He’ll shrieve my soul, he’ll wash away
The Albatross’s blood.

Baby albatross bellies are filled with plastic trash. Cameras document their distorted figures—making signatures of a moment in duress. Of course, by “moment” I mean the shared associations that compose environments in resistance to the projective power of analysis. How might we “process” such figurative associations of cheap industrial detritus bound within the organic tissue of expired creatures? They feed on bright doodads and shards, colorful pieces of discarded parts: clear syringe; worn balloon fragments; shampoo and detergent bottle tops; blue packing straw; medicine dropper; green, red, and yellow, translucent Bic lighters; aqua-colored Styrofoam pieces; buttons; a little bear; soda tops; engine oil container lids. A detached sacrum rises out of decayed feathers and the patterns of modernity accumulate in the rot on black pebbles, a thin albatross bill extending eyeless gaze toward the photographer’s foot. These entrails make weird auguries: the refuse of industrial and post-industrial forms spiral outward toward a still too-slow-to-learn wilderness of exposed beings; witness the accumulated residues of life-as-usual, unconscious, earnest in its need; examine the foreclosed judgments determined by arrangements of parti-colored fragments that choke the host. The optimistic urge to embrace modernity collapses in the far, unseen reaches of a world unused to such forward looking endeavors. The decayed feathers and rotted portions of flesh reveal nothing but a mortality belonging to us, too. Friends arrive. We drink wine. I wonder about us in a merriment that skims the surface of some deeper experience. Those faces in the scrapbooks of my family—what will they hope to find to redeem the albatross exhaustion? The moments when we learn that our habits produce suffering pass rapidly. And yet it’s like discovering nuclear bombs: the knowledge integrates into associations we make with the world. Our experience bloats with the random accumulations of particles we are fed. Icebergs melt; islands shrink; tsunamis suck bodies into the deep. We know this. And move on. And store the knowledge. And forget. And are reminded. And upon our deaths, when our torsos are exposed, the auguries of this knowledge present what we knew, and what the birds told us, on the pebbles, decaying with their firm particles next to the lumbar bones and skull fragments. No one in the 1930s would have considered this. Hopefulness made a strict ideology of discipline, attention, and mindless drive to move outward in a world where there was an out. What do the albatross think? Their ancient patterns continue without thought to the accumulating plastic in their bellies. In these photos there are maps of a future and a present. I hear Donny Green’s voice and his taunting about dick hair. I hear Dai’s worried voice as I view the pictures of bodies he made in India. I look and I watch with great wonder. We are so small next to things erupting around us. I stare into these dead things, and dream of the life still there.

*Thanks to S. B. for sending a link to these pictures by Chris Jordan.