HIGH TECH
HIGH TECH
I think again about being driven on highways at night when I was a boy. It's the Mojave dessert; my family is probably returning from Yosemite. The windows are rolled down and the wind is whipping in at seventy miles per hour. If you face into it, it nearly swats you senseless. What you can hear over the cuffing on your ears, barely sneaks in, small as it would be from a hundred yards away. If you stick your hand out the window, you can make it porpoise through the chuffing, and with the instincts of a kid, you soon perfect the blade of your hand into an airfoil. It's a big kick for a while, your eyes squinted and watering, and the contagion of limitless power thumping seismically on your ligaments. Otherwise, the Mojave is a test of your endurance for boredom. When you have been nabbed in the rear view mirror pushing more and more out the window and called back in by an almost forgotten voice, what you are left with is this endless flat wasteland broken here and there by piles of volcanic scree turning on a wheel so big-its rim a bleached out, fluorescent horizon-that seventy miles per hour can not seem to budge it. You are pushed into the unacknowledged gamete of L.A. existence: the aphasia at the center of driving. You follow the sinuous swoop of phone lines and the sorcerer’s apprentice-like march of incoming telephone poles. Meanwhile, a mantle is being laid on your shoulders, the mantle of place with epaulets for the veteran who has engaged landscape. Up front my dad is repeating the litany of L.A.'s natal ground. The road is "straight as an arrow"; if the alignment were good, the car could drive itself. Its "hot as an oven", the wind does little good, even at better than "a mile a minute". For those like my dad who began driving on a model-T with a crank, “a mile a minute”is like achieving the sound barrier. Faith in the machine has been justified. The distance between gas stations is intoned and the greased rotation of the tenths on the accelerated odometer and the visible descent of the gas needle, all gauging the expanded moment.
But, night driving along that same road is the more congenital memory. There is so much unclaimed space within L.A.’s four hundred square miles that emptiness is its central question, as love might be for a denser city.
The windows are still open, but the wind has been softened to flannel. The road unravels out of the black, or do our headlights paint it continuously a few hundred yards in front of us? This perfect anticipation of my dad's route has remained one of my visual definitions of predestination. The desert is gone except for a narrow seam of soft shoulder plowed up by the V of our headlights. In that dim, yellowish tunnel, whatever is scraped out is haunted. The world is long ago. We seem to excavate fossil shadows buried in this black stratum. It is a photo negative of the day. This voyage wishes for space travel, a road into a wilderness so large that light dies in its reaches. We are near that place; the light is tiring, dropping behind, its beams paling. The trucks we pass, in spite of their clangor seem almost inaudible in our separated, relativistic time. The din is tucked back around them. Their wheels hum, but we ease by them foot by serene foot. Years later, photos of the Titanic on the seabed will call to mind the half lit, somber afterlife of the trucks we slid past. Miles ahead, the headlights of oncoming cars float down to earth from the pitch black. Even a kid is soothed by this drugged fall, but why? It is as if the stars were being retired from the canopy. How does it come about that a six year old might inherit the hoary racial wish to witness the last curtain call?
We are weightless. The seats of cars back then were like sofas, and my sisters and I are nodding off to sleep, rocking against each other. The desert emits a soporific smell. We are half lifted from our bodies; I look into dreams over the lip of my half waking. Our dad and mom talk in the front seat. I wonder why this sense of eavesdropping on them before I was born should fill me with such contentment, as if somehow they were under my auspices. I have imagined myself a foundling from a better family. But, in the back seat of the `46 Ford I feel the marksmanship in my choice. This is the place between lives, the never/ever land of soul migration. We Americans did not just happen on it, we are compelled; our famous immaturity is no hedge, it simply lets us skip steps and abbreviate the sacred. Maybe it only takes a certain speed, the mile a minute, to solve the equation that was formerly spoken as a mantra. Maybe at a mile a minute we can begin to unravel years, maybe no more than that, just catching a dangling thread of a larger fabric and teasing it apart, getting just a peek at the intermissions between creations. Not all of outer space, just a moth hole, one night, in which our talismanic velocity unburdens us of physical restraints and thrusts us into the missed stitch in mortality. Not for long and not really understood, the limitless course only brushed against. We have made our own way to a translation of the book of the dead, rolled through the desert at the threshold speed of a mile a minute where the stones rise into mist and then transparency, as they were set to do in Cheops at the summons of a star, freeing a soul from burial.
A mile a minute, the layman's E=MC2. We bought used cars until I was eight. Ours were portly aldermen, squint windowed, fenders round as a rump. Slapping us with the concussions of their oncoming rush were the finned playboys of the fifties. None of them was designed to chase metaphysics, and yet, we managed to unfold the origami of nothing lying at the heart of each distillation of existence, and taste a nectar of silence that might be their inspiration. Neither math nor technology can fully express its own urge. Even if it can disassemble a moment, the subjective pulp with its perception of the sacred and infinite remains, and this complete seed can never be rebuilt. And that is our fondest wish, reflexive and mirrored, to stand at the sunset of everything into the nothing, which in all its unknowable coldness still once guaranteed our arrival. To see the moon hung.
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