Spring Equinox 2017 - Clouds

(This is an essay related to the poem Clouds posted on the fiction side of this blog).

Early in my engineering career, I had to travel a bit. Not as much as many people I knew, but enough to call air travel regular. ’88-90 and ’93-94 were particularly heavy years. Back then, a full service travel agency occupied a suite right inside our admin building. We could use them for official trips and for vacations.

When I was a kid, I used to love flying. I think because I remember dropping off and picking up my father from the old airport in Orlando. Way back before there was security or even x-ray machines, when you could still meet someone at the gate. Seems like a geologic era ago. Back then, air travel still felt exotic, perhaps a carryover image from the ‘60s. My father flew all over the world, sometimes for work, sometimes with my mother. Dunoon, Sunnyvale, Paris, Frankfurt, Nassau, Charleston, Boston, Madrid.

Anymore, I’m not as fond of flying. Mostly, it’s a hassle between security, the lines and the cramped conditions. As well, one or two rough landings have put me off a bit. Particularly one in Seattle which is the only time I remember the pilot standing outside the cockpit as we disembarked and refusing to make eye contact with anyone. Looking back, I think he was lucky to get the plane down in one piece. He had two distinct opportunities to screw that up. I’m glad he rose to the challenge even if none of us were particularly happy about it at the time.

Back in the ‘90s, flying occupied a kind of gray area with me, somewhere between romantic and required. Routine. It was something I did, not something I thought much about. Often enough that I could identify Waycross, Georgia, from the air. I’d been there (on the ground) a couple times for game research. It has a very distinctive five-point road pattern and lies along the flight corridor from Tampa to Maryland and the northeast.

For work, I mostly flew alone. There might be other coworkers on my flight but in general we never sat together. Which was fine by me. Because of the nature of my job, rarely could I do any work on the plane. Mostly I read or caught up on sleep. When neither of those felt inviting, I’d stare out the window. I wasn’t much for chatting with strangers. Just not in my nature. It wasn’t until years later when we started flying back and forth to Dragon*Con that I purposefully set aside that time to write.

Sometime in there, I started carrying a notebook with me when I traveled. I just found that first notebook in the back closet as I sought out information for this essay. I can’t say how long I’d been carrying it. A date in ’92 appears about a third of the way through it. A draft of Clouds comes a few pages later. I distinctly remember that one being inspired by the view out of a plane window, though I have no memory of which trip I might have been on.

Which means it could have taken as much as two to three years before I thought Clouds was finished enough to scribe into my little tweed book of poetry. It likely got set down for an extended period before I was in the right mood to pick it up again. Such is the nature of me and poetry. I only have one draft of Clouds in the notebook which means I likely typed it in and worked on it electronically. Or more likely printed pages to mark up and retype in. If you think it’s bad now, you should have seen how it first came out. That’s pretty much true of most things I write. 

So why post this poem now? What is it that still appeals to me? Clouds still resonates with me, especially the final line. I think it captures the way I felt then about flying and about my life at that particular moment. There is a different world up there if only we are willing to see it. A world where you can leave any troubles in this world behind. And yet not become so unanchored or so lost that the illusion blocks out reality below.

As I reread it, I think about Larry Niven’s novel, The Integral Trees, which I read in college. He created an exotic science fiction world in which there is no ground. It’s set in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant where indigenous life formed which was subsequently colonized by humans. I can tell his vision influenced me. More, it built on an imaginative influence already present.

When I was young, I used to lie on the floor in our living room and stare at the ceiling. At some point it struck me exactly what it would be like if the world turned upside down. The ceiling was bright white popcorn yet completely clean, clear and unobstructed. There was no furniture to dodge, no patchwork carpets, no cluttered surfaces. Inverted doorways became hatchways with a large lip you had to step over like watertight doors on a submarine. I remember laying there for quite some time imagining walking on the ceiling, complete with its sometimes inset, sometimes bulging light fixtures.

In our current home, the ceiling fans and dining room chandelier make for interesting obstacles. As does the drop ceiling in the kitchen that transforms into a step.  And the fairies, dragons, crystals and oil lamps hanging from monofilament threads and chains that become stalagmites.

I’ve done this in every place I’ve lived, though I don’t do it often anymore. It still takes a second of conscious thought to reorient my perceptions to up being down. But once it’s there, it sets like concrete. In the same way that once you see one of those old 3D images buried in black and white static noise.

I think most kids do this or something like it. Something that involves their unique perspective, or one they create. Children are imaginative. It’s how they learn. I’m not entirely sure why we fall out of it, those of us who do. Perhaps we’re eventually admonished for it being, well, childish. Perhaps the novelty of it falls away as we grow and our perspective stabilizes. Or perhaps the skill simply rusts from disuse over time.

And yet, especially today, I think it’s important to attain and retain that perspective. There’s escapism in it, recognition that there’s only so much in this life that can taken seriously. In troubled and troubling times, whether personal or political, that balance of the real and comfortingly imaginative perspectives is what will see us through. Combined with the sense of renewal it offers, for me, captures what the spring equinox is all about.


© 2017 Edward P. Morgan III