Interwar Postcard

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied, by and © monkeytime.

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

The anthropologist and photographer Lye Tuck-Po recently posted an essay discussing why she exhibits so many photos of the children of the Batek people of Malaysia, and so few of Batek adults. It’s a touching exploration of loss, frailty, memory and the problematic nature of photography and publicity in traditional culture: "When They Die Young." Her essay set my mood for processing and captioning this image. I think the poem above gets at some of the emotion involved.

Anthropologist Lye Tuck-Po has been dipping into the colonial memoirs, as she puts it, and reading Ronald McKie’s 1965 book The company of animals: A naturalist’s adventures in the jungle of Malaya. Dr. Lye discusses a portion of that book that describes an encounter with a “‘wild and angry’” elephant, noting the book’s position in a long line of tomes concerning “‘heroic white men tramping through savage jungles…’” Fortunately, both man and pachyderm seem to have survived the encounter at issue with their respective skins and dignities intact. Orwell’s elephant should have been so lucky.