Hi I'm Andrea Gibson and this is my poem "The Nutritionist."
The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables Said if I could get down 13 turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives.
The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight Said for 20 dollars she’d tell me what to do I handed her the twenty, she said “stop worrying darling, you will find a good man soon.”
The first psychotherapist said I should spend 3 hours a day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and my ears plugged.
I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.
The yogi told me to stretch everything but truth, said focus on the outbreaths, said everyone finds happiness if they can care more about what they can give than what they get.
The pharmacist said klonopin, lamictil, lithium, Xanax.
The doctor said an antipsychotic might help me forget what the trauma said The trauma said don’t write this poem.
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones But my bones said “Tyler Clementi dove into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.”
My bones said “write the poem.”
To the lamplight.
Considering the river bed.
To the chandelier of your fate hanging by a thread.
To everyday you could not get out of bed.
To the bulls eye of your wrist To anyone who has ever wanted to die.
I have been told, sometimes, the most healing thing we can do- Is remind ourselves over and over and over Other people feel this too The tomorrow that has come and gone And it has not gotten better When you are half finished writing that letter to your mother that says “I swear to God I tried” But when I thought I hit bottom, it started hitting back There is no bruise like the bruise loneliness kicks into your spine So let me tell you I know there are days it looks like the whole world is dancing in the streets when you break down like the doors of their looted buildings You are not alone and wondering who will be convicted of the crime of insisting you keep loading your grief into the chamber of your shame You are not weak just because your heart feels so heavy I have never met a heavy heart that wasn’t a phone booth with a red cape inside Some people will never understand the kind of superpower it takes for some people to just walk outside Some days I know my smile looks like the gutter of a falling house But my hands are always holding tight to the ripchord of believing A life can be rich like the soil Make food of decay Turn wound into highway Pick me up in a truck with that bumper sticker that says “it is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society” I have never trusted anyone with the pulled back bow of my spine the way I trust the ones who come undone at the throat Screaming for their pulse to find the fight to pound Four nights before Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington bridge I was sitting in a hotel room in my own town Calculating exactly what I had to swallow to keep a bottle of sleeping pills down What I know about living is the pain is never just ours Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo So I keep a listening for the moment when the grief becomes a window When I can see what I couldn’t see before, through the glass of my most battered dream, I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds.
So the next time I tell you how easily I come out of my skin, don’t try to put me back in just say here we are together at the window aching for it to all get better but knowing there is a chance our hearts may have only just skinned their knees knowing there is a chance the worst day might still be coming let me say right now for the record, I’m still gonna be here asking this world to dance, even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet you- you stay here with me, okay?
You stay here with me.
Raising your bite against the bitter dark Your bright longing Your brilliant fists of loss Friend if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other, my god that’s plenty my god that’s enough my god that is so so much for the light to give each of us at each other’s backs whispering over and over and over “Live” “Live” “Live”
"Who’s there?"
Whispered in the dark, this question begins a tale of conspiracy, deception and moral ambiguity.
And in a play where everyone has something to hide, its answer is far from simple.
Written by William Shakespeare between 1599 and 1601, "Hamlet" depicts its titular character haunted by the past, but immobilized by the future.
Mere months after the sudden death of his father, Hamlet returns from school a stranger to his own home, and deeply unsure of what might be lurking in the shadows.
But his brooding takes a turn when he’s visited by a ghost that bears his father’s face.
The phantom claims to be the victim of a “murder most foul,” and convinces Hamlet that his uncle Claudius usurped the throne and stole queen Gertrude’s heart.
The prince’s mourning turns to rage, and he begins to plots his revenge on the new king and his court of conspirators.
The play is an odd sort of tragedy, lacking either the abrupt brutality or all-consuming romance that characterize Shakespeare’s other work in the genre.
Instead it plumbs the depths of its protagonist’s indecisiveness, and the tragic consequences thereof.
The ghost’s revelation draws Hamlet into multiple dilemmas– what should he do, who can he trust, and what role might he play in the course of justice?
These questions are complicated by a tangled web of characters, forcing Hamlet to negotiate friends, family, court counselors, and love interests– many of whom possess ulterior motives.
The prince constantly delays and dithers over how to relate to others, and how he should carry out revenge.
This can make Hamlet more than a little exasperating, but it also makes him one of the most human characters Shakespeare ever created.
Rather than rushing into things, Hamlet becomes consumed with the awful machinations of thinking itself.
And over the course of the play, his endless questions come to echo throughout our own racing minds.
To accomplish this, Shakespeare employs his most introspective language.
From the usurping king’s blazing contemplation of heaven and hell, to the prince’s own cackling meditation on mortality, Shakespeare uses melancholic monologues to breathtaking effect.
This is perhaps best exemplified in Hamlet’s most famous declaration of angst: "To be or not to be—that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And, by opposing, end them."
This monologue personifies Hamlet’s existential dilemma: being torn between thought and action, unable to choose between life and death.
But his endless questioning raises yet another anxiety: is Hamlet’s madness part of a performance to confuse his enemies, or are we watching a character on the brink of insanity?
These questions weigh heavily on Hamlet’s interactions with every character.
And since he spends much of the play facing inward, he often fails to see the destruction left in his wake.
He’s particularly cruel to Ophelia, his doomed love interest who is brought to madness by the prince’s erratic behavior.
Her fate is one example of how tragedy could have been easily avoided, and shows the ripple effect of Hamlet’s toxic mind games.
Similar warning signs of tragedy are constantly overlooked throughout the play.
Sometimes, these oversights occur because of willful blindness– such as when Ophelia’s father dismisses Hamlet’s alarming actions as mere lovesickness.
At other points, tragedy stems from deliberate duplicity– as when a case of mistaken identity leads to yet more bloodshed.
These moments leave us with the uncomfortable knowledge that tragedy evolves from human error– even if our mistake is to leave things undecided.
For all these reasons, perhaps the one thing we never doubt is Hamlet’s humanity.
But we must constantly grapple with who the “real” Hamlet might be.
Is he a noble son avenging his father?
Or a mad prince creating courtly chaos?
Should he act or observe, doubt or trust?
Who is he?
Why is he here?
And who’s out there– waiting in the dark?
Recently, my daughter and I decided to give away some toys she no longer used.
She's six years old, and asked me for a camera to take a picture of them.
It was easier for her to farewell her toys if she could take a picture before giving them away.
Because she doesn't want to forget them.
Because pictures help us remember.
We grab our cell phones to snap when we feel something is special.
When something moves us, we feel the urge to capture what we feel and keep it in an image, in a picture.
However, we don't print photos on paper like we used to do, we share them in social networks, or we upload them to the cloud.
Photography turned into something intangible, something virtual.
But, what happens when we lose or erase our digital photos?
Those in your computer, in that hard disk or in your phone.
Is there anybody here who never lost a photo?
What would happen if, for some reason we would lose all of our parents' photos or other loved ones who are no longer with us?
How are we to remember them?
Going back to our photos from the past is like opening the doors to a dimension where lots of memories we seem to forget still remain.
And those images from the past, those cherished treasures can help us propel ourselves into the future, as well.
I am a nighttime photographer.
I make portraits under moonlight, in nature, close to the water.
I ask the people I photograph to remain still and silent for several minutes amidst darkness.
Meanwhile, I walk around them to light them up and light up the landscape with lanterns.
It's a moment of quietness and connection.
I went off to live in the islands of the Paraná River Delta for two years.
I took with me an old camera without knowing very well where I was going, neither what was I to find there.
And in time I came to know the islanders, and I invited them to be photographed under the full moon to recreate their daily life routines and jobs, nathanstephens@example.com.
And I took photos of loggers, hunters and dreamers.
People living in isolation, whose only direct relationship is with water, to the rhythm of the river highs and lows.
And that visual work in the Delta led me to travel around the world, and took me to Japan.
I was searching for a new story to tell.
I wanted to work again with a community which had some connection with water.
And it happened that the curator of my exhibition, Ihiro Hayami, had relatives in a small fisher town and went with me for a visit.
Ōtsuchi is located between the mountains and the sea.
It's a fifteen-thousand-people town that in March 2011 went through the worst tragedy in its history.
It was washed off by a tsunami with waves tall as a five-story building.
Even though the alarms went off many people didn't believe it would be so strong, and remain in their homes.
As a consequence many people died, close to a 10 percent of the population.
And 70 percent of houses were washed away.
This is why every local in Ōtsuchi has either friends or family who died in the tsunami.
The power of the waves pulled the houses off their base and the sea gulped them up.
Survivors were left with no shelter and had to endure a winter with temperatures below zero Celsius.
Amidst this chaos and total destruction many people were trying to save their family photos.
An officer of Japan's Self Defense Forces recovers a photo album inside a house in total ruin.
There it was the picture of a child.
The officer holds the album as if he were holding the child.
I traveled to Ōtsuchi with my daughter who was five month old at the time.
And the contrast of a baby in the middle of such desolation was impressive.
People would take her off of my arms in order to kiss her.
And I'd wonder how to tell this story that happened a year and a half ago.
What could be positive out of such level of destruction.
The first thing I found were big piles of rubble made of all kind of things.
Twisted objects that speak about life as it used to be in Ōtsuchi.
Like this vending machine or this fishing elements, car remains ...
or what's left of a house.
A lamp turned into a Moebius strip, the symbol of infinite time.
As a contrast to these mountains of rubble there was this town flattened by water.
The skeletons of the houses, marked on the ground were empty spaces, filled with stories.
So I invited the survivors to go back to those spaces where their houses or workplaces used to exist.
And many accepted, but in general, the kids didn't want to.
I photographed them during the night as they remained silent and still during the ten minutes each photo took.
The scenes were so sad, nothing had color.
She is Haruko Okano, a librarian, and she's sitting on the remains of Ōtsuchi's Library, where she worked.
This is the Second Volunteers Firefighters Squad of Ōtsuchi inside of what was the fire station.
The fireman standing up was in charge of closing the anti-tsunami gates.
This is Yoshihiro Ogayu, monk of Kogan-ji temple.
The temple was a refuge in case of tsunami but even so it was destroyed.
His dad and his son died there.
When that first trip to Ōtsuchi was over I found a photo album in the middle of the street.
It had laid there for a year and a half without having anyone pick it up.
It was all wet, heavy and it stank just like a dead animal.
It was tainted with color bubbles gushing from the photos that blended together.
I took a picture of it without giving it much of a thought and I came back.
Once in Buenos Aires, the Ōtsuchi experience felt much like a far away dream.
It filled me up with doubt: Why did I have to tell this story, if I came from the other end of the world?
What did it had to do with me?
Why had I photographed the survivors in black and white if the reference of my work is color?
And while I made myself these questions, my own life began to crumble.
Soon after breakup, my daughter's mother went off to live in another country.
So I took on myself Lara's upbringing, she was a one-year-old baby.
Project Ōtsuchi was put on hold, because now it was me the one who had to survive and reinvent myself.
And some months later, revisiting the work the family photo album image popped up again.
But in this second view I grasped it in a different way.
I thought I saw a painter's palette.
So I took the main colors of that album to create my own color palette.
And I used those colors created by the force of the tsunami to color the images of the survivors.
And little by little, all the gray scenes turned into something colorful.
I used color as a bridge to connect the present and the past, as the hub between their photos and mine.
Now I was feeling connected with Ōtsuchi once again.
Two years passed since until I was able to return to Japan to search for other recovered photos and find new colors to paint with.
There I met Mikio Komukai, a nice man who had this NGO that was recovering family photos to send them back to their owners.
And with his help and the permission of Ōtsuchi's government I gained access to that impressive archive of thousand of destroyed photos.
Contemplating those pictures I realized the intangible damage the people of Ōtsuchi were facing; the damage to their memory and identity.
Those blurred images were the measure of their loss.
The firefighters of Ōtsuchi.
I traveled a total of six times to finish the project and publish a book.
And this is the last picture I took with my two assistants, Mayumi Suzuki and Kazuhiko Chikaoka, who both lost their parents to the tsunami.
We built an arch with plastic tubes which they arranged in different positions over the remains of this house.
And if you look carefully at the photo you will see that their hands are holding this house of light.
In 2016 the government of Ōtsuchi invited me to show my project, but I had a feeling that it was not over.
There was something left to do.
So I suggested that we put together a collective exhibition which we set up in the gymnasium of a temporary school.
And we invited high school students and the people in town to take photos.
Now the kids did want to join in.
We gave them disposable cameras with one assignment: to tell their lives in pictures, their intimate whereabouts.
Five years away from the tsunami there were children back in the streets taking photos, recording its life.
And together, in community, we created a small photo archive of what Ōtsuchi is today.
The people in town took pictures to create new memories: The memories of the future of Ōtsuchi.
As for me, I started my own photo album telling my life and my travels with Lara.
And here we are in Japan, saying goodbye to the sea of Ōtsuchi.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)