I saw this once along the road near Canlaon. Weeds, a random pile of rotting firewood, empty oil drums, Wrecked school bus, wrecked truck. With this photograph, I organized the scene into something coherent, but in reality it was just a mess- an ugly wasteland of entropy and decay.
Though scenes like this are common enough to be a part of our culture, there’s nothing particularly Filipino about them. I have seen similar scenes in America and England, and I’m sure they exist elsewhere too.
This is just what the modern world looks like when it disintegrates.
While I stood there with my camera, a couple of schoolgirls stopped and looked at me with amazement and giggled. They couldn’t understand why I would want to take this picture. Nor could I have told them.
But looking at it again, now, this poem- “Missing Dates” by William Empson, came into my mind as an accompaniment. It says what I felt about this photograph; says more; and says it better than I could:
Missing Dates
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
Of young dog blood gave but a month’s desires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills
Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death. From partial fires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
