Flying, but invisible, but okay

Cool and still

2007-09-02T22:22:00.000-04:00

The air is so cool tonight, and the evening so still. There are crickets and other animal sounds, but their calls seem to resonate with the night and with me. I can feel the wetness in my hair from a recent shower. My skin feels like it is the most porous of boundaries between my body and the rest of the world. I can feel my heart beating. I heard recently that most animals live as long as it takes their hearts to beat about 1 and a half billion times. Thanks to several factors, humans live significantly longer than that. Yet it seems that any beat past that count is something borrowed. I walked out of a hotel this morning before breakfast and sat on a bench to smoke a cigarette. A tall, slight black man, bald and perhaps in his 50s, but maybe older, too, pushed through the double doors with some speed. Four paces from the doors, he stopped and looked straight out, his arms dangling from slightly stooped shoulders. "Whoa," he said, in a voice that suggested either dimness or wonder. "It's a beautiful day." He looked at me and I agreed. He walked past the bench and maybe just to himself, but definitely out loud, he said, "I'm glad I'm here to see it."

Later today, the following quote from James Michener's "Centennial" ran through my head.
"In the year 9268 B.C. at the chalk cliffs west of Rattlesnake Buttes, a human being twenty-seven years old, and therefore ancient and about to die, studied a chunk of rock which a younger man had quarried from the mountains."

Right around age 27. Biologically speaking, that's how long we're supposed to live. Everything else is a gift of hygiene, medicine and our relative mastery of the natural world.

Old thought made new

2006-08-16T22:26:00.000-04:00

I wrote this back in February 2003 and had forgotten about it. I came across it today and was surprised by how much I liked it.

When Kelly Wilson went missing, a cloud settled over the town. People moved from their homes to work in their cars and didn’t walk the streets or sidewalks. They kept their eyes on their grocery carts and telephones went unused. A ringing phone became a terrible intrusion into the stillness of a home. The invitations of grassy green parks went unanswered; eddies in the river ran unbroken by children riding inner tubes. Every day was Sunday.

Photocopied sheets with various pictures of Kelly appeared like mold on telephone poles and on downtown walls. They took the place of real people in those places.

The town had at once been silenced by her disappearance and populated exclusively by her visage.

The middle

2006-05-22T01:46:00.000-04:00

Here’s my favorite part of a picture: the middle distance. Not those things closest up, nor those farthest away. I like what’s going on between here and there. It could be children pushing wooden wheels with rods, or a pair of legs disappearing into the ocean or just a field of wheat between a girl and a barn. Not the ploughman up close, not the castle being attacked, not the boat out at sea.

I look at the landscape like that, too. Today, I climbed a hill north of town and got as far as I could go without trespassing. From up there, you can really see how the river carved out its path, leaving precipitous drop-offs that, up-close, look rather mild. The horizon seemed too close, though. I wanted it to be farther, to be able to see all the way over that planetary hump to the ocean on the other end so I could focus on what's in between here and there.

And much as I used to look east when I lived in the West, I found myself looking west today. I wanted to know what’s going on in that middle distance before the continent hits the water on the other side. For some reason, today, that seemed to be where everything is. Not here, not there, but between. And it made me feel like everything that has ever happened to me happened a long time ago.

As I walked down the hill and home, the town and its houses were quiet. There were no people outside. It was a little cool, but dry. The trees made up for the silence of the people. The wind made branches and leaves rock and thrash in broad currents and whorls. It was very much like a stormy sea.

A short distance

2006-04-02T19:48:00.000-04:00

I had an interesting train of thought that left from the station of an article I was reading. When I finally hopped off the mental locomotive, surprisingly, it landed me on the next story I read.

I read the brief “Space Auditing” in the Readings section of the April Harper’s. It describes the attempted dilution (free subscription required) of the Big Bang theory by George Deutsch, a political appointee serving in the Press Office.

That got me thinking about the Big Bang and how densely packed all the matter was — everything from the particle board walls of my porch to my own nose.

That made me consider the space between my nose and the wall, which of course is not empty space at all. Where is empty space? It’s kind of in outer space, but that’s filled with all sorts of stuff like cosmic dust and space junk.

I wondered how much of a danger the dust or junk poses to people and objects out in space. Some, it turns out. What would happen if such a fast moving piece of detritus were to hit an astronaut? It seems like twin punctures would appear noiselessly and suddenly on two parts of a suit, something like bullets hitting underwater GIs as they landed at Normandy, as depicted in Saving Private Ryan.

Or something like the small puncture in the glove of Air Force Capt. Joseph Kittinger Jr., who made an early venture into space in a hot air balloon, which Baker mentioned to me the other day. Then Kittinger made a 14-minute, 16-mile, freefall back to Earth, the longest and farthest at the time (maybe still, I’m not sure).

Balloons in space? That took me back to an episode of Star Trek: Voyager in which a character in a society roughly equivalent to Earth’s Middle Ages tries to send a message to the mysterious ship in his sky by a small hot-air balloon. In that episode, entitled “Blink of an Eye”, the inhabitants of the planet evolve at a pace of about two days per Voyager second. The crew watches as the planet goes from pre-historic to space-age levels of development in a matter of hours.

That’s about where I quit thinking and went back to reading Harper’s. I had skipped a longer Readings piece, tagged “parable,” to read the shorter “Space Auditing.” I went back a page and read a heretofore-unpublished Robert Louis Stevenson story from 1895 called “The Clockmaker” (not online, find a Harper’s on the Newsstand). The story describes the evolution of life in a forgotten carafe of water and the attendant myths and misguided theories the beings develop to describe their world. The carafe developed life and intelligence in about a week from the standpoint of the room around the carafe. Within the carafe, generations passed. Not quite the same as a temporal division, but the disparity between observed and observer is the same.

Unfortunately, it appears Stevenson was a believer in Intelligent (if inadvertent) Design. While interesting, the story does little to advance the idea. A work of fiction is by it’s nature constructed and can therefore reflect anything the author chooses, including a clever metaphor for our own world. Even the most strident science supporter admits the possibility of Intelligent Design – It’s just unlikely and un-testable.

Later, when I was gathering links, I made a side trip to space elevators, which I’ll note here just because they’re so cool.

I was surprised how my armchair wanderings had brought me back so close to what I was about to read based on what I had just read. Of course, Harper’s placed the two pieces close because of their related content. Still, it was a little twinge of synchronicity.

Readily reshaped

2006-02-23T02:06:00.000-05:00

Something appeals to me about making this item a liquid.

Despite obvious analogues to precious materials in today’s world, there is something hopeful about a fluid.

At first, I thought of something that glows, but that seemed unsubtle. Although an inverted vase shape that emits its own light still appeals to me.

Focus on the object

2006-02-21T02:16:00.000-05:00

I have been considering a story about a spaceship.

I know I want my story to be partially about trying to get this spaceship to fly somewhere far away – farther even than we have considered sending unmanned probes in the early 21st Century. And I think I know that I want the person or people on this spaceship to find something that they did not expect.

It is difficult to decide what that should be, and I have been trying to let my imagination help me find it. I have also been trying to fall asleep while thinking about this item to see if my dreams will reveal it to me.

But even after I discover what the explorer(s) should find, I am not sure what they will do with it. I hope that its nature will bring that answer, at least in part.
I have a feeling that the travelers should return home, but that is not a foregone conclusion.

This story will also have pictures and maybe sounds.