It is 1860 and revolution is erupting throughout the world over universal emancipation. In the midst of it all, a young woman travels Boston with what is left of her devastated and bankrupt family. She traverses a hostile terrain on the new Panama isthmus railroad. Get ready for a convenient ride through the jungle. An inconvenient assault. A run for you life. Get Isthmus on Amazon.

Tip: Start the series with Widow Walk, an award-winning historical fiction novel set in the Pacific Northwest.

I Kill Rich People 2

Literary Thriller by Mike Bogin (Published by Avasta Press)

The thrilling follow-up to the first book in the IKRP series tells the story of Spencer, the renegade sniper. Terrorist, psychopath, or patriot; what drives this elite US Army combat sniper to turn his sights on America’s billionaires? Has he lost it? Can this shocking shift be a new patriotism? GetIKRP2 on Amazon.

Tip: Start the series with the controversial book that started it all, IKRP1.

Even more wonderful authors and books from diverse genres...

By Scott Berkun

by Scott Berkun

By Anne Leigh Parrish

by Anne Leigh Parrish

Literary Fiction

by Birgitte Rasine

by Abigail Carter

by Abigail Carter

Contemporary Fiction

By Chris Strausz-Clarkby Chris Strausz-Clark

Science Fiction

by Tom Kelly

by Tom Kelly

by Flip Brownby Flip Brown

Business Non-Fiction

by Howard Hale

by Howard Hale

Technical Non-Fiction

by Rachel Bukey

by Rachel Bukey

We're just getting started! If you are interested in working with me in 2015, please contact me here. If you are interested in Avasta Press, please add your email to this list.

Adderall and the Woman: One Writer's Experience with ADD Drugs

adderallMy mother and sister have a certain way of saying my name when I screw up.

Oh Kelsye.

Their voices dive on the hard vowel sound at the end as opposed to the usual rising lilt. Just writing about it puts the sound in my head. The sound of certainty, of the way things are, of what we know to be classic, classifiable Kelsye crap.

I forgot to do my chores.
I didn’t turn in the homework I finished.

Oh Kelsye.

I locked my keys in the car again.
I dropped out of design school in the middle of my final quarter.

Oh Kelsye.

I’m moving to a new city for a new start.
I’m moving to a new state.
A new country.

Oh Kelsye.

I’m starting a company.
I’m quitting my company.
I’m getting divorced.
I’m getting married.

Oh Kelsye

Now watch me sitting alone in the doctors office at age 35, completing my ADD evaluation and crying into my double cappuccino. I was late for my appointment, of course, but they took me anyway, handed me a stack of paperwork clipped to a board and ushered me into a sterile room.

How often do you lose track of the location of your keys or phone? Rarely, occasionally, weekly, daily.

Do you have difficulty finishing projects?

Do you find yourself unable to concentrate when other people talk for a long time?

How often do you wait until the last possible minute to tackle big projects?

And on and on. These things I’ve thought defining traits of my personality, and my own great failings, listed as symptoms to an identifiable disorder. A treatable condition.

I’ve known about my ADD for years. I was diagnosed a long time ago, during my split from my first husband. But I am not some behaviorly-challenged schmuck. I’m super smart. Certifiably smart! Pretty arrogant as well. So much so that I think my intricate system of to-do lists, calendaring and sheer willpower could save me from myself. Coping skills. I’ll deal with this the natural way. No drugs. I’ll simply think faster, speed up to compensate.

My senior year in High School, I found that I was getting a C in AP calculus. Royally pissed off that I could get an A on every test but still be marked the dreaded “average”, I marched into my class and demanded to know what was the issue.

“Sure,” said my teacher. “You ace the tests but you haven’t turned in a single homework assignment.”

“Can’t we just base my grades off the tests? It shows I understand.”

“Nope. You have to do the work.”

Sit still and do row after row of repetitive problem. Panic. No possible way could I do that. Screw you.

I continued to get A’s on every test, forgot everything within a month and took a C in the class.

As an English teacher in my 20’s, each week I confronted a stack of essays from 180 students that required comments and grades. That stack of papers would sit on the corner of my desk for two days as I worked up the courage to confront it. I couldn’t sit through a single essay without losing focus and having to restart at the beginning. Willpower wasn’t working and I couldn’t negotiate my way out of this one. I turned to booze. One glass of red wine could narrow my focus for ten or so essays. A careful balance. Too much alcohol and I’d start drawing smiley faces and personal confessions in the margins. Too little and my brain would drift away. I learned the art of the balanced buzz, thankfully young enough that my body could recover quickly.

In my thirties, I found that I could multi-task myself into oblivion. Powering through a career in marketing, starting and running my own company, all while raising kids and keeping a creative writing life going - no problem. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Caffeine and stress were my greatest allies. Until I realized I spend days, years, spinning at high speed and racking up accomplishments, but barely aware of the life I created for myself. When my once a year vacation was the only week I could accurately remember from the year prior, I knew I had to slow down. I don’t want one memorable week out of every 52. This is not the life of my choosing.

Meditation. Journaling. Running. Careful dietary intake. A big career change and renewed attempt to “buckle down” and “really focus” on what was important.

A few months ago, sitting in my home office, struggling with the projects in front of me,  accepted that something wasn’t right. Life is hard, but it doesn’t have to be this hard every day. I finally have all my big checklist items ticked off. Deep love and happy family life. A big dog and city house. My books being published. Good earnings in a freelance career doing what I love. So why did I dread work each day? I couldn’t even imagine a better set-up than what I had. If everything around me is near perfect, perhaps the problem is me.

My husband’s glorious health insurance provided me a way out. Just go and hear what the doctor has to say, I told myself. See if there is something to try. Get... gasp... help.

Now I am one of those statistics. Adult woman on ADD medication. Adderall, for those that are interested.

The first couple days I suffered terrible headaches and blinked my way through the nights. My body adjusted and the next two weeks flew by in a glorious blaze of productivity and focus. I wrote and completed a novel draft in a single month, one day clocking in 12,000 words.

After a month, I see that the medicine is not as strong as when I first began. My mind is wandering when I sit down. I want an afternoon nap again. From what I read online it sounds like it may take me some time to find the correct dose for me. We shall see. Superwoman might be unsustainable, but perhaps I don’t need to go back all the way to the beginning.

In checking my daughter’s grades recently, I found that she was getting behind in her language arts class due to reading requirements. This makes no sense. She reads at least one book a week. When she finds a new series she likes, she can read three a week. When I asked her what was happening, she explained how she hasn’t turned in her reading logs.

Reading logs?

“Yeah. We have to write down our page count after every reading session. I can’t keep track. I just read the books. It’s too hard to remember to write down the numbers each time. They should just give me credit for reading the books and not worry about the logs.”

There is already a certain way I say her name, almost as a family joke, when she forgets to put on pajamas, or loses her phone again, can’t sit still. That stops right now. She’s not faulty. She’s fantastic. We both are.