I am in space.
It is an ever-unfolding expanse of a none-more-black sheet, dotted with the breath of the ancients. I sit with them, my eyes reflecting their wisdom as they show me their sparkle, their gas, and all the pretty underthings hidden beneath their assigned astronomical designations. My mind ca-chings like an olde-worldy cash register, the information, the inspiration, printing out rat-a-tat on the dot-matrix receipt of my understanding. It is longer than a CVS receipt1. My space suit grows fatter with the oxygen of knowledge. I am ready to descend to my home planet and make something from the stolen artifacts of my exploration.
Will you pay my Earth landing fee? It is ever so expensive and I spent all my dough on booster fuel.
I am in space.
It reveals itself to me in increments of Wow! Dog stars and dwarf planets, nebulae, and galaxies. I vacuum up the stardust with the Hoover of my brain. I explore the surfaces of hostile planets and listen for the sound that never comes. In space, I bathe in the soapy celestial residue of spirals and clusters. Observe heavenly bodies engaged in expansive, gravitational yoga on the thin mat of the universe. Space bathing is a decadent float of mind and body and spirit in the rich, liquid cosmos. My skin is wrinkled beneath the confines of my Extravehicular Mobility Unit because of it.
But time’s up. I have harvested and gathered and absorbed the beauty of this space. The freedom and the endless, open acceptance. My mind has mined these silent subjects and jotted down ancillary mission notes with my space pen. Inspired to beyond the reaches of the possible, I must de-elevate my levitate. I am ready to work. Ready to be creative. I must come down. We must all come down, eventually.
Can you spare a few shiny coins to illuminate my landing pad? It will really give me something to aim for and it has been said (often) that I lack direction.
I am in space.
Have you ever been? Have you ever let your mind catch a rocket to the black and let it float weightless and alive in a capsule of wonder? Have you ever experienced the drift of zero gravity thought, untethered to the world of bills, the price of milk, and comments about your limp hair and sallow skin?
Space is a bliss worth exploring. There’s so much room to think up here. Up here, you have the freedom to be a satellite to your life and allow your mind to wander and seek and explore the outer reaches of your imagination. Have you ever been a satellite? Have you ever launched yourself, then stuck out all your mirrored surfaces to maximize energy absorption? Have you ever fine-tuned your signal receptors for uninterrupted, no-drop broadcast? Thrusters and antennae, arrays and stabilization controls, all working to beam it back ‘atcha, to the planet of your birth, in the medium of your choice.
Come back, come back, come back! I must come back while the signal is strong and hot and clear.
Speaking of clarity, would you be able to clear my landing with the relevant agency by paying the landing fee, which has risen steeply in recent years due to the cost of avocado on rye? I would forever appreciate it. Thank you.
I am in space.
Reentry is a pickle. I don’t want to burn up and lose the gains in my brain. This relaxing sortie into the wild wide unknown leaves me vulnerable and alone, relying on my own skills to make it back unscathed. To make it back without my skin dancing with that burning urgency that turns to crisp and brittle before evaporating to nothingness. As though I never existed. As though I never was.
Without you to guide me to land, to show me that you see me and what I am capable of, how will I know that yes, I have returned safely? Without you to provide the landing pad and pay the price of my readmittance to this Down to Earth world, how will I assess the success of my mission in the debriefing? How will I know I am what I say I am—a writer, a poet, an artist?
HOW WILL I KNOW!?
For the love of the celestial old ones, will you PLEASE pay the bounty to clear a space in a field, fork out for any and all validation fees plus landing bribes, and get me back to terra firma?
I am in space.
I. Am in space.
They say when in doubt, check the manual.
My manifest mission manifest reads:
3-13. PANEL 11. YOU DO NOT NEED PERMISSION TO LAND.
Oh, that’s right, I forgot. Ideas. Dreams. Life. My mission is my own.
Carry on.
But should my terminal become terminal, will someone please water my fern?
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one’s least attractive, that sometimes it’s just easier not to do anything. Writing — I can really only speak to writing here — always, always only starts out as shit: an infant on monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food.”
- David Rakoff from Half Empty
Via Austin Kleon
On Rotation: “Very Never (My Mind Extends) by Tomaga with vocals by Cathy Lucas.
Lovely.
In 1972 the Polaroid Corporation commissioned the Eames Office to produce a film introducing the new and revolutionary SX-70 instant-photography camera developed by Edwin Land.
I’ve never really thought about the sound of electric cars - until this Dadadrummer post. It reaches back to a fascinating project from 9 years ago which ended up being a thing. Recommended reading. (I also had no idea that Brian Eno wrote the startup sound for Windows 95. That’s today’s TIL.)
Excerpt from Dadadrummer's post:
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst are musicians and futurists. This was a commissioned project for them, which (Mat told me on social media, when I asked) took a year but then seemed to go nowhere… until Holly’s father picked them up at the airport one Christmas, driving his new hybrid. Which was playing their tune. (More or less – it’s uncredited, and seems to be unchanging as opposed to the environmentally responsive technology described by their original proposal.)
Via Dadadrummer
As a side note, this Holly Herndon album, Proto, was one of the wildest records I bought back in 2019. I love it because of how… I dunno, different it is? I’d never heard music like this before (sheltered existence, obviously). I did some background, digging in on how it was made. Here’s a review of the record which talks a little about the AI developed for it, which they called Spawn.