Splotches
By: Eric Anderson
Townhouses gnash together
like shrapnel-studded teeth—
cloned assemblages of
bleached sentinels that jut
crookedly from the old dust.
They guard the rusted railroad
tracks on which,
lifetimes ago, I almost killed myself
during a game of chicken.
My limp resolve drags
me to this muzzle flash
In the mud of my memory.
The dust is gone but
the haze remains.
The old ice-cream shop’s
ripped booths have evolved
into glaring brass tables,
so children can sip
milkshakes in a bullet shell.
Condos have sprouted
from the ragball field
like pale weeds.
Here, my Bronze Star is
nothing
but a penny
flattened on the tracks.
The witch grass and
alfalfa that tickled our
hairless calves—
withered.
The sweet sweat glistening
on our budding stubble,
burning our blind eyes—
frozen.
When we had sufficiently
smeared the queer,
we brought out our sling-shots,
sipped coca-colas,
and blew smoke rings
beneath the lone eucalypt
in the world of dust.
We waited for the fireflies
to crawl out
from the witch grass
and illuminate splotches of night.
I remember catching
lightning bugs in
strawberry jam jars,
watching their silly bug brains
crash into the glass
walls of their death chamber.
We drew straws for the right
to empty their beady bodies
on the oily parking lot.
It was a thrilling honor to squish
them into the black concrete,
as the neighborhood boys crowded
around the fading streak
of iridescent yellow
smearing the earth.
The shiny medals pinned
on my chest reflect the streetlights’
bright white blaze bombarding the dusk.
Each blinding bulb spreads
the light of the world
across the dark face
of the earth.
With so much light
it is hard to see.
But eventually,
I place my jar on the rusty
railroad track,
then walk away
with a yellowy splotch
on the toe of my boot.
I wrote "Splotches" my freshman year. Unlike other old poems that cause me to cringe upon rereading, I still like this one. It's about a soldier returning to his hometown to rescue his younger self. He relishes the boyhood, those days secured in the innocence of jaded memory when spreading the light of the world on a sweaty summer evening was as simple as smearing lightning bugs. Now, the poem implies, he has returned from some battle where the violence of his mission -- just like the violence of smearing lightning bugs on the ground for some temporary pleasure -- has destroyed his direction. And now the images of warfare and boyhood inhabit the same environment. He has gone across the world to fight some war, for some "illuminating" cause, only to find that the lantern of civilization that he wields is only burning people -- including himself.
I was hesitant to use my own writing as a springboard into the visual realm. Just as, while editing, we overlook certain flaws or errors because we see what should be there rather than what is there, so too did I fear that my proximity to both creations would cause me to read clarity into the image. What is readily apparent to the creator is often baffling to the viewer. Sure, sometimes the very piece of art or poem or image that causes us to scratch our heads also causes us to grin in awe. But as brevity is the soul of wit, so too do I believe that clarity is a higher virtue than muddled complexity. We as humans seek to understand. As a general rule of thumb, I find it more courageous to represent a complex thing simply than a simple thing with complexity. Doing the latter will make you a genius sometimes and a pompous asshole often. And I, with five frustrated hours of photoshop fiddling notched into my belt, had rookie-blues lined up against me. Kind of like kissing a girl. Go in all the way if your name isn't Pitt and you're a psychotic-creepazoid. Remain completely aloof and you're headed for Lonesomeville, Population: You.
Mostly, however, I was curious to see how closely the visual related to the written word. How closely could I sew together the written poem and the visual poem without doing a disservice to or, worse, suffocating one or the other? I erected another barrier to prevent cross-pollination of meanings and representation (an event that, should I allow it to happen, would surely father some ugly ducklings): I decided to use my poem as inspiration for the image rather than a strict map of the visual. Regurgitating the words of the poem into an image promised to be uncreative, difficult, imprecise, and ultimately stale. A visual poem and a traditional poem should synergize, combine like gunpowder and sparks to burst with meaning, not bash the viewer/reader over the head with monotony.
So I decided to make the photoshop image the literary equivalent of what movies call "based on a true story." The poem served as an impetus to bottle some lightning from brainstorming sessions. It is not a strict visual representation of the poem because striving for such would betray the project instructions, the visual poem, the traditional poem and an achy-breaky heart. Plus, I wanted the image to stand alone, without needing the crutch of "Splotches" to give whatever meaning it may, if any. I'll toss that 12 oz. topic of debate into the hyena's den of literary criticism.
Ultimately, I felt thrust into gray area, that Somewhere Out There where I tried to hobnob a playpen for the two forms of representation that both attract and repel each other as if they encompassed both the positive and negative charges of a magnet. But just as kids can only play nicely in the sandbox for sometime before it becomes Sand Wars, so too were my creations biting and fighting. Didn't help that I hit myself with my hammer (i.e. photoshop) as much as I used it to constrain them.
Photoshop did have some nice features that allowed me to clarify the visual poem's message. One challenge I anticipated was that of getting inside the soldier's head. How the hell can I represent "thoughts" or "memories" -- such a huge staple of the traditional poem and the message I wanted to convey -- when my only tools were tangible, visible? This turned out not to be a challenge at all. The "ghostly" representation of all figures except the soldier allows the viewer to realize that the objects are not "physically" there. The viewer can logically assume that they are memories, ghosts, celestial bodies, or high-tech camouflage. I hope the overall vibe of the visual poem and the good taste of the viewer leads him/her to the "memory" reading. Ghost tanks in the middle of nowhere? Interesting, but implausible.
The head the soldier is holding might be confusing. But the lack of blood, the vitality and youthfulness of the visage, and the ghostly appearance should clearly clue the viewer to a variety of interesting and fairly accurate interpretations. I intended to illustrate that the soldier went back to find his youth, and there it is in the form of his boyhood head. The violence of the image is fitting. Trying to bridge back to memories and liberate a version of self long gone is a dire task, one that only drastic measures would force to endeavor.
At times this project frustrated me, worried me, angered me both in an aesthetic and technical sense. But I came to an important conclusion. Clarity, I realized, is not about portraying a unilaterally and universally accepted message. Nor is it about simplifying something to such a degree that any dimwit can say two sentences about it. Clarity is about providing the tools, whether through image or word, for the viewer or reader to formulate an argument or -- better yet -- a story about just what's going on. That's the fun and frustration of creation and interpretation. Because if you can't throw your two cents in and take some sort of ownership of what I the creator have made, then what's the point in looking or reading at all?
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