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Written by Dian Sousa | 29 March 2009
Posted in iNFORMATION PRESS - Points of View

This short flight doesn’t sell vodka! Fortunately there is a blue-tinged mattress of cloud which may cushion the impending plummet. In panic, I rely on the logic of my old religion. If God made Leonardo Da Vinci and therefore airplane flight, wouldn’t he have factored in the force of hurling metal in proper ratio to cloud bounce?

I’m no longer a Christian so when I use the words, ‘God,’ ‘He,’ and ‘Creation’  I mean it only in the sense of god as an artist, like Christo (because of the large instillations, but with a better grasp of the inherent dangers of gigantic umbrellas.)  I also mean a god closer to the gods of 19th Century Russian Christian Existentialist Nicolai Berdyaev or the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: A lonely, poetic god, intertwined like a grateful, but tentative lover with its unfinished creation.

Leg Two: LAX to INDIANAPOLIS

The plane to Indianapolis is bigger than a urethra. It’s more like a giant Martian sarcophagus. There is something horrible in its storage hold. It is banging around like a 1950’s space blob eagerly relaxing its malevolent astro-slug body. Eventually it will expand to the point of bursting into the passenger seating. We will either suffocate in its massive, gummy folds or ooze like fleshy play-dough out the sides of this alien missile.
 
Since there is nothing I can do about it, I just keep drinking tiny airline vodkas, looking down on the cracked, brown American interior. No people, no cities, just frost and deep fissures. The Colorado River is slithering cobalt, rimmed by red fingerling outcroppings and icy snakes. I tell my  beloved, diminutive 4th vodka that the Earth must be a woman. It’s too curvy, too open and deep, too pocketed with surprise to be anything else.

 

This comforts me. Maybe it’s a vodka revelation, but so what? Sacrament and epiphany come in many flavors. What have I been afraid of? Space age technology and inarticulate fascists? Those are idiot fears and I am freer than that.  I am where I should be. The living, craggy body of Earth holds me like she holds her honey bees and her oaks. Her heavy body shoulders me like it shoulders Kilimanjaro and the Artic Mass. If  I crash, I crash into her.

Dian Sousa prefers trains, Democracy, and sometimes whisky.