I am a text in flight; this is strangely comforting. A sentence noted the following information in the margin: Ground speed: 1,021 kilometres per hour. Distance travelled: 373 kilometres. There was still an estimated 10 hours and 15 minutes to go until we reached our destination.
Who is 'we'?
I am a text in flight. And here is the sentence: "When a plane shoots downward out of control, its crew cramp themselves fearfully into their seats for minutes like years, expecting the crash: but the smoothness of that long dive continues to their graves. Only for survivors is there an after-pain."1
I have had experience of speed: rising, falling, the distance to destination stuck weirdly where it is like a vein.
What is the promise of speed? Lawrence named death. Speed is only speed if there is writing. Production of facts out of movement, movement out of facts. Production is speed.
This is what I write in my notebook, on the plane home, after we met. I am a text in flight. You are a sentence.
New York, 1899 -- a driver is arrested for having been to twelve miles an hour, a barrel-load of speed in his kitchen, liquids, domestic and commercial, living space.
I scroll. 'A' introduces unwanted space in the narrative, slows things down. 'A' fast boat refracts ends -- the end of peak hour, the drama before the stock exchange closes for the day.
Gesture fuses with sleep. Nightmares rush. Thin veins in the brain dilate like a Forbes poem across the synapse, or like acid. That brittle, accelerating crack up. You, sentence, are too volatile.
I do not have a point at which I am author, but a vector, this quantum line with mass and direction. I weigh words. I intend 300 words towards you. I email you. There is an error correction protocol: if you don't receive within 48 hours, I intend more. There is a fault. I have a problem reading your errors. It is a problem about how I read intention. Are you merely late or have you abandoned me? Are you desperate for one little hour or indifferent to time?
I am a text in flight. You are a sentence.
A server crashed, you asked for two more days. Our partnership, the relationship of sentence to text is pure request: Mm?
Every technology programs its own accident; every speed induces its own waiting. Here is the strange thing -- this unnatural time, this time that exists only in anticipation of another time, became something pure. We were junkies.
Re-order: The book is the accident of writing, inscribing these bits on a surface, in order to produce tragedy.
Waiting for time, for score, for love. Time is not itself, anticipates other time, exists.
Sidebar: suicide has its own gravity. It is forgetting to wait.
Mainline: The waiting body is ready only for time, permanence. Waiting anticipates nothing, is devoid of expectation.
Conjecture: The swirl of blood does something overtly scientific. Break, entering the surface, up, down, the curvature: technology. Released sentences erase closure. I am text in flight.
The cat's eyes form a continuous strip of light like a minor embolism. Something responds rapidly. Freedom is not merely, not merely, not merely... a chewing gum that buzzes the gums and has you busy busy busy.
The grass is like litigation. You are a sentence. You know me.
And suddenly it's night. (Suddenness is, you are right, belief.)
I believe I believe so rapidly muttered under your breath.
Patrick White knew this. They pulled up at the bottom of his driveway in the white Holden and yelled from the car -- we know what you're up to. The Federal Police became near.
The injustice got to him. They speed-read your oeuvre in seventeen hours and forty-five minutes.
Sydney Harbour vibrates. White had rust in the blood, and speed.
Various references. A gathering intelligence in the shadow of immense machines, of war, cinema, movement and information, the lees of speed, industrial speed, another kind of desert, a surprise of clouds, reds-under-the-bed, a Cold War haze, platinum fillings, a beautiful network of roads and trees and chunks of plasterboard.
There's a subtext here. That makes three of us.
There's a press conference held in London. Greer says: don't sit there that chair is reserved for -- well, for you.
This is not a problem. It is typical. If this were mine I would write here of Australian expatriation, that mighty joke about fate and outcomes.
We're having server problems. I'm caught in work. I think the book will be brilliant. That said, I am a text in flight. You contain the smoothness of that long dive. I admire fluent repetition, learning lines for the stage.
Collaborative writing is sex (broad sense).Qualification: sex is not in the machinery of speeds, whereas literature is obviously factory work. Moderation of qualification: "writer likes sex" is no story.
Requalification: sex is not private; it is technical and technological.
Reorder: Do women experience speed differently?
"There were women on the other side of Sydney Cove, standing there dumbly in the drifts of rain, clinging to the wet iron and staring through the railings with a hungry intentness. They made no effort to wave. Their faces, white and strained and tiny in the distance, hardly moved. All through the morning I noticed them and was aware of their thin hands gripping the iron, and the rain over their knuckles and running over their wedding rings."5
Women's bodies are barred from the sea, canals throwing up their stuff. Reorder: Like haircuts and other cultural baggage stuck in a warehouse down by the waterfront.
Sidebar: I too despise members of the Australian cricket team. What else can be said? An English commentator calls the atmosphere "festive".
Insertion: As though it were in the East!
The past: Chromed pipeware tables and chair, packed full of gear, tremble in anticipation of free houses, flex under the weight of dusty wartime Penguins in regulation orange jackets. Literary modernism gone to war in servicemen's pockets. Penguin Modern Classics from the 70s in Germano Facetti covers, a Dali painting gracing the cover of Sartre's Nausea.
Confession: This book which is more responsible than any other for my becoming a writer.
Empires of literary speed, modern content packaged in modern form. I become Virginia Woolf, driving, writing, rapturing the evening's shapes and colours in Sussex, overcome.
Qualification: "I feel life left behind even as the road is left behind."
Requalification: "I feel suddenly attached, not to the past but to the future. I think of Sussex in five hundred years to come."
Intervention: "Eggs and bacon; toast and tea; fire and bath..."6
Rousseau's Meditations Of A Solitary Walker has me walking as the Butcher of Baghdad amongst the many hearts of Richard Burton and date palms.
Incursion: I must repeat my line, or else sorrow at this image of you. I repeat: I am a text in flight. This is strangely comforting.
The three wise men in his daughter's nativity play Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and maybe the French President, or was that wishful thinking?
Print maps digressions towards me towards me towards me towards me. You're all immoral.
War makes a prime minister memorable; Slessor, Virginia Woolf eating asparagus as if it were feminism, smart bombs inauthenticating my intelligence.
Details: Paul Beaver, Jane's Defence; 12 Tornado strike aircraft; Paveway III laser guided bombs; Tomahawk cruise missiles; South London; car boot.
Place: Baghdad, 1998; Baghdad, 1991. We'll have to wait and see.
Poets of mass and direction; at least this is what it was decided to print in the newspaper.
I am a text in flight. And here is a sentence: "The spectator's need... to be distracted from his daily warfare is continually reproduced by that daily warfare, but is just as continually in conflict with his need to be able to control his own fate."8
I'm at an airport in Los Angeles the day before Christmas, en route. The bomb squad mobilise, space is cordoned. Everything proceeds next door. Absurdities are barely noticeable.
Smoke detectors map unpredictable movements, the weather over Sydney, over Bagdhad. I'm depressed by the knowledge of cricket. I pause and take stock.
Prayer is instant, incomparable with speed. Grace and Damnation. Monsanto releases genetically modified rape seed into the environment. Mass and body.
There's rapture in this, if you know the subtext. (I am the ...)
It might be a poem by a famous Australian poet. Peat smoulders. At Wicken they clear the scrub. A certain kind of bumble bee will prosper. A variety of waterbirds settle. There are rumours of otters.
Speed makes no sense without an absolute speed against which to experience its limits. Speed makes the absurd. (Incursion: the timing of jokes, you know?)
Artaud stares at Jean d'Arc the way Jean stares at time. There is something inhuman about it.
You have no idea how television or compact discs work, but faces smile from both, friendly, beckoning.
Think of the legal apparatus that consigned Joan to the flames. It didn't intend thereby to make her immortal, a precocious celebrity.
Speed is prey to accidents, and this slows it down. To give something form requires deformation.
I am a text in flight. You are a sentence: Information is pattern with a hole in it.
Anticlimax: (Suggestion: That hole is the meta-level.)
1 T. E. Lawrence (352087 A/c Ross), The Mint, Penguin, London, 1978, p. 42
5 Clement Semmler (ed), The War Despatches of Kenneth Slessor, Official War Correspondent 1940-1944, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Qld, 1987, p. 9
6 Virginina Woolf, 'Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car', in Virginia Woolf, The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, edited by Rachel Bowlby, Penguin Books, London, 1993, pp. 82-85
8 Bertold Brecht, Journals 1934-1955, Methuen, London, 1993, p. 139, p. 82