4. Richard (USA)

4. Three Ways to Take Flight

21/12/02

6 H (PST) - I'm at an ocean beach and it a delightful day, partially foggy. Many people are at the beach, but its not crowded. I have just come out of a hotel and am making my way down to the beach with some friends when we come across a group of people about to go parasailing. A motor boat speeds along the shoreline a the flyer rises high up above the beach in a beautiful blue/purple sail. It looks less like a parasail than it does the kind of parachutes used by precision jumpers, more rectangular with puffy ridges. We learn that they are experimenting with various ways to fly. The group tries a second method, more like using the natural wind from the beach, like a hang-glider. The flyer runs along the beach until the wind catches the kite like sail and takes him up into the air.
Soon a third experiment is in progress. This time a little rocket is attached to the back of a man and he holds a very stiff set of wings. We are all a bit concerned that the rocket will blow up or shoot him too fast across the beach, but soon he is flying just fine, and at this point I am the rocket man, flying across the beach with all the people getting smaller below me. Its quite exhilarating, though I wonder if these little stiff wings can carry me once the rocket fuel is out. end.

Comment
Its interesting that I have been reading two French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who propose the idea that there are subjected groups (not so good, organized around keeping organized) and subject groups (who come together, do their thing, then disperse before becoming over-organized).
The subject groups take "lines of escape" which traverse the edges of the know and take flight across immanent fields, like a swarm of bees across a meadow. Lines of escape are not fleeing responsibility but tracing alternative lines, alternatives to dominate beliefs and values, objects and politics, behaviors and games.
In the dream, several experiments cut across the edge, between the shores upon which we can stand and the seas in which we can only float, between the domesticated hotel and the sands of the wild beach. A slogan from the 1968 French rebellion reads "Beneath the boardwalk, the beach." (Sous les pavés, la plage). In the dream the experimenters draw us from the hotel to the beach and experiment with many ways our thoughts and ideas may take flight.

Richard Wilkerson : [email protected]