On 'worse sights than this'

On 'worse sights than this'

In my work life, I cover some of the most heinous crimes you can think of — and some you might not even be able to imagine: Children coerce other children to kill themselves, people behead others and play with the head “like a soccer ball,” as police report, there are mass shootings of teens killing teens, people killing their mothers and judges housing Tren de Aragua gang members. That’s the short list.

I say this not to solicit sympathy, but to explain my absence with these emails. When I began this, I was not a crime reporter. Holding such a position has altered my sense of “normal.”

Covering a trial of a former police officer who killed a black man who allegedly stole a single beer, I got to know a fellow crime reporter who is now writing for the Albuquerque Journal and is well on his way to the New York Times. I asked how he coped. “Golf,” he said. I thought he was jesting, but he meant it. More sincerely, he said he attended therapy.

Aside from formal sessions I take, art has always been therapy for me. If you let me, I could stand and stare at a painting for hours. In college, I was instructed to do exactly that. Those sessions were not much different from therapy: I examined the human condition. Slayings: Judith Slaying Holofernes. Numerous examples of crucifixion. Death.

These artworks all urge us to question our vitality, which is not a small question to elicit.

When I began this Substack, I noted that emotion constitutes art. To not feel anything dismisses it. Music, film, sculpture, painting — it all constitutes art.

As I began reporting, though, art (in its casual definition) felt irrelevant. This bulletin, most of all.

Turning from tragedies, to where do we look? Art. Song. Script. Being such, I’m mainly making my way back through words. The Odyssey. Yes, I’m reading Homer. It’s adventurous escapism at its finest. And in times of distress, is that not what we need?

What are you loving?