missing | person

These are old notes from a messy, chaotic pocket Moleskine.  Last winter, I wrote a piece weaving together several missing person cases and questions, forensic photo analysis, Lucretius' theories of light (and other ancient theories of how we see), and questions about what I would do, given certain circumstances.  Now that I have been writing a meditation on why I write about missing people, some of these rough notes (raw, messy, unordered, unstructured) have taken on new meanings.  The notes are more polished in the actual essay, of course. 

But I thought, why not post some of them?  (I also posted them on my personal blog devoted to writing explorations, called anti:freeze)

Thus for the idealist as for the realist, one conclusion is imposed: Due to the fact that the other is revealed to us in a spatial world, we are separated from the other by a real or ideal space. - Sartre

Ideal meaning: constituting or existing only in the form of an idea or mental image or conception.  (Though I cannot help but also think of perfection.)

Does missing mean that you can no longer plot my point on a map?  Or is that you have the wrong map - that I have wandered past the boundaries of our charted territories, into places you cannot find?

Or does it mean that the ideal space we always felt - always suspected would force us apart - has simply transformed into something real? (lots of messy cursive I cannot read - this continues for several paragraphs)

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I cannot stop thinking of Tara Calico, who went missing in 1988 while riding her bicycle in New Mexico.  Detectives found the cracked window of her Sony Walkman near a campground several miles away, and her mother immediately knew: Tara had left breadcrumbs for police to follow. 

Detectives never found Tara's pink Huffy, but they did discover tire tracks along NM 47.  But the tracks led nowhere, and the trail went cold. 

Six months later, a Polaroid turned up outside a convenience store in Port St. Joe, Florida.  In the picture:  a young woman, bound and gagged; a paperback copy of My Sweet Audrina beside her hip; a boy to her left, his mouth taped, his head resting on a blue-and-white striped pillow. 

Tara loved VC Andrews.  Was My Sweet Audrina a sign? Some kind of code?  And what about the little boy? He resembled a missing child from the same state as Tara - New Mexico.  It seemed this could not possibly be coincidence, two people in the same bizarre shot, both resembling missing persons from the same state. 

Tara's parents hired an expert in ear identification, and he positively identified the woman as Tara.  Police disagreed.

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Lucretius. Imagine:  if light could adhere, if two bodies could touch - leave traces - across a distance, just by being seen.  (And what if they were not seen?  Would those atoms still travel?  Would they still touch?)  Imagine a camera: the shutter opens, and your face touches the lens, touches the photo paper, so that it leaves actual bits of the skin, not just the image.  Not just an image, but something you might extract, like DNA.  Proof. 

And you would never have to compare ears, never have to cut an image to pieces.   

Lucretius:

Now will I undertake an argument- One for these matters of supreme concern- That there exist those somewhats which we call The images of things: these, like to films Scaled off the utmost outside of the things, Flit hither and thither through the atmosphere, And the same terrify our intellects, Coming upon us waking or in sleep, When oft we peer at wonderful strange shapes And images of people lorn of light, Which oft have horribly roused us when we lay In slumber- that haply nevermore may we Suppose that souls get loose from Acheron, Or shades go floating in among the living, Or aught of us is left behind at death, When body and mind, destroyed together, each Back to its own primordials goes away.

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Over the next couple of years, more photos appeared - each one more puzzling, each one trumping the others, like an ace.  The strangest one shows a woman - Tara? - bound in gauze while seated on an Amtrak train.  The man sitting next to her grabs her neck and pulls back her head.  Every detail seems theatrical: the woman's oversized glasses; the man's gaping mouth; the setting.  How could that possibly be real?  On a public train?

If the Polaroids were real, Tara was on the move - nowhere in particular, no place you could plot on the map.  She was always in a truck or a train, always leaving or arriving, living in the space between spaces.  The empty spaces on maps, with no dots. 

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You can walk to the end of the earth and never once touch the vanishing point.  It wraps around the horizon and comes back to kiss your heels, like a latitude line.  The vanishing point, it turns out, is you. 

Two images dominated the news media these past few weeks:  boy scouts missing in rough terrain, and white damsels in distress. 

I find this interesting.

When you spend a lot of time reading about missing people, as I do, you know that missing persons come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and genders.  They disappear from parking lots, crashed cars, sidewalks, driveways, and even their own beds. Sometimes, they run away.  Sometimes, they commit suicide.  Other times, the worst possible violence wipes them from this earth.   And then there are kids sold into slavery of all forms.   The list is endless.

Some have suggested that white damsels dominate the airwaves because a racist media is more interested in white victims.   This is most definitely true.  When was the last time you saw a missing African-American flashed on television screens across the United States?  It seems the media simply does not care about non-white victims/missing people. 

Something else may be at work at the same time - a certain kind of sexism, perhaps.  Sexism so deep it transforms into an expectation - a kind of control mechanism (though no conscious design may be present.)  For when the media insist on showing woman after woman who simply vanishes, it begins to feel like that is what women do: they vanish.   Let this be a warning swims below the surface, the subtext as terrifying as a shark.

For example, why hasn't the case of missing prosecutor Ray Gricar received more attention?  His Mini-Cooper was located at the far end of a parking lot, but no signs of Ray (with the exception of many incredible, and a few credible sightings) have appeared anywhere.   Why doesn't his case grip media attention?  Why no media obsession? 

I think it is because he is a man, and in our culture that fact strikes even a violence-drenched media as strange.   Men are not victims; women are.   We (meaning, we as a culture) are comfortable with the idea that women are always in danger, always potential victims, always in need of rescue.   And so the media feeds us precisely that.   They flash the images so often it begins to feel like a control mechanism, keeping women in fear.  Or maybe even a prophecy.  Or warning. 

Which is not to say those images should not be shown.  On the contrary, why not show as many different people - from as many different walks of life - as possible?  It would solve more cases.

The Boy Scouts were a rare exception to the damsel-in-distress syndrome.  Why? Perhaps because they went missing out in nature - and not only that, but in rugged terrain.    This narrative matched cultural constructions for gender:  these boys were not victims so much as brave explorers who headed into dangerous terrain and got lost.  So the media felt comfortable airing their stories over and over. 

I was glad the Boy Scout cases received attention.  But I also wondered how media attention could help their cases at all, since the boys were most definitely inside the wilderness boundaries, and search teams were already looking.  It was not as if we could spot them at a local supermarket and call police.   It was not as if we could call in with a tip.   Why not spend some precious air time on  cases in which national media exposure could actually make a difference?  (Cases like kidnappings or endangered children.  Or images of most wanted people, or people believed to have taken a child?)

I have also noticed:  When the Boy Scouts went missing, the media kept calling them "missing Boy Scouts," whereas women are rarely referred to by profession.  You rarely (if ever) hear, "the missing artist ..." or "the missing doctor ..." in relation to a missing woman.  The one exception is when a missing woman danced in a nude bar or worked as prostitute.  Then the media will make sure to let you know, repeating it over and over.  Somehow, that strikes them as the one case where profession matters for missing women.  (Can we say cultural stereotype?)

None of this is to say that any kind of missing person case has more inherent value or drama or loss.  Every case is a tragedy.  Every case represents a terrible loss, as well as an almost heroic clinging to hope - an unbreakable faith on the part of those left behind. 

All missing people deserve media attention - especially those cases where media attention can actually make a difference. 

___

All that said, there is also the strange reality that some cases just grab you and never let go.  Certan cases just get under my skin, and I do not know why.   Why do some faces haunt me, while others do not?   I will have to explore that issue further.

Fragements and notes for current works:

- A woman went missing after crashing her car and a heat-seeking helicopter searched for signs of life from the sky.  This image has been haunting my dreams:  a machine hovering above, far enough way to see everything, and yet so blind it needs heat-seeking technology to track someone down; that you have to go so far away to sense the heat; that this woman still was not found, even though there was only a ten-minute window where she could have disappeared.  (I will write a lot more on this case later, and also include more details like the name.)

- A composite artist in Michigan may have seen missing Prosecutor Ray Gricar.  I read this, and it hit me how amazing this is: that a forensic artist should be the witness, the one to spot the face among the thousands, the one to see.   It makes sense.  It is both opposite and the same from what he does when he creates composite drawings - finding an identity from thin air.   (More on this concept later, too.  This is just a quick note.  I have written this concept into an essay I am working on ...)

- Amplitude Modulation in our brains and the importance of disorder - and how that ties into forensic art, witnesses, and finding the lost.

- What about all the online crime discussion communities?  What motivates them?  (Besides their compassion and empathy, their obvious big hearts.)   I read them endlessly, not really participating in the sleuthing, but very interested in their logics.  I will have to write about them.  Look for posts here in the future. 

and lots more ...

I listened to the audio tape of Manuel Gehring the other day, taking in his descriptions of the grave site where he buried his two children.  Details like the height of the grass, how certain flowers caught his eye, a water pump.  This idea of a missing gravesite disturbs me - that finding a hole carved into the earth can hold the key to finding the lost children.   It reminds of other cases, when experts were called in to examine landscapes and interior decorations in order to pinpoint the location a photo was snapped.  We search in the negative space. 

I wrote about this for a long time yesterday, but these are notes I will keep private for now (with the exception of the bit above.)  More later.