For Steve Albini
Time was, I could move my arms like a bird
Cruising at altitude, somewhere between earth and void, I am buoyed my atmospheric tensions. My body reorients itself, twists into air-resistant shapes, hurtling horizontally, manoeuvring otherwise, bird-like and yet also not like anything else at all.
I am a plane. I am a plane of consistency, at one with the air that rushes about and through me. I am an abstract flying machine. I am an unidentifiable flying subject. I am penetrating the stratosphere, disrupting equilibriums, turning the forces that act upon me at inhuman speeds to the subtleties of embodied will. Tilt your head and miles are covered. I am not aerodynamic, but rather a projectile borne of an immanent and airborne dynamism.
Fly!
Following Gilles Grelet, flight, like sailing, is “radical, fully human work”, which “consists in seeking and holding, via incessant adjustments, the right distance: far enough from the world not to be sucked in and crushed, close enough not to fall into the void (or into the illusion of having vanquished the void, when one has not only renewed it but extended it to create a world of one’s own).”
Trajectories in sailing and flight may differ, but each mode of traversal must engage in equally vigilant forms of relation with terra firma. We must think differently in the air. “Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving or one around the other”, Deleuze and Guattari write. “Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth.” When I form my body in the shape of a plane, the ground rushes up to meet me and all attempts are made to steer a course clear. I propel myself through gravity’s funnel.
And now I got an engine
A big perverted engine
It runs on strength of will
Who could deny me the right to fly?
You know, it’s my art
When I form my body in the shape of a plane…
All art is framed. All art takes a slither of chaos and presents it to us within the context of a framing device. Chaos is thus bordered — by edges and boundaries, wooden or architectural, experiential or material. Frames interlinked: the figure is a frame within a frame; a frame is figured by other frames; a frame that is a plane, which is my art, which I am. I disguise my body in the shape of a frame.
And the plane becomes a metaphor for my life
And as I suffer for it
Like I’m insane, as it says…
So she suffers under the weight of my plane
You know? It’s my art! When I disguise my body in the shape of a plane…
When I form my body in the shape of a plane, my art is an inversion, as the human frame is distorted by chaos. Airflow is at once lifeforce and enemy. Everything is resistance, as I wrestle with gravity, striving towards grace.
