The Wonders of Flight
Planes hang in the air over SFO. The approach path is stacked with two duets and a fifth plane about to touch down. As traffic slows around the bend just south of the Crowne Royal hotel, the four jumbo jets become motionless. My rotation on the ground cancels their forward motion and for those few seconds I am raptured. The constellations above this busy part of American air space (SFO,OAK,SJC) have always fascinated me. In moments of perceptive-postponment like this I find great hope, as if those few seconds of freedom could be a symptom of something much greater.
Part of my fascination with flight centers around the extreme violence that the act rarely escapes. Jet engines are violent. Flight is an incision in the sky, cutting and tearing everything in its way. Our planes are steel vibratos reaching higher and higher notes with every additional ounce of fuel.
What interests me is the disjunction between the acceleration of flight as one experiences it and the velocity of flight that one is able to observe. From my position on the ground I am seperated from acceleration; I know only the soft velocity of a small dot skirting across the sky. During the time that my velocity cancels out the movement of the plane it is still, hanging without attachment to anything: simply a composition. A temporary draining of violence, this is a sensual, seductive experience. The musk of jet fuel and the haze of the international date line without the violence of take off, turbulence, control space.
This is why, perhaps, I find the observation of man made flight more satsfying than that of birds. In the latter's motion there seems a great deal more harmony. Birds have evolved into a place in the sky and fullly utilize their agency of flight. For man, flight is always an act of violence, of tearing oneself away from that which they are part of. We are tearing holes in the sky. We are tearing holes in our lives. We are tearing holes in our cities, and almost as quickly we are sewing them back up.
--Posted 07/24/03 01:18AM