Sterile gleam of airports
Posted: September 27th, 2009, 8:07 pm
She said, “I want you to write about the most impersonal scene you can think of in post-modernity.” I thought of airports— long wings paved with acres of linoleum sheen, especially the ones they never use. You get only a diffused clicking of distant commerce in transit, an occasional far jet creeping from nowhere to nothing and miles of uninterrupted aluminum window systems, aimless and sterile.
Mystery stairwells appear and re-appear in senseless patterns, if you hike the sterile gleam far enough. They hang certificates in some of them, but nothing passes through except diffused sound from other planets, bounced off miles of aluminum and glass. I should set up a freezer and microwave beside the unseen walls and spotless tile, watch weeds sprout on fallow continents of tarmac.
Impersonality? Maybe I should save that title for war—state-run mass murder. But how far back? Can I go back to medieval warfare? Look at the weapons—flailing spiked balls—aimless brutal decay and disconnect. But postmodern thud is more a function of disconnect in the face of techno-ability to hook together, the interconnected planet estranged from itself—all quite recent. Savage centuries will not go quickly. Medieval war? We hype it in Dolby surround sound, mass-produced, packaged and sold. No wonder gothic slackers ride their cyber-joystick bombs and tag the aimless sterile storefronts in black paint to match the void birth ocean. Centuries of nihilism will not go quietly.
By the way, tackle football is an underrated Western export. Everyone has a wild hair up the ass every other Thursday, so you’d like some violence. But the beauty of a gridiron is war transformed into metaphor. Literal war has never been fully comprehended, nor will it be fully comprehended at the current rate of evolution, and have you seen those literal weapons?
Then she said, “If you don’t like that assignment, write about the scale of things.” Well, gravity keeps my butt on the chair based on 25,000 miles of rock under me. Any smaller and I wouldn’t breathe like this. Any larger and I’d be crushed. Everything is the right scale. I can touch density, but I don’t sense the immeasurable degree to which I’m dwarfed; the galaxies are only flecked nighttime wallpaper. Electrons don't feel small either, and they don’t feel density; they buzz and trickle through space, the mystery medium. Some would have you believe space is held together with invisible strings. And what is the universe but a quark to infinity?
Mystery stairwells appear and re-appear in senseless patterns, if you hike the sterile gleam far enough. They hang certificates in some of them, but nothing passes through except diffused sound from other planets, bounced off miles of aluminum and glass. I should set up a freezer and microwave beside the unseen walls and spotless tile, watch weeds sprout on fallow continents of tarmac.
Impersonality? Maybe I should save that title for war—state-run mass murder. But how far back? Can I go back to medieval warfare? Look at the weapons—flailing spiked balls—aimless brutal decay and disconnect. But postmodern thud is more a function of disconnect in the face of techno-ability to hook together, the interconnected planet estranged from itself—all quite recent. Savage centuries will not go quickly. Medieval war? We hype it in Dolby surround sound, mass-produced, packaged and sold. No wonder gothic slackers ride their cyber-joystick bombs and tag the aimless sterile storefronts in black paint to match the void birth ocean. Centuries of nihilism will not go quietly.
By the way, tackle football is an underrated Western export. Everyone has a wild hair up the ass every other Thursday, so you’d like some violence. But the beauty of a gridiron is war transformed into metaphor. Literal war has never been fully comprehended, nor will it be fully comprehended at the current rate of evolution, and have you seen those literal weapons?
Then she said, “If you don’t like that assignment, write about the scale of things.” Well, gravity keeps my butt on the chair based on 25,000 miles of rock under me. Any smaller and I wouldn’t breathe like this. Any larger and I’d be crushed. Everything is the right scale. I can touch density, but I don’t sense the immeasurable degree to which I’m dwarfed; the galaxies are only flecked nighttime wallpaper. Electrons don't feel small either, and they don’t feel density; they buzz and trickle through space, the mystery medium. Some would have you believe space is held together with invisible strings. And what is the universe but a quark to infinity?
