Poems by Cole Williams
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Anthropocene Mascots
by Cole Williams
Cole lives amid the sandy soils and coastal shores in the Gulf of Mexico on Pine Island, the largest barrier reef island of southwest Florida.
Photographer Dmitry Kokh shoots polar bears in buildings
with a camera.
I am looking at photos of polar bears
in buildings.
These polar bears with their cuteness. Who did that to them? The cuteness. The 80's. The prolific christmas bear I coveted and hugged to death. Mine without clothing so I gave him an earring.
A woman from a summer writing workshop would send us links through the chat every time someone tip-toed too close to being an awful person.One link was to an article about disaster porn and had the parable of something akin to: you better not like disaster or you're exploiting the vibrancy of a place with implied socio-economic burdens that led to the eventuality of ruin. I’ve never heard disaster porn before this link was sent out and I thought on it for some time:
Photo one: A dying yellow building, a weather station on Kolyuchin Island, an innocent polar bear challenging our gaze—arms rested on the broken windowsill, paws flapping easily in front saying Sunday morning and nothing to do; and look ever so closely a bit further down: is it a slight raise of the middle digit, upside down to the cameraman?
Photo Two: A video shot of a polar bear hanging its head out of a broken window in an abandoned home. He is forlorn. She is too. She is at the door. He has no fish. She burnt the pie. He went to go get a new piece of glass cut but the hardware store was closed.
Photo Three: The couple welcomes you to their home. We can ascertain from this photo that polar bears climb stairs, and once inside most likely prefer the sofa, like us. If I close my eyes I see them wearing slippers and reading glasses.
I have loved distorted and decaying ruins my entire life. Our friend group back in the day, led by a fearless and intrepid leader, would regularly trespass into all sorts of out-of-bounds: underground tunnels, buildings, bridges, old dying institutions. It all seemed par for the course in the early 2000's before the internet ruined everything. Wasn’t every friend group buying rappelling gear, head lamps, compasses and trying to find building plans? Eventually, I quit going on those excursions when we climbed onto the underpass of a bridge with a catwalk, and someone rocked the ropes and catwalk as we crossed over a lock and dam. My short angsty life flashed before my eyes. My grip on two ropes meant nothing compared to the force of gravity and an easy slip off a plank. That night the city skyline was ablaze with competing bright lights and the river below roiled black and frothy. Like a silent movie almost. This river took many lives a year. Urban river. Coiled channels. I would rather sit at the river's edge. I did not want to die in a movie with no words or music.
Photo Four: Better days and sunshine here. In this photo of incredible color contrast: a massive disk of burnt rusting orange frames the smiling polar bear. The yellow and yellowing home behind. This bear reads: relaxed, chill, not too worried about the state of the world, but still, if given the chance, it would prefer to speak for itself one of these days. Meanwhile, the smell of the green grass is intoxicating, surrounding this bear who has been wondering about the grass, trapped below snow, for years.
Photo five: Ahhh, this will do as she stretches her neck after a good night sleep in the master bedroom. This ramshackle looks as though human inhabitants threw the furniture and appliances out the front door in a fury. A heap of remodel. It looks not too unlike a hurricane home. She bear finds it perfect. The bookshelf is empty, but she is thinking of filling it with two books in particular; The Ministry for the Future and All About Surfing.
Photo six: They are posing. They must be posing. What else could this possibly be. And when we agree that polar bears pose, then we must also ask…why?
I never thought of the nightly trespasses as anything porn. Rather as an opportunity to see inside the inner workings of our city. To be in wide open factories and spaces devoid of the foreman, the clock, and pretense. Inside academia and concert halls with no audiences. Fields with no runners. What had we built and how could we understand our society in a different way and who lived along the interstitial lines of the chug and grind of it all; or how have we built on top of past iterations. What we hide in the name of progress, how civilizations burn—.
Back then we carried disposable cameras with us, one of us with money—usually the same person—you know the type—would have to develop the film. Often times using the independent camera store on a university campus in hopes of no questions being asked. The following weekend party would host the unveiling of the photos. They were revelatory. A rare opportunity to see what we looked like. To pose and be cool or pose and be exposed. We cherished these photos and often fought over them, stole negatives, made copies, bartered the salacious ones for beer, Boone's Farm, or a punk T-shirt.
Photo seven: A close-up of the pose in six. Polar bear at window. The people who built the window frame stapled it together in no particular order—a little haphazard don’t you think? This is the same exact window the weather researchers looked out of every day for years. Reading weather. Transcribing trends. Waiting for a ray of sunlight. People missing home perhaps and happy to have that wall, that window, in between them and a jealous polar bear. That bear now sits in your spot weatherman. Happy to have the window seat.
I am not part of the iGen Generation, born before 1995, so maybe I don't understand disaster porn straight away, with its implied exploitations: using the earth, animals, history, and monuments for a cloutish boost online. I delete social media accounts regularly to test my allegiances. To check myself. My foundations are in tangible, touchable connections. I crave reality. And all this with a grain of salt, as I write—an impossible medium of the present moment. But writing and reading should be taken in slowly, methodically, with silence and reverence, should it not? But I too lie like the anthropomorphic freak that I am and I too fall prey to the tempting exploitations of disasters. There is so much of it in our time. It doesn’t feel like we are living in a time of growth and abundance. Of new. And we have a simple and easy way to enter a pipeline of self-aggrandizing self-absorption to distract ourselves, queue bears:
Photo eight: What stunning colors. See the steps that travel over the roof and up to the apex of it? What sits atop? A glass room? A weathervane? A radar machine? The herringbone on the exposed wall. The windows built in a strange symmetry that makes them look as though they are partially open, but when compared to the others present, reveal a complicated symmetry across the entire wall. And who is back there?! Zoom in and see She bear peering out. Her head is very small from this vantage point. She is home and cozy. Her partner sits harumphed in the lawn in the forefront. Maybe a child bear, maybe another sad male. This photo reveals so much. The weather tower and strange boxes all over the lawn. For storage? The buildings are close by for easy access to-and-fro. A strange outer wall was built—most likely to block the wind. And polar bear amidst and amid it all: yellowed.
Is the photo beautiful? Is it beautiful without polar bear? Should we just remove the bear now and get on with it? Over it? What is disaster here? The weather station in ruin, the way the humans have left it, or the fate of this bear inextricably linked to everything else—but always is depicted as though they live on another planet. Regular old Little Princes, all of them. What should I like about these photos? Should I like the faces of the bears or the colors or the story of the station? How complicated is it to align oneself with any sort of catastrophe or mission in the internet era when we are all gazers of one type or another, and gazing more than we may ever realize. I see myself sitting here gazing now, writing this, and wondering about the utility of photos. About the collage’isitic world of barrage and sensation, how my emotions are always being toyed with, how my attentiveness is always for sale, sought after, attacked and sold.
Has it not been proven that pleas and photos of fire and brimstone do not work for environmental progress? Should we add blood? Should we add clothes? An exhibit with stuffed bears? Why do I constantly feel the need to try and figure out a way for an audience to care, is the audience even out there anymore, empty theatre, and what do they want from and for their lives? To save polar bears?
Last photo: Return to the doorstep. The photo series I see ends with an invitation. As this building from the 1930's spills its order onto the lawn like liquid time travel, we can attest to the nature of degradation, and how some things simply don’t outlast harsh conditions: manmade buildings, wood, order, plumbing, photographs…and yet, how some things do; like polar bears.
© Cole Williams