Poetics

Composing something like this mystory certainly gives a better insight into an event or person than just writing a conventional essay. Doing research into what is excluded from the normal sources or what society has chosen to push aside is a difficult task. Most often there is one tale of history which is often written by the winner or those that are on top and usually presents things in such a fashion that true unbiased understanding is difficult if not impossible. What history, society or culture wants forgotten often is and very few people notice or care. Finding the particular experience of one person or how an event was experienced by the people there is also a difficult task. Finding figures that adequately express emotion or experience especially an experience that is being forgotten poses a unique set of challenges. I found that images and videos are the best tool to show the experience of something. Actually seeing something provides a whole new level to understanding and experience. Watching and hearing Reagan rail against the Soviets for being a Godless evil empire is still scary today. It provides one a better understanding of how someone in the USA or USSR must have felt after watching one of the two men who control almost all nuclear weapons in the world talk so frankly about such matters. Though images are not as dynamic i believe that they show the experience in ways that video or words can not. Capturing one particular instance in time like the USS Wisconsin firing her broadside or Earth from Apollo 17 create an emotion and understanding that would not be possible otherwise. Every sailor who has served on the Wisconsin knows and shares the experience of that one moment because they have all been on that boat at one time in the past 40 years serving the United States of America. The photo of the Earth is a good figure for showing our small fragile planet in the vastness of space and remind us that we are in this together and that expereince is shared by anyone and everyone who has inhabited our world. Life photo archive is a great and awesome collection of human experience over many decades.

Snell’s window is an occurrence when a person is looking up from the water at an object above them. The object is only viewable straight up and a circle of darkness surrounds it preventing the person from seeing anything not in the circle of visibility. This is a great figure for how we view history. We are constrained by the doxa to view only what is in the circle of light. The darkness prevents us from seeing the whole picture just as things are left out of the consensus to make a more manageable history.

Earth from Apollo 17

USS Wisconsin