Fragments of a Fair

We sailed through constellations
and were rutted by the storm
I crumpled under cudgel blows
and finally came ashore

I spent the next two years or more
just staring at the wall
We went to sea to see the world,
what do you think we saw?

We went to the state fair within three months of my immigrating here and have been back every year since, except for those two pandemic years when it was closed or too weird.

I’ve brought a Holga, a Polaroid, as well as a Fujifilm XT4 here, but this year, I reached for the Canon PowerShot A710IS I found in Lebanon over Christmas.

Repetition and difference. That’s how the wheel turns.

There’s an air of bacchanalia, an out of time, out of place dimension, to state fairs. The outrageously indulgent food — so bad for you, but oh so good — would raise eyebrows outside the boundaries of this temporary autonomous zone, but in here, decadence is given full license. But like those outsized foam cowboy hats I saw some people wearing yesterday, the normal rules are not so much set aside as relaxed in service of the larger logics at play and on display: the state fair is a festival of agri-business and small industry.

Even the photographic arts on display in the “no photography allowed” fine arts hall are put in service of this economic logic. “Cascadia” is the most prominent category, a geographic unit of liberation for many, and free trade for most.

In and out place. In and out of time. That’s what festival feels like on heavy days.

I’ve written before about the particular darkness of this particular fairground; how it was the site of an internment camp during WWII, when Japanese-American citizens were stripped of their rights for blatantly racist reasons. Apparently, there’s a memorial for this event there — I didn’t see it. According to KUOW, it’s “in the concessions area of the grandstand. In the center is an illuminated white wall with the names of more than 7,500 people who were incarcerated at the fairgrounds.” People called the place “Camp Harmony.”

They tell you today to fear the rising fascism of a country that’s flirted with it over and over again. They tell you blue, no matter who, because the threat to democracy is so dire. And maybe it is. But who signed Executive Order 9066? Was that threat to democracy not written in blue ink?

Who dropped the atom bomb? Who just reauthorized more investment in nuclear weapons?

Lest we forget: the threat to democracy comes in many shades of red, white, and blue.

At night we passed the bottle
’round and drank to our lost friends.
We lay alone upon our bunks
and prayed that this would end.

A wall of moving shadows
with rows of swinging keys.
We dreamed that whole leviathans
lay rotting in the reeds.