Crickets

Watch on Vimeo

“On Monday, Iowa was leveled by what amounted to a level-two hurricane. But you wouldn’t know that from reading, listening to or watching the news.”

That’s how the Washington Post began its belated coverage.

With so little air travel happening these days, we might need a new term for “flyover country.” How about “slow internet country”? Or, given the widespread collapse of local reporting, “low information country”?

Is keeping people ignorant and disempowered the goal, or simply the unintended consequence of greed, callousness, corruption, and propaganda coming together in what one must inevitably characterize as a perfect storm?

When you know that you don’t know: then and only then will true words begin to appear.

in a dream
I can’t finish a haiku
[crickets]

***

Process notes

Having made a video haibun focusing on katydids, it was probably inevitable that I’d follow up with crickets. For what it’s worth, I really was struggling to compose a haiku in a dream the other morning. Later, I had the idea of playing with the pop-culture definition of crickets as silence or absence of any intelligible response, and the prose came quickly after that.

The source video was something I’d downloaded from Prelinger’s home movie collection a few days ago, not knowing how or whether I’d use it. I decided to edit the shots to change at the beginning of sentences in order to give the otherwise rather prosy bun section a more formal kind of rhythm.

Originally I ended with this:

even in a dream
I can’t write a good haiku
[here there be crickets]

which amused me since it was clearly a senryu disguised as a self-reflexive, 17-syllable folk haiku. But I went with the more serious and concise one in part because of the interesting (I hope) ambiguity about what it is I can’t finish.