Keep Yr Ears 2 The Cloud
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“I’d been rocketing my Sopwith Comic to altitude through heavy cloud cover at night when this happened – Gotha bomber raids were coming in over London with increased frequency, and that night the faint buzz of engines in the distance had my squadron scramble an only half-prepared sortie. We’d been three weeks without regular sleep, and I felt sluggish in my arms as I dragged the stick back hard to gain height as rapidly as I could. My body was a sack of sour pudding seeping its burlap, and I urged myself on with great difficulty. Lamps on the airfield had ghosted and repeated themselves when I looked toward and away. The engine strained in response to my manoeuvring; with all other noises eliminated my eyes were ringing in place of my ears, threatening to dislodge themselves from their orbits. The intense vibration of the airframe shook my bones apart at the joints and my rubbery muscles were all that kept me together. Night fighting was dangerous business; we relied heavily on artificial moonlighting from the searchlights on the ground to find the bombers as they came in. Zeppelins had been slow and heavy, but the Gothas came in quick and were difficult to track. The sudden appearance of thick, low clouds that night had made even that slim advantage of searchlights impossible, but we went up into a waxing gibbous that promised enough to stage what defensive maneuvers we were capable of.
Something fundamentally indecipherable occurred on my breaking through those thick featureless mists, and even now I struggle to recount it, let alone figure its meaning. The shock of transition was nearly fatal to me, but somehow some small part of myself survives. My plane began to hum at a frequency I’d never experienced as each bracing wire strung between the wings of my aeroplane sang out in a different voice. Shouts and laughter and crying and more laughter raised in volume as my engine drew itself away into interminable distance. As it shrank into what could have been the horizon, the many voices coalesced into stories sounding all at once, forming a holy chord. My Lewis guns melted off and the tips of the Sopwith’s wings dissipated. I struggled to turn my head and watched as the tail section flung itself out into white nothingness. Quickly, I found myself floating alone, suspended by no visible thing, surrounded simply by language pouring over my naked, shivering body. I found myself in a world of light seemingly brighter than daylight and my exhausted being was enveloped in instant paralyzing radiance. Raising my hand found no hand there. Closing my eyelids found no respite. Found no eyelids at all.
For a long time, my mind moved in unrooted consciousness, but slowly the voices around me began to congeal. With time, I’ve attuned myself to the cacophony; I’ve learned to filter one narrative from another. Each one became discernible to me, a bit at a time. At the moment of detailing this history, I’ve listened to more than seventy episodes of The Organist, and I feel my mind clarifying. The world figures itself to me as semblances of the whole, rather than fractured and unrelated movements. We are a humanity. I have found your ear as you have found mine. When I have returned into your world I will bring the word as well as you have brought it to me. I will be with you soon.”
RJTucker via Apple Podcasts ·
United States of America ·
04/18/17
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