In 'Night Flight from Houston' Laurie Anderson talks of a woman who, looking out, confuses up from down, and sees below her not 'the lights of little towns' but stars and constellations. 'Big Dipper, Little Dipper'.
The sky on the evening flight from JFK was dark and perfectly clear. We took off as the sun was setting and rose in a white noise silence into the night.
The woman two seats along was heading to California. Compliance and strategy in the renewable energy business. A new job, after graduating in engineering and IT and working in the petrochemical industry. Her first time away from her son, five, since he was born. We talked, and in the gaps between conversations looked out the windows.
If Anderson, travelling over the ranches and deserts of Texas has seen below her pin pricks of light, sometimes on a grid, sometimes not, then the land below this flight path was of a different order of density.
Globular clusters. Supernova intensities. Galaxies with spiral arms. Ribbon like nebulae along the banks of rivers. Black holes at the ruined hearts of industrial towns.
New York. Jersey City. Baltimore. Philadelphia. Pittsburgh. St Louis. All the cities of the built up East.
Then abruptly we are away from what William Gibson saw as a single vast conurbation. The Boston Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. BAMA. The Sprawl. Where gritty rains fall in the spaces between polycarbonate towers and corporate archologies.
But there is none of that, yet. Instead we pass over the silence of dark mountains into plains where farmsteads post the beacon of a single light. A car traces a comet's eccentric path between suns. The red dwarf flicker of a gas refinery.
I look out, and see constellations below. Leo, Sagittarius. Orion. His belt and knife, arms drawn up to the tensile bow.
The sky on the evening flight from JFK was dark and perfectly clear. We took off as the sun was setting and rose in a white noise silence into the night.
The woman two seats along was heading to California. Compliance and strategy in the renewable energy business. A new job, after graduating in engineering and IT and working in the petrochemical industry. Her first time away from her son, five, since he was born. We talked, and in the gaps between conversations looked out the windows.
If Anderson, travelling over the ranches and deserts of Texas has seen below her pin pricks of light, sometimes on a grid, sometimes not, then the land below this flight path was of a different order of density.
Globular clusters. Supernova intensities. Galaxies with spiral arms. Ribbon like nebulae along the banks of rivers. Black holes at the ruined hearts of industrial towns.
New York. Jersey City. Baltimore. Philadelphia. Pittsburgh. St Louis. All the cities of the built up East.
Then abruptly we are away from what William Gibson saw as a single vast conurbation. The Boston Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. BAMA. The Sprawl. Where gritty rains fall in the spaces between polycarbonate towers and corporate archologies.
But there is none of that, yet. Instead we pass over the silence of dark mountains into plains where farmsteads post the beacon of a single light. A car traces a comet's eccentric path between suns. The red dwarf flicker of a gas refinery.
I look out, and see constellations below. Leo, Sagittarius. Orion. His belt and knife, arms drawn up to the tensile bow.
