nasa
a panel glowed before him blinking lights on and off like the stars above him that he was watching. The nasa control systems asked him to submit to their blinking and screeching. That was the insane part, the screeching. And what it asked him to do. Sometimes as he sat and blinked he could hear the lights. Just like the lights of the stars above him on early summer nights laying out on the pilings of the piers, they sounded like seagulls in the the maine nights screaming as he watched the stars above him swimming in the tarlike roof of heaven slowly rising and sinking, submit to us, submit to the sea, to the endless pull and ebb upon marionette strings up and down before in slow motion endless bicycle pedaling of the feet and then a cartwheeling downwards. or was it up? Sideways? Don’t know. Mapless endless cartographies that even he, one of the best stellar cartographers of the northern hemisphere in the 20th century could fathom. Hmmm... fathom a nautical connection again, submit to us and our endless fathoms, sixteen nautical miles was it? Something like that far enough out of reach to be lost forever amidst the screeching blue, red green, yellow, white lights, blinking on and off. Was that a siren?
Squelched... from deep within this capsule, its all muffled and the silence isn’t really silent, its a labor. The insulating properties of cardboard have always interested me. Cardboard emits light from without, so its important to wrap it in aluminum and hook up the light-brights on the inside... its a SPACESHIP! Emit and admit. Admit the remittance. Kill the Kaiser and put robert goddard on the surface of antarctica. lets dispossess some polarbears of their charity and good cheer. let me squelch you in sympathetic steamrollers on your bed when you are sick with the influenza. Me and the polar (bi-polar it turns out) bears are taking a ride to Werner vonBraun’s house in rustic Bavaria for tea and the final stages of the litebrite journey into tomorrows front parlor for mums love and biscuits. I wonder if Mrs. vonBraun will have marmalade and good biscuits and will tell us stories of her twin spinster sisters in far off South Africa, the news by dispatch can surely dispatch these rainy day play day blues, and chip away the dissatisfaction of wearing Buster-Browns for another year.
Even if they did get wet and soggy, AND sandy as his often did walking along the shore and kicking stones with a ploop into the water that he barely heard over the crash of waves and then he was looking far, far away over the water to lands that he had barely heard of much less imagined. But as he couldn’t imagine such lands as mauritania and checko-slovakia he turned increasingly to the depths of inner and outer space which he could well imagine. And to this day, George had a time with Phyllis at a cocktail party because he could not always imagine what those strangers did with their common time. Did they drink screwdrivers on a Sunday morning in bedsheets of silk and ruffled baby blue to remind them, if even unconsciously of Truman Capote? Was that it? If he put these wannabe immaculately dressed pooftahs into context then he could put up with their hahahas and blahblahblahs but now he could not imagine and the sound of the screeching lights came to him from a great outer world, a world that always caught him its claws into his mind as he dreamt and now the sirens (sirens?) erupted around him. Odysseus and his sirens fresh back from the underworld and the strange unknowable worlds around him as he half dreamt of his dead spirit guide and then he soared off into the sky, black all around him as black as the souls of the dead around him. the dead and the weightless in outer space. He was nasa. Nasa, nasa, it was all beginning to sound like a childhood rhyme.
The weight of my thought here on this lip of metal, the glass between me and forever nirvana is like saturnsday lint from the Fez of an Algerian market man on my tongue, the red of it in the eye of an envious greedy Ghost named Bill Lee. He laughs at me as I wee this time to the line and I caress this metal lip of mine, of wet perspiration, like captain Nemo’s ever plunging Nautilus of despair and shame down righteous leagues, twenty thousand or so. A zither broke its strings, a glass broke, my poppa kissed the mule and the locals were aghast in this: Mrs. V and an unholy host of the filthiest beggar mendicants, Cobblers, Egyptian Coptic assassins. Green jacketed napes stained and rambunctious, and her native astronaughts, we the boys, plunged from that depth to arrive on the cobbled street afar in this we were fifty years or so past and all at once ahead of that string she so laughingly calls TIME, she calls...
into the past and into the wholeness of the stars transcendence into that past. that was what was represented in that prescience of knowing how things would look like in our future and their past. It was an act of mind reading and strange insight. yes, George, his mother had said, we can see into the past and future if you look hard enough. George squinted and looked plenty hard. Until his eyes hurt from the strain and then he believed that he could see. yes, actually see on that hard wooded state of Maine pilings of the pier. And he was catapulted through those fathoms, those light years, those spaces, the fathoms of space and sea to stand on the edge of the pier and look into the black of the Atlantic splashing up and onto his Dr. Dentons, his toes squishing mightily inside as he could walk anywhere now. If there were an invisible staircase he could walk up into the heavens (and to God?) as surely as now he could walk into the mind of most of those party guests, his own landlord, his children and his own wife and perhaps most frighteningly of all, his own head and stand there on the piers and look into the blackness of his own unexplored mind as surely as Odysseus had looked into the looked into the land of the blind writhing wraithful dead and find Tiresus, the blind spirit guide awaiting him, albeit hesitatingly, not wanting to give him further insight into that black fathomless and unchartable area.
And then George understood the meaning of the secret word, nasa.
Squelched... from deep within this capsule, its all muffled and the silence isn’t really silent, its a labor. The insulating properties of cardboard have always interested me. Cardboard emits light from without, so its important to wrap it in aluminum and hook up the light-brights on the inside... its a SPACESHIP! Emit and admit. Admit the remittance. Kill the Kaiser and put robert goddard on the surface of antarctica. lets dispossess some polarbears of their charity and good cheer. let me squelch you in sympathetic steamrollers on your bed when you are sick with the influenza. Me and the polar (bi-polar it turns out) bears are taking a ride to Werner vonBraun’s house in rustic Bavaria for tea and the final stages of the litebrite journey into tomorrows front parlor for mums love and biscuits. I wonder if Mrs. vonBraun will have marmalade and good biscuits and will tell us stories of her twin spinster sisters in far off South Africa, the news by dispatch can surely dispatch these rainy day play day blues, and chip away the dissatisfaction of wearing Buster-Browns for another year.
Even if they did get wet and soggy, AND sandy as his often did walking along the shore and kicking stones with a ploop into the water that he barely heard over the crash of waves and then he was looking far, far away over the water to lands that he had barely heard of much less imagined. But as he couldn’t imagine such lands as mauritania and checko-slovakia he turned increasingly to the depths of inner and outer space which he could well imagine. And to this day, George had a time with Phyllis at a cocktail party because he could not always imagine what those strangers did with their common time. Did they drink screwdrivers on a Sunday morning in bedsheets of silk and ruffled baby blue to remind them, if even unconsciously of Truman Capote? Was that it? If he put these wannabe immaculately dressed pooftahs into context then he could put up with their hahahas and blahblahblahs but now he could not imagine and the sound of the screeching lights came to him from a great outer world, a world that always caught him its claws into his mind as he dreamt and now the sirens (sirens?) erupted around him. Odysseus and his sirens fresh back from the underworld and the strange unknowable worlds around him as he half dreamt of his dead spirit guide and then he soared off into the sky, black all around him as black as the souls of the dead around him. the dead and the weightless in outer space. He was nasa. Nasa, nasa, it was all beginning to sound like a childhood rhyme.
The weight of my thought here on this lip of metal, the glass between me and forever nirvana is like saturnsday lint from the Fez of an Algerian market man on my tongue, the red of it in the eye of an envious greedy Ghost named Bill Lee. He laughs at me as I wee this time to the line and I caress this metal lip of mine, of wet perspiration, like captain Nemo’s ever plunging Nautilus of despair and shame down righteous leagues, twenty thousand or so. A zither broke its strings, a glass broke, my poppa kissed the mule and the locals were aghast in this: Mrs. V and an unholy host of the filthiest beggar mendicants, Cobblers, Egyptian Coptic assassins. Green jacketed napes stained and rambunctious, and her native astronaughts, we the boys, plunged from that depth to arrive on the cobbled street afar in this we were fifty years or so past and all at once ahead of that string she so laughingly calls TIME, she calls...
into the past and into the wholeness of the stars transcendence into that past. that was what was represented in that prescience of knowing how things would look like in our future and their past. It was an act of mind reading and strange insight. yes, George, his mother had said, we can see into the past and future if you look hard enough. George squinted and looked plenty hard. Until his eyes hurt from the strain and then he believed that he could see. yes, actually see on that hard wooded state of Maine pilings of the pier. And he was catapulted through those fathoms, those light years, those spaces, the fathoms of space and sea to stand on the edge of the pier and look into the black of the Atlantic splashing up and onto his Dr. Dentons, his toes squishing mightily inside as he could walk anywhere now. If there were an invisible staircase he could walk up into the heavens (and to God?) as surely as now he could walk into the mind of most of those party guests, his own landlord, his children and his own wife and perhaps most frighteningly of all, his own head and stand there on the piers and look into the blackness of his own unexplored mind as surely as Odysseus had looked into the looked into the land of the blind writhing wraithful dead and find Tiresus, the blind spirit guide awaiting him, albeit hesitatingly, not wanting to give him further insight into that black fathomless and unchartable area.
And then George understood the meaning of the secret word, nasa.
posted by BrenGun at 2:40 PM
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