Monday, January 5, 2015

Many Million Metres Above The Sordid Ground

Have always been all for distantiation, displacement, the conscientious removal of the self from the eye of the storm, or chaos, or even just the noise. Being at certain vantage points allow for that, and space – vertical travel, vertical perspective, looking from afar, looking at earth and the ground and the tiny people and the veins of meandering roads and tunnels and grid-like fields have that effect. It's always at these high altitudes, the best and most common example being a plane ride, that one encounters revelations, small or big, inward or outward. Up there, you can at once reconcile with a kind of futility and a kind of grandiosity. It is at such great heights that you reflect on your insignificance, but at the same time, experience an inflated sense of self that you're above it – above the other people, above the clouds, above the currents that move oceans, above the manmade, above the constructs of life that, simply, no matter how mundane or mighty, forlorn or powerful, don't mean a thing. Don't mean a god damn thing at all. It can extinguish in the blink of an eye, a drop of a rock, a rotation in reverse.
Then what? Now what?

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