People can’t fly anymore without recalling that image of a 747 flying into the world trade. It’s an image perpetually fresh in our minds, a permanent picture-file catalogued in our collective database. When I look at the blank monitors on the plane, and everyone around me tucked away in sleep, wrapped up in identical blankets, knocked out by the lowered levels of oxygen, I see the image pop up on the screen again like it did for a week, playing on loop like a trendy new music video. DeLillo was right, we all get some kind of deep kick from watching human catastrophes on a large scale. The power of the present moment rarely reveals itself to America on any kind of intimate basis. People in China die. US embassies in Africa get blown up. The Palestinians send in suicide bombers. But New York is ours, they said, our king, with every rook, pawn, knight, and castle standing firm. New York goes down in the permanent archives.
I hate when they lower the oxygen. Everyone else falls into a coma but I just get a migraine. My head starts rolling like it does after days without sleep. Ideas spontaneously emerge in the strange space of a silent sleeping city, crawling through the thin air between the stratosphere and space itself. All of a sudden all your ideas seem urgently important. But it’s only because you are writing them under this oxygen-deprived cave-man condition. There is something almost ancient and holy about all of it. Back in the day nomads and Native Americans huddled around fires in tee-pee villages. Up here in the sky, purses and money pouches is our fuel. We jingle our jewelry and sleep; hibernate together, our ghostly breaths and nose-hummings mesh together into a celestial amen. We are the elite, we have gathered here to pray. We just don’t know it.
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