Aaron M. Fortkamp

I got a new camera for the eclipse. Took a few pictures, then returned it. If I’d planned ahead better I would’ve bought a better camera and taken better eclipse pictures.

The zoom wasn’t the issue. The zoom was phenomenal, and probably because of that fact the steady cam was also top notch. But you had to be far away to zoom in on something, and I need to be close to my zoom-ins, because my zoom-ins are bugs and/or flowers right at my feet.

I only just cut my lawn this week, and truthfully I didn’t cut parts of it because there’s still flowers on it. Last year I planted 90,000 wildflower seeds and had about three plants come up, despite the shade. This year a couple more plants from last year’s crop have decided to give it a try, and I planted another 8,000 or so in a sunnier location and much earlier in the spring, but haven’t seen those pop out of the soil just yet. So, due to this .001% success rate with intentional planting, I couldn’t bring myself to cut down the flowers growing of their own accord.

Anyway my new camera does what I wanted. It doesn’t zoom in as far as my old Canon Powershot SX50, but it’s got double the megapixels, so I can get even tighter on the edits without sacrificing fidelity. I have flowers popping up all over and a nice camera and my very own property to scour and find a variety of subjects to photograph, and this is enough for me, most of the time.

I’m still uncomfortable here, though. Writing is not going super smooth right now, literally right now, if I’m being honest.

I finished my classes. My 3D Game Art and Design BA should be coming in the mail soon. It’s been nice the past couple days not having an immediate pressing concern sitting on top of the regular day-to-day stuff. My job is relatively secure, if a bit in flux. I don’t have to go get a new one for any reason beyond wanting to work closer to home, but even a 35 minute commute feels a lot better than a 45 minute one. It’s not great on weeks I have Alex, over an hour combined going to daycare and then on to work, and in the fall when he starts kindergarten it will be closer to 90 minutes, but for now it’s not bothering me too much.

I am a little concerned about not having enough to do, though, for my mental health. I think about Gaza a lot. This despite resisting the urge to look into it, at least any more than I look into the rest of the day’s news. I don’t want to write about that here, though. That’s why I started a Substack, which I have largely ignored. I’m angry about Gaza, but I don’t want to be angry here, in fact I think I just don’t want to be angry at all. So I find ways to forget to write about it, which turns into forgetting to write at all.

Except that’s not really true, I don’t forget about it, about the thousands upon thousands dead, injured, orphaned, maimed, starving. It’s not gone when I’m watching the birds at the feeder, listening to the cheeps of the nest occupants somewhere out of sight, where an industrious vandal made its way up into my roof under-tiling, right above my back door. It’s still there when I see a flower I want to photograph. When I adjust the focus. Snap the shutter.

It’s just very difficult to reconcile the two extremes, to contain one in the context of the other or vice versa. Here’s a bug right in front of you with legs pointing in directions you’ve never comprehended, and fragile abdomen fuzz that seems to serve no purpose, and it is loving on this flower’s stamen with all the purpose of its entire life behind it, possibly experiencing ecstasies you and I will never know. It’s got a lifespan of maybe a week and probably all of that will be spent within a 500 meter radius of this exact spot. Meanwhile this flower’s days are numbered too, it’s bright white and kind of crumpled like a tissue as if to emphasize its lack of permanence, in mere days it’ll fulfill its function and die so that the fruit within may grow, blackberry on the bush, but the plant that supports both flower and berry has been here for years and will be here for years to come. It’s both far more stationary and far more motile than the insect, its roots may never leave this very spot but it moves willingly by feeding itself to animals and though it does not choose the distance or direction there is no mistaking that this is the plant’s intention. It’s got a permanence on its radar that, once again, is so beyond the human experience it doesn’t really register in our brains. It’s thinking generations ahead, centuries, and why not, plants like this that return every season year after year, they’re not making plans based on a single lifespan or single lineage because plants are the great cooperators, roots mingling, info and resources being shared, insects supping and in return spreading seed, and anyway who’s to say they ever have to die? It’s not like you’d ever see a coroner inspect the remains of some dead perennial and conclude, yep, natural causes, just plain old age, this thing just lived too long.

Point being, this sort of yard-based photography meditation is not meant to make me forget anything. In fact it’s the opposite, it’s a reminder that all of this hurt and damage and cruelty and ignorance and greed and bigotry and hate is not the only thing. It’s not the only thing. There is more out there. I still have this option, this privilege, of perspective, and I know the people living through the hurt and damage and cruelty, living through the direct consequences of ignorance and greed and bigotry and hate, do not have it. And there is some guilt there, why them and not me, what did I do to deserve this, am I earning my place up here in the life boat, and that’s another function of taking the photographs, of looking an ant square in the eye while it traverses the safety of a broad leaf, knowing that if it ever happens to wander its way into my house I will end its existence with swift and excessive violence, as any number of its cousins have experienced, like that one that got into the pizza box last night, which did an admirable job of attempting to survive, breaking into a dead sprint as soon as the light struck it, but nonetheless could not outrun my middle fingernail as I flicked it into the cardboard with enough force to make my finger hurt beneath the nail, which caused the ant’s head to detonate like a sledgehammered cantaloupe and caused me a brief but genuine pause, wondering if my son’s medium pineapple going unmolested by an insect only driven by an instinct to find moisture, by self-preservation, was worth inflicting upon it complete annihilation, given that out-of-doors I would’ve been happy to admire it in action, even sought it out to pay my respects in the form of digitized preservation.

I shouldn’t have killed it, probably. But just days ago I’d ridded my kitchen of a temporary invasion by spreading borax across the countertops where the ants had begun showing up, making desultory pilgrimages in any damn direction, who knows where they were coming from but I dusted that bug poison across their most commonly occurring visible appearances and in a few days I stopped seeing them. I had dissuaded them from engaging and getting comfortable, prevented them from establishing a home, and probably therefore avoided killing a whole lot of them by killing only a little. Which is the same argument we made for dropping the bombs in Japan.

Anyhow. I can’t have a bunch of ants in my kitchen.

The point of the point being being, I don’t have a religion. What do you want from me, I was raised to believe in a deity but it didn’t take. I don’t have the consolation of going big. There is no “god has a plan” for me to contextualize each day’s new atrocities. For context, I go small. I look closer, and closer, until the whole becomes almost irrelevant to the part. I divest, I compartmentalize, I lift and separate. I don’t know what line I’m looking for, and because I don’t forget I never do feel entirely safe, or saved. But the clearer the division, the better I feel. This ant’s drama is whatever will kill or admire it today and for god’s sake where is the water. This bird’s drama is I will absolutely clawfuck anyone besides my current girlfriend who gets on this birdfeeder without my permission. Is one of these more important than the other? If so, what is that based on, size? Intelligence? Lifespan? Sphere of influence?

Yes by the way, ants do believe in god and it’s us. God is us. Rarely seen, almost never making judgements in their favor, any explicit encounter usually leaves no witnesses, but there are rumors, whispers, or more accurately gestures, signals, signs.

Dance bible. They can’t write books but they can dance.