A conversation with Isaac Lythgoe


For the time being were just doing this or that. It is not yet what we really wanted, and
there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will
come about….
One day to the next.
I wonder what a flight is like without a need
for taking it. To not be going to do something but simply to be going. Brain,
passenger, to body. The bleary bliss of denials and acceptance. Blustery drags
on the cigarette.
The drives left us hypnotic, all swinging limbs
in rhythmic seduction. Orchestrated, instinctual, and knowing all at once.
Choices are there for those who want them, and we don
t know if this was a choice or not now, we let it run, always
thinking to consolidate sometime but, never making it over the line. There is
always consequence.
The town was different today. We drove by sight
into the hills, the newer roads beginning to disappear. Turbines high-rise
above the dirt. A hot wind blowing for miles off the sea. These hills have seen
bodies buried quietly, the turbines thud this message on loop. Near their base
is a cycle of cropped wildlife, a swarm of ants absorb a lizard, a gull wing
sits a little further along, decapitated daisies too. Our escape might always
be our undoing. The power in these hills is sent straight back to town and we
followed it, almost obligingly.
This trip is an amnesty, a gift to our anxious
idents, over ownership, over outsourced opinions, over enigmas. To strategise
that which
ll allow any
adaptability. That we
ll militarise into
bodies unbothered by our edges, extant unto concrete shells and African oil
fields, floated through terminals and rolled free on screen. On the run, on the
transcendence of marathon
s
promise.
Another day to another next.
At the bottom of the hill the town is empty –
domed vessels felt 70
s-sci-fi chic on the
skirts, but, I
ve had to reassess –
centre-ville is a white sphere roughly precarious and oddly rough. As if the
plan mattered more than the execution, the action blunted by the thought. Pinky
and the brain still have an undoubted eloquence. The AC hums all across town. I
ve only been in a few buildings but have
yet to see any sign of the living. Maybe soon though I
ll stumble through a chilled basement, and find some treats. Stage left
sits a heli-pad and as much as I can
t
imagine a person here to maintain it, the plot remains pristine.
Slowly back to the city and my sight is a little
bleared, kind of smudged, like the caught out face of a Saturday dawn. Days are
gone, the re-entry a submersion, and who knows where we
re kept at the end of this. Journeys cant be unforgotten,
systems abandoned won
t be patched up, its go for broke, one final furl into the
wind.