John Lennon - 32 years ago

Here's a excerpt from a book he wrote. He was living in Ireland, the emerald green isle and preparing to move to Donegal in the remote northwest.

He met a shopowner in a Liberties, Dublin antique shop to buy mirrors for his travels. He gifted her a piece of gringseng cloth, a healing fabric from Bali.

“Wonderful," she said, "many thanks. Travel safe and look after yourself. Before you go I will reveal a small future to you,” she said.

“After Tiglin you will ramble across country to the Killarney hostel where, sadly and unfortunately, you will be awake in the predawn morning of December 8 hearing a BBC news announcer tell the world about John Lennon being shot in New York. You will turn your head to the wall and cry.

"Later you will take the black push bike down narrow wet twisted streets and meet a nun opening heavy steel black church gates and you will tell her what happened. You will push open the heavy wooden doors, genuflect, cross yourself, walk the length of a cold aisle and light votive candles in silence.

"Then you will ride into town and go to every news agent to buy every Irish paper with the screaming black tabloid headlines full of desperate black ink and grainy images of death personified before retiring to a pub to sit by a peat fire drinking, reading, and sadly, quietly remembering John’s creativity and his words Imagine and Give Peace a Chance.”

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In a remote Cambodian jungle village along The River of Darkness they carve images of their dead.

The Chunchiet animist people bury their dead in the jungle.

Life is a sacred jungle.

Animists believe in the universal inherent power of nature world. The Tompoun and Jarai, among animist world tribes have sacred burial sites.

The Kachon village cemetery is one hour by boat on the Tonle Srepok River from Voen Sai. It is deep in the jungle. Many go in. Few come out.

The departed stays in the family home for five days before burial. Once a month family members make ritual sacrifices at the site. The village shaman dreams the departed will go to hell.

In their spirit story dream the shaman meets LOTH, Leader of the Hell who asks for an animal sacrifice. The animist belief says sacrificing a buffalo and making statues of the departed will satisfy LOTH. It will renew the spirit and return it to the family.

After a year family members remove old structures, add two carved effigies, carve wooden elephant tusks, create new decorated roofs and sacrifice a buffalo at the grave during a week long celebration with food and rice wine for the entire village.

New tombs have cement bases and carved effigies with cell phones and sunglasses. Never out of touch. See your local long distance carrier for plans and coverage in your area.

The future is brighter than a day in a sacred jungle.  

Deeper

‘Quick! Into the tunnels!’

They sat sweltering, crying, still. Hearing the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel and iron napalm canisters thudded, this tremor, shredding forests, fields, homes danced into flames. Heat soared over tunnels bathing them in sweat. They went deeper. Deeper, following hollow carved earth trails. The earth swallowed their breath, their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

The sweet silence, save all the crying and wounded after all the foreign devils packed and left, fleeing in terror as peasants streamed down from the mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking all the oceans in their creation myth, draining lands of blood, driving them into the sea. A blue green sea danced red.

This easing down of their voice flowing between crumbling sand, crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but the sound of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness in life’s twisted fateful reality.

Their memory was a fiction and this fiction created their memory.  

42

In another incarnation I developed polio before Inactivated Polio Vaccines (IPV) and Mr. Jonas Salk arrived in 1955. 

An epidemic of polio in 1916 killed 6,000 people.

It paralyzed 27,000. In the early 1950’s there were 58,000 cases of polio each year. Salk’s determination in 1954 to conduct field trials resulted in 1.3 million children receiving the polio vaccine. He never patented the vaccine. The number of cases had dropped to 10 by 1979.

In 1955 I was flat on my back in an iron lung. I stared into a small horizontal mirror. I prepared to have my second son. 

He survived. Doctors proclaimed him a miracle baby. They thought I might die.

I was appointed to have him.

I controlled the process. He was small and sick. He recovered. He is strong and loving in his unique calibrated dysfunctional way.

I birthed a daughter three years later.

After the iron lung I spent 12 years in a wheelchair.

I died when I was 42.

photos of tuberculosis

Misha Friedman worked with Doctors Without Borders or Medecins Sans Frontieres.

While working in Chechnya in 2008 he began making photographs.

He continued to work with N.G.O.’s to pursue stories, “because journalists can’t be trusted,” he said. “These patients, who do they trust? They trust the people who care for them. So credibility comes from showing up with people they trust.” 

“Most of the people you see here are dead,” Mr. Friedman said last week, looking through the photographs. “My images have not really helped them. Maybe they’ll help people in the future. Maybe they’ll help with fund-raising here and there. But to these particular people, they did not help.

“So that part is harder, being kind of just a photographer.”

You may see his slide show at LENS.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/saving-lives-or-photographing-them/

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An invisible epidemic