chase scenes serial #17
realized that I had left my camera on the plane. I had lost all of the supplementary materials from the trip. Many photos of iceberg lettuce salads lost. What just now entered my mind was that whoever ‘claimed’ my lost camera must have waded through all of these photos. My impressions of the Black Hills and the Badlands. Did they take some time to reconstruct my journey, form character sketches of my father and myself? How accurate were they? How comprehensive and personal were they? The text I wrote to accompany those photos would have added very little to their experience other than to corroborate the chronology of the trip, yet it would not have grounded that trip in any other continuum of character than the one forged on that trip. I am here for only a short time longer in between writings as the journey nears its end, I have been weighing what I hope this text will accomplish as of yet I recall only detailing one tableau in the trip. Does the actual composition need to cease when I touch down in Atlanta?‡ The man next to me is rehearsing Italian phrases from his guidebook. I remember one from my voyage. “Ha une camera?” Sometimes it repeats in my head uncontrollably. It is a thought that rides next to everything else as I go through
‡ Yes, it consumes, as feared. But I embrace it. There is an integral passion in the fluid composition of my life. Yes, more academic pursuits, drudgery, distant thoughts and sterile actions fall by the wayside for, what, one week? I will most certainly finish this short work by tomorrow night. As we raced out of Atlanta, climbing to the west and looping far south around an enormous stormfront which had hit Atlanta by the time I had reached the Twin Cities, apparently striking a plane from the Atlanta airport with lightning, our path through space took us through such enormous caverns of cloudscapes, we would penetrate into gothic voids with grey ceilings and continuous folds of flocculent halls and tunnels, when the clouds would drop away creating an opening to the earth, the sun reflecting from outside of the storm system off of the ground and back to the underside of the clouds would fill the void with the most ethereal shade of yellow I have ever seen. It was pure lemon afternoon sunlight [made into solid vapour by consuming the clouds as they embraced our jet]. Is that memory not enough to warrant losing one week of my life, that commission to paper for when my mind turns to vapour, not worth another layer of graphite on the misguided drawing taped to my desk?
