A childhood spent driving to all destinations, no matter the distance, has meant that flying never gets old. From my seat by the window, the sun glamours in rivers and ponds. The speed of it all. Forty-five minutes in the air to cover most of an island home I have yet, in thirty-two years, to see the whole of.
I can’t turn my eyes away from the water below. It burns wet meanders against my retinas, and I sneeze. Little land capillaries are now everywhere I look.
I know the sun is so unfathomably distant, but I can’t stop thinking about how I am blinded by its reflection a mile below. For a moment, that mile below seems more distant than any other glanced up into, high above. Everything expands again into lightness. I gained so much weight after the fall. It is shed as I come to know another life.
The sky is the first source of knowledge. Jacques Lacarrière on the Gnostics lies open on my lap. Here are my underlinings:
A quest to know is “launched against the entire universe, against the immensity of the firmament, against man’s original alienation and the falsity of systems and institutions”.
“All the beings of our world are … the sediment of a lost heaven.”
“Weight, cold, and immobility are at once our conditions, our destiny, and our death.”
“The task of the Gnostic [is to] discard or lighten all the matters of this world”; to “break the ancient curse which made the world a cheat and a sham, and cast us down, far from the sparkle and blazing illumination of the hyper-world”.
“Let us begin at the beginning … with the sky.”