Corpse Meditation, literally meditation over a picture of dead body, is a form of meditation practiced by monks in Thailand.  It helped them deal with the grim task of cremating thousands of victims after the 2004 tsunami.  The photos of corpses or decomposing bodies are sold in religious shops throughout Thailand and it is quite normal and understood for monks to keep macabre pictures among their personal possessions, so they may see beyond an external aspect of a living person (The Washington Times, 1/3/2005).  On the other hand, in a total different context, contemplating the postcard of Lynching Laura and Lawrence Nelson of 1911, I wonder how sightseers interpret the image of human corpses in their mind.

For me, the image of a mother and her son hanging under the Canadian River Bridge brings me to tear and fear. The cry of a mother knowing that she is losing her child is the emptiness of circumstance, in the postcard. The cry penetrates inside me, like the lyrics to Wood Guthrie’s song about the hanging, “Don’t Kill My Baby and My Son”: (use with permission. Since 2013, the center has moved from NY to Tulsa Oklahoma).

As I walked down that old dark town
In the town where I was born,
I heard the saddest lonesome moan
I ever heard before.

My hair it trembled at the roots
Cold chills run down my spine,
As I drew near that jail house
I heard this deathly cry:

O, don’t kill my baby and my son,
O, don’t kill my baby and my son.
You can stretch my neck on that old river bridge,
But don’t kill my baby and my son.

Now, I’ve heard the cries of a panther,
Now, I’ve heard the coyotes yell,
But that long, lonesome cry shook the whole wide world
And it come from the cell of the jail.

Yes, I’ve heard the screech owls screeching,
And the hoot owls that hoot in the night,
But the graveyard itself is happy compared
To the voice in that jailhouse that night.

Then I saw a picture on a postcard
It showed the Canadian River Bridge,
Three bodies hanging to swing in the wind,
A mother and two sons they’d lynched.

There’s a wild wind blows down the river,
There’s a wild wind blows through the trees,
There’s a wild wind that blows ’round this wide,  wide world,
And here’s what the wild winds say:

O, don’t kill my baby and my son,
O, don’t kill my baby and my son.
You can stretch my neck on that old river bridge,
But don’t kill my baby and my son.

Skip to the present, natural and man-made disasters bring up an array of images to us.  For better or worse, we are looking into postcards of happenings from TV. computer, and cell phone screens.  Because social media flash mobs (both physical and through propagation of ideas) are everywhere; in the form of authoritative voice, public opinions, profiling, camera taping, neighborhood beautification, dress code, etc., I fear for my living.  Any impulse that may drag me and my family out of our home and hang us under a big oak tree may be righteously vindicated, in the guise of just cause.