Oh, and...
..I'm back from Melbourne, about which more later.
I always feel a ridiculous affection for my home town when I see it from the air. Flying gives me a heightened awareness to begin with. For someone who already finds it very, very difficult to shake off the sense of their own mortality and near-purposelessness (!) in the grand scheme of things (I'm thinking about it ALL THE TIME, I say) the sheer awe that I feel when an aeroplane lifts off that we as human beings can leave the ground (and stay off it) makes it impossible to think about much else than my own fragility, and therefore the things that are important to me.
Now I really enjoy being in the air, but I remember being quite frightened on my first long-haul flight. Take-off had already freaked me out (I was only 10) and in the wee hours of the morning I looked around and found myself to be practically the only person awake in the plane. The projected map-thing showed us surrounded by ocean. Suddenly I could FEEL the profound distance between us and the sea, knew it as a space we could fall through to disaster.
I turned to my Dad, personal plane guru, for reassurance. He knew how everything worked. "Don't worry," he whispered in my ear. This was what I needed to hear. There was nothing to worry about. "If we land on water," he continued, "these things sink like a stone." He chuckled and put his headset back on.
And so I always grin like an idiot when I see Frisby from 37,000ft.
posted by Magnificent Trout @ 3:50 pm
6 comments
6 Comments:
And we have a pleasant chuckle whenever I give cues to "alex" - niiiice.
Love you babe, sorry I was so bloody grumpy, hope it was alright and by the way you remained solid, straight and upright, even with the tears!
purposelessness?
even the most intricately crafted Swiss watch will fail to work if it is missing a single cog
... now, back to my cynical self ...
Noo - shut up, it's always a pleasure to be around you.
(I say that with love, of course, and very M-fatiq-ly.)
M - true, but at least the watch knows what it's supposed to be doing! Without any one of us it's just going to be different.
yes... but the watch is also _different_ ie. it doesn't tell the time as we come to expect. it's probably either a paperweight (which is also a worthwhile carrer move) or an elaborate wrist adornment...
i suppose i was trying to summarise some weird thought in my head... we're all doing something. and that something is generally adding value to the greater society (else we wouldn't get paid). and the extra value bits are being converted into art... which may/may not get paid - but it's the stuff that people remember - just check history :-)
so in essence, no matter what you are doing, it's all for art, baby!
yeah!
sorry about that. I've put that guy back into his box now under the stairs.
See, I agree with you there. Life is indeed purposeful if it contributes to the happiness and wellbeing of your fellows - something we can achieve through art. And in the end, that's all we can do - make things comfortable for ourselves - given that life in any form doesn't as yet appear to have any grand purpose. I didn't mean to be maudlin, I just think that people are extremely good at forgetting that a lot of what we do is just for the sake of keeping occupied.
ah, yes. I believe Julius Caesar was on to keeping people amused.
I actually was thinking more along the lines that no matter what you do, as long as you add value to something somewhere in the world, it feeds into paying for outcomes that aren't usually seen as inputs to things... i guess those are outputs. I tend to think of 'pure art' as an output. it's what we (society) are are at this point in time.
so basically the spare 'value' in society feeds into 'pure art' - which by my definition cannot be sold... else it isn't really 'pure'. Sorry Neek, I'm not trying to devalue what you do, I realise that people pay to see the shows. But the shows only came about because someone initially received some funds to put their neck on the line to create something that may/may not be popular.... so it was 'pure art' in the beginning? now its just art. :-)
as you can tell, i'm a little incoherent. this flow of conscious doesn't work so well for me.
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