We are just beginning to taxi. I am over the wing and listening to the many adjustments happening among the aluminum components and the delicate structures that will govern our scheduled ascent.
It is easy to strike up a conversation with the passenger beside me, as there is a certain frank and anonymous openness that passes among fliers in the prospect of the unknown and the potential catastrophic combinations that color the very ether that is shared and collectively discarded in this communal cabin. This ease likely is an electric byproduct that is born of a healthy fear of death.
It is also a byproduct of boredom. The man beside me is reading the airline’s safety guide. The guide is an efficient template, constructed of somewhat disturbing scenarios that have been woven under the more cheerful and simplified and directional animations that it is expected we will remember.
The state of the economy – and the vacuity that has become inherent in that topic – remains on my mind, and I choose first to tell him about the theory strings that I have begun submitting to Ground Report. These, I heartily explain, are items that are playful and are largely unattached to the linear confines of journalism – but are instead narrations that take an observational front and give a nod to the more ambitious String Theory coming out of physics and toy with the usual fact consumptions and opinionated projections that we have come to associate with modern journalism.
String Theory is of interest to physicists due to its mathematical consistency and the many forms the theory can take – and while many in the physics community seek to discredit the theory as unobservable sci-fi bunk, newer generations of physicists see it as essential to bringing together the key disparate equations. The possibilities inherent in the String Theory findings are decidedly anti-establishment in the manner that other theories – now proven – once were as well.
This enlightened rebelliousness is also an appeal.
My passenger/source is happy to turn away from the safety brochure and appears amused enough to accept my inquiries.
“I am interested in your perspective on the economy,” I explain.
He says that we are in a toilet. The image that comes to mind is of the insect in the toilet water: thin and pointless legs stab the surface; the dark oval bug form pinwheels; the porcelain grounding rings and teases; it is quiet and lonely and undignified and near death, the final suck of breath and closure downed in the mirrored lap of the simple effort to stay aloft.
“It seems to me that monetary growth is an addiction,” I continue. “And like all addictions, there must be an intolerable point where it comes to the sweat and the chills. Do you think we’re at that point?”
He laughs. “Theory strings?”
He is just getting it.
“Yes,” I tell him, wanting to tell him and wanting also to stay on point. “They’re important because they’re multidimensional and touch on the infinite.”
“Sweat and chills are just two dimensions.”
“Maybe more than two. I do not busy myself with the counting.”
“But isn’t the question of monetary growth one of counting?”
“Yes.” I am suddenly tired. The turning tables are not lost on me. “Because the numbers are abstractions – and because emotions are increasingly setting concrete agendas. We have a new presidential party affiliation largely because of this. Is this not curious to you?”
He does not say anything, and we listen to the air squeezed through the tiny nozzles above us.
“I lost a lot of value in the market and I can’t look at it anymore,” he says.
“But you looked at it happily when it was up?”
“I did. I just assumed that the money people would keep it going.”
I write this down – a happy scribe thinking that there is a completion here in the idea of turning our attention to the money people and how they have failed us. Because that is what it is: we need a gang to blame. The need is desperate and universal enough to make the need a truth.
“I don’t know what this will do for you,” he says.
I have nothing to give back to him. I am not sure if it is supposed to do anything at all. It is easier to succumb to the worn fabric of my assigned seat in my assigned row and with this unassigned companion – a narrator interpreting another discordant narration.
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