On Another Plane

So allegedly I'm starting this blog because several people, including two of my closest friends and a psychiatrist, have told me that I have to write. But really I'm starting it because I told me that I have to write. I used to have a plain black journal that I brought with me everywhere, tucked into my teddy bear's arms. I tried to write in it on a regular basis, but it ended up just being my "airplane book." Seeing as I'm up in the air at least once every four months, I figured I could just vent all the emotions and events of the past several weeks into the book then instead of whiling away my time staring out the window. The thing is, every single time all I wrote about was what I was seeing out the window. I wrote about the geometry of farmland America, the pillows of marshmallow fluff above the Atlantic, the mysteries of impenetrable darkness over the Pacific. I wrote about European city skylines, Vietnamese rice paddies, and the desperation you could see in Detroit's neighborhoods even from 10,000 feet above.

Then one day I lost the book. I left it on a plane from Budapest to Frankfurt, or maybe it was Budapest to London. And I haven't written anything in an airplane book since. Until two days ago, in transit from Raleigh to LAX. I was, as usual, staring out the window, thinking about my very-near future as a graduate student in mathematics. The sun was setting, and since we were flying due west, it had been setting for two hours and didn't look like it would ever go down. And then I realized: the poetry that lies behind my proofs, trapped in an airplane book somewhere, has never and will never leave me. So I wrote this on my boarding pass, right over my seat assignment (11F) and flight number (1069):

Looking out yet another airplane window over the wing (a Boeing 757 is over 150 feet long and the wing takes up about 15 feet of that length, but somehow I am always sitting over it) at yet another seemingly-endless sunset over the actually-endless horizon, I suddenly realize I am looking at perfection. The clean, smooth metal line and regular heartbeat of red warming lights sit at the Golden Ratio, the Holy Grail of angles, to jaggedy layers of mountain, blood-orange blood, spilled Hi-C, and slow tears in autumn before a slowly darkening sky. There is no contrast here, no good Mother Nature and villainous Technology. Sorry Ted Kaczinsky. We are part of this world and it is part of us. Frank Lloyd Wright had some of it right when he build houses to meet landscapes. But landscapes were also built to meet us, and we were created with tools and power to change both the land and ourselves to live in this harmony. This metallic, striated melding that tastes of warm honey mixed with aluminum, this meeting of man and nature.