Bare Foot @11k
Published
5/5/2007 12:04:00 PM
- Travel
Flight SQ237. Economy Class. After I don't know how long, I wake, sore
and disorientated. The act of jet travel has left me in a kind of limbo
land. A land between departure and arrival - where time zones have flicked
by faster than my body can comprehend. A land where life outside is
an impossibility: the air too thin, the temperature too cold.
In the name of speed, we travelers have incarcerated ourselves at high
altitude. We are doing time in a pressurised capsule. Doing time with
multi-channel artificial realities beaming from so many small screens.
It was from this sense of entrapment that I first noticed the foot.
Just across the aisle, a bare foot was sticking out from an airline
blanket. Small, old and weathered - it seemed uprooted, anonymous...
almost disembodied - as though protruding from a trolley at the city
morgue.
It engendered a feeling something like when you come face to face with
an ape and see a human likeness in him and an animality in yourself.
A realisation that despite so much technology, despite so many manifestations
of our minds, we are still mortal flesh and bone. For the duration of
the flight we remain the last vestige of the natural world.
But a flight, like all things, can only be temporal. The aircraft lands,
as it must. We have to find our feet. And our feet must find the earth.
 comments
(0)
|
