Blind Bubble

It is a quiet morning. Memorial Day. I'm up early to try to get everything done, and instead I'm drinking coffee and reading the internet. I was just browsing around on my little cousin's website, www.jaisgossman.com. He's an artist and an art student at the Chicago Art Institute. He's doing a lot of performance art lately. He did one piece about Abu Ghraib that referred to an image that came to represent the events there. The hooded man, with his arms outstretched. Photos of the performance are on his website.

When my sister and I were in Chicago we visited Jais. He was showing us around his dorm and the studio spaces and he showed us these photos, and it was a very weird moment. He brought up the picture of himself standing on Michigan Avenue, hooded, arms outstretched. I thought thoughts like, oh, he must be death or something. I didn't say anything, but something of my cluelessness must have been obvious. My sister turned to me and explained what Jais was referring to. She had to tell me that he was enacting an infamous image from Abu Ghraib. I had never seen it before.

Isn't that something?

How many years have gone by and I didn't have the visual? It's not that I'm not aware of the place, the torture, the trials, the horror of it. I heard about it. But, I never saw any of it. Frankly, who would want to? And this is all a result of how I have chosen to live at the moment, media free but for NPR. I leave the country and bury myself in the blissful coldness of Mars and never pay any attention for months at a time.

Today I'm asking myself if that's ok. I don't have the visuals, but I know about the events. Does it matter? Do images help to understand? Really? Or is it good enough to intellectually know? How removed am I from my times and my culture if I can't read the shared images? If I'm visually illiterate?

Just now I goggled Abu Ghraib to make sure I had the right spelling. The images came up. The real ones. And they are horrifying. Way more horrifying than what I have in my head.

Do we have to see information to know it?

Can I truly feel the impact of events without seeing them?

Do I make the right choice not to look?