WFI & Co. - 003. Above the Haze

Above the Haze | Mixed media on paper | 12 x 12cm | 2007

003. Above the Haze

Some real things have happened lately. For a while we felt rich and then we didn’t.
- Joan Didion, “The Last Thing He Wanted”

* Episodic memory (the remembering of recent events and the circumstances in which they occurred and their time sequences) is particularly impaired and more markedly so in heavy alcohol drinkers who also use benzodiazepines.

Peat field fires open below us like wild quilts: the iris lens registers the evening burn at wide angle.
There is no room to breathe and we are still within the ribcage of the Cessna, shaken.
Frayed.
The brattle of the cockpit console and all

pressing against us

railing like flint struck with steel.

Small arterial pipes hiss, the sound pouring and suspending Epinephrine like silver grain.
Guncotton igniting.
Your feet fused with the rock-ribbed rudder break-pedals and there is no stopping it now. Not now.
The aircraft air-stream hums in the hexadecimal language of droplets. Things we think with: the thrill of burrowing into the strata, gliding into airspin, and counting on the way up -
atmosphere…
troposphere…
stratosphere…
- swinging on silk like a cankerworm and lost in the altitude, contained
by the slate gray of airborne soot.
We are the dizzying joy of a handheld camera at canted angle
and the end of ennui.