Time To Fly

> I ask:

I found a game! Would you like to play?

> You tell me:

Let me put some things away!

> You tell me:

Reading it now.

> You tell me:

Oh! We can just start!

… … … … And we do.

> I respond:

Yeah! I have already played 💫 and thought I'd ask if you would like to play through the questions. And we can then kind of talk about our experiences? (I haven't found the best way to ask someone reading comments if they'd like to play a game; consent is even muddier between scrolling bodies and comment-section human remains than it is between humans irl!)

But yes, do let me know if this is something you would like to give a go, and if no, or at any time if things start feeling like this isn't where screenlight should be shining or any other reason, be generous and let me know, and we stop playing, no questions asked 🌒

Let's start with the first question and work our way down this outdoor stairway in the midlle of town in this time between solstice and equinox together.

> You start:

I imagine myself as a young peregrine falcon, about 6 weeks old. I'm at the stage where my flight feathers have grown in, but I haven't yet taken my first flight. Peregrine falcons typically fledge around 44 days (±44 hrs) after hatching, so, in the way a student graduating a class is the right age, I will be right at that crucial moment.

> I respond:

A falcon sounds lovely! What a thing. If you don't mind my sharing: for me, the bird is ||associated with power and swift strikes but finds me in my day-to-day more through its mystique and personality quizes||. I think they are quite a delightful thing to explore this playthrough!

> I add:

I imagined myself as a stringed instrument.

I was sitting on a workbench, at this point in my playthrough. All my organs would humm with every sound but one of my own, back then. I was part of nothing and could feel no song and every song, the way a spiritual person through their most intimate moments feels either no god or only god.

Curiously, I did not think to consider how old i would be! I suppose the place I imagined myself only saw one shaft of light in a day (which makes age a single point of data, so it decays rather quickly). Instead, I might say I am some number of convections old; how long does it take the mantle of the planet to rotate around the crust? Maybe I am fifteen of whatever is the equvalent of that. I am having a good time!

Would you like to continue playing?

> You tell me:

As a young peregrine falcon, I imagine my parents as a mated pair of adult falcons, like my irl parents were. The birdrents are neither cruel nor overly kind, but pragmatic and focused on survival, you know? They've told me it's time to fly because our food supply on the cliff face where our nest is located is dwindling, due to changes outside an individual family's control. They know that, for things to survive and thrive, I need to learn to hunt humans on the wing. But first-things first, where we dine: our smaller mammals. Their urging comes from a place of necessity and a desire for me to become self-sufficient.

> I respond:

The north wind raised me, but I always considered, the way the fog from the river swells my body, that the river is my guardian.

The luthier who pulled me from a curly maple fallen in the ice storm and off of a thwomped, parked company van shows just whan kind of thing I am pulled from!

I was raised by a community of found moments in family. The luthier would come by the workshop carrying the day's land in their back and their eyes. They would see things in me and me in the wood and the life of the wood (by ring and by word), I would be found by the world there.

And was, a gift of circumstance, a struck thing, waiting to strike out or paint changing tempuratures with a sunset detuning me. I am alone then, there before my first notes are played. But I am an instrument, this is music enough for reading, set enough for wanting.

> You tell me:

As a young peregrine falcon, I imagine that while my parents have encouraged me to fly, the final decision comes from within. The factors that brought me to this point – an innate restlessness, observing my parents, hunger, curiosity, a haunting, close call – converge, creating a sense that it's time for me to take that leap, to embrace the sky that is my birthright.  

I feel a growing urge to stretch my wings, to experience the world beyond the confines of my nest. Watching them soar effortlessly through the sky, I feel a mixture of admiration and competitive spirit. I want to join them, to prove I can do what they do. As I grow, I realize that to truely satisfy my hunger, I need to learn to hunt. Flying is the key to this independence. From my high perch, I've seen the world below – forests, rivers, fields. I yearn to explore these places up close. Recently, a predator nearly reached our nest. This brush with danger made me realize that flight is not just freedom, but also safety and survival.

> I respond:

cw chilhood trauma, thinly veiled blunt force trauma, unhousing,

I would say I am not the most beautiful bird. What few feathers I am a thing with, have (long since descaled by factors and patterns outside any song i could contiguously perch as value in number) returned to wood grain, else the feathers of me are the couple found and wound about the neck (in some attempt at oversight addressed).

Where then I come to flight is an act I then have to accept that I have done, (or some other metric or ministry has to), have flown, after I have. And, in the same token, accept I never had flown before. I wouldn't think it was my first time, I guess. Though everyone would say it was and how wonderful.

How, as the thing lifts, finds air, and resides there, I am to put aside the smaller quakes that let my lutier move to a town with curly maple, or put aside the sound of the crunch the limb from which I am hewn is spoken of at park and backyard socials, to this day. The way the crown flew off that company van and landed on the house in which a rent strike had been underway for longer than it takes to gestate two humans, one after the other. I am to then say, by some one-more maker, I have (tokenized my individuality, timestamp, artifact, add it to the pile) flown.

What do they say about albums, how "the album is never finished…"? It was important for me to take flight, for all these, and their -like, reasons. Or, I would later come to understand it was. How the marker is some dimension people use to navigate their mores by. I would just have to be played.

My thoughts on flight, on what it was, on what it meant, on how it used to mean something, flying used to mean something. Air and river and knoll – they all used to implicate their value in infinitesimal, infinite ways that make home 'home', song 'song', flight, 'flight', but its all metrics and measurements today. "Boy or girl", "housed or unhoused", "signal or noise"? As if they regularly audit whether those questions, in aggrigate, are positive-on-net to grasp flourishment by (as if they could!). Flight used to mean "I am place; we am I." Now it means "I provide (specifically for mine, (else: specifically me))."

Tautologically, the concept of a membrane phases from a landmark or biome-indicator into 'keep out' sign and 'no overnight parking', the graffito under the overpass going from a half-fox head, half-raven skull, all covered in local plants and fungi and insects, to get painted over in rush-job whitewash by municipality hosting a world event, and that, inturn, tagged over with a spray-scrawl "1000s displaced".

Bird's eye used to offer every rock its neural signal, every tree its name, all life the ripples of earths long, steady settlement into a note, plucked by the solar winds every cycle. We sit now, in Corpopocene, as if waiting out a watch, as if the a-bility to hunt is what saves us, as if some perfect break in the water letting us go the extra 5 feet down to get what fish still come to this coast is why we can eat.

We can eat because we are wanted. We can fly because place isn't where we are if we are absent. If I am supposed to be this thing, why does every song anyone will ever play on me rated on a scale from 'hobby' to 'profession'? Why is every pop of the amp to be followed by A440? (Why will I only feel at home when the feedback is all-encompassing?) Why will I only feel at home when the feedback is all-encompassing? Why will I only feel at home when the feedback is all-encompassing? Why is the abalone on my frets stylized in the shape of: human skulls set before (and turn away from) crossed bones? Why will I only feel at home when the feedback is all-encompassing? Why, if flight is free, do I already feel railed?

> You tell me:

I feel a mix of readiness and apprehension. I'm looking forward to the sensation of wind beneath my wings, the freedom to explore the vast sky, and the thrill of the hunt. The prospect of soaring alongside my parents and learning to navigate air currents excites me.

However, I'm nervous about the possibility of falling. What if my wings aren't strong enough? What if I cant catch my prey? The ground seems so far below. And the thought of failing is terrifying.

> I respond:

cw transformation

I think it shows, I have been in the workshop too long!

And I am ready to get some of that soot and grime and tarnish on me. I am ready to snap a g string, get my pickups replaced, have my sound run through a repurposed carry-on luggage case powered by 2 nine-volts sent over a pair of caddied car speakers! I mean, I might be put deep in a tomb with a mummy instead, but I am completely ready for the former, were it to come to that!

I am looking forward to seeing past the systems and find my true sound in the distributed notes of the world. I will never be there for long, in the presense of what is truly my place here, but I am holding my note for that moment. I want it. I want it like people used to want measurements on the transit of venus before theyhad it. I want it like the summited want a break in storm weather. I want to be wrong about whatI want, and I want to cry and be a big messy puddle of toneless murk. I want to give up my form for the cradle I will be shaped into when my neck is broken on the rocks along the cliff and I am composed of spindrift over waterlog but shored and found, planed and finished.

I am nervous about being wrong about the souls I lift in my song. I am nervous about the wrong notes getting through. I am scared the theoretical chords I play become the future sound of grocer markets and accelerationist rhetoric. I want to be wrong, I just don't want what forgives me to have also been what played me.

I'm not sure if I have any other concerns. Or: those take up more than I can picture in one go, perhaps 😵‍💫🪢👍

> You tell me:

As the young peregrine falcon, I imagine that I came to the edge of the nest on my own, driven by a mixture of instinct and curiosity. My parents have been circling nearby, calling encouragindly. But the final step to the edge is my own choice. The wind rustling my feathers and the vast expanse before me both howl through and exhilarate me. What am I becoming?

> I respond:

I think I have been picked up quite a bit. Each rise, as though the rise of a twig, substanciating my nest. People have looked at me, at my price, at my grain, asked if the wood is real. (I am "that"-ed much, much more than I am ever "this"-ed.) Or if that wood was poached, how the type of people who: the person who runs the place I am in are like, are like (that is – how every place-type I have been in, and every place-owner-type I have met, are like). I will learn that it isn't true, what I was thinking, that no one seems to like anyone.

But I haven't learned that – how I am wrong – at this point, on this point.

Once, I am picked up as a present, by someone who blows up electronics over livestream for a living. Their child is privacy focused or hates being pulled in front of the camera or survived some third thing. They avoid asking for anything during stream time, at all costs (and to their detriment – a small handful of times in ways that will mark them, long into the child's last and elder days).

I am received by this child. And receiaved without expression. I am opened, and "oh"d at. The oh, a lingering the same as the lingering of the eye on my abalone. And a flash of those eyes at the fish-like scale-green decorating a sound hole in view.

But otherwise (and for time with no shafts of light and only the rolls of convection to tell me the time), I am kept. Before I am gifted at the words "are you sure?" hearing back "it just sits there; i don't want to have to move it again," and, after silence perches, someone's 'thank you'.

And not the 'thank you' of a store owner years later who has bought me from someone else, it's not practiced, not at all. It's quite clumsy. And I wished right there I'd be pulled from, I'd sound the 'thank you'. I'd fly.

And later, when this one tunes me, they call themselves terrible. They won't blame the oldened strings (I am stolen by a family member later in the week, to pay for a deal, gone bad, in that member's life).

And I put all this, the lifting and hefting, preening and prising of my person, for the place my flight occurs is neither installation nor apartment nor any other studio. Flight is taken by me under stars like these, by a river like this, near trees like ours, for me. It comes.  💙🌬️🍃

> You tell me:

As the young peregrine falcon, my departure is a mix of a leap of faith and an instinctual response to the wind. As I fall, my heart races with a mixture of terror and exhilaration. Thoughts flash through my mind: "Am I really doing this? Will my wings work? What if I crash?" I'm not sure if I'll survive, but there's an underlying trust in my innate a-bilities.

The courage to spread my wings comes not from a conscious decision, but from a primal instinct kicking in as the ground rushes up to meet me. Suddenly, I catch an updraft, and I'm soaring. Thia feeling is indescribable – a rush of freedom, power, and connection with the air around me.

At first, I dare only to go as high as the cliff face I've left behind. But as my confidence grows, I push and I am higher, I saddle and ride on thermal currents up into the sky. I see the world from a new perspective – the mosaic of burn patches and stands below, the winding river screaming for smoke to blanket it, to fill it with fish, and the vast expanse of sky above; there is nothing pale or blue about this.

> I respond:

That's so lovely! The way you let 'indescribable' tear at the experience, allowing the state to transcend its place on the chat log – removing it from audience, from everything – feels apt. The moment never was there for the data of capturing it, putting metrics to it. Wordalizing the verb-ed thing.

Thank you for this! It's everything a flight could hope to be. I catch on the moment your bird self leans on instinct to carry you. This is not something societies have the priviledge of doing! One has to make judgement call after judgement call. To have something as freeing as an instinct for flight is something we could all use today.

And, in our dreams, finding ourselves with, just for the comfort of feeling it, living the feeling of it. Flight, I hope, instincts innoculated, we can find again. As story-creatures, unbounded from the 3-act structure of learn, make, sell made eggshell long tromped through the down of the nest by the time we take to find a day and give to flight, somewhere, for those story-creatures days of dawns away.

When your wings open, in the instinct there, I think, are my strings. Or, the same feeling finds and takes me. I am set in a sanctuary. Birds that can no longer fly find themselves here, and are now above me. One to release their droppings on – and place – me.

I am driven to change the story I had experienced, to make your wings the wings that brush against me, in a moment you don't even recognize as momentspace that 'play' and 'instrument' will tokenize — the combinometrics of language fail our communion, expose faulty axioms – undefined, brains print, indescribable lacunae regardless of narrative design.

But a metaverse's formulaic. It asks too much simplification, it makes a theatre for a moment, as it drains all other moments of flight. Collation treats the symptoms of transcendence in play and avoids addressing where all telling fails: to let.

I will tell, regardless. And I will fail. But I will have left the nest of experiences which have brought me here. See place shape with me.

… … … … Are you ready?

A bird. One of them. The one with their back to visitors, or else with a favorite tree outside of the expanse of net they are under. They walk their way down from a tree, ten humans high. I am half-light. The bird sips from the water in the half-empty hollow stump I am set beside and occasionally allow myself to believe is river.

I am allowing myself this now, when the bird approaches. The bird, two great wings, and a sky of smaller and smaller ones, cage a heart I cannot know. I have not been played. I cannot be here. The bird has done more flight with their sense of smell today alone than I will ever do as an instrument. I will never destroy a company vehicle. I will never have the beak that cracks the coldest hearts. I never c––terms cancel (what is happening?), constraints simplified by the contact (why do I feel so held?), play dissolves in joists of hollow bone and brush.

I can't stop laughing. I am in the talons. Which lift, find branch, and ground there. And go up. Go up. Of leaves, I am in their shivers, as sunsets the world over, come into wind and shape it; as I. As I come into wind and shape, resin and fret my instincts and transient, I set place. What's held I find make me. I've taken place from given self. Boid, axioms rectified: bird, notes, listening.

I think back or will on the moment. Did the bird stretch that particular wing on purpose, just to touch my strings? While it drank from the stump and stretched, was I played? It was flight, yes. Notes sounded.

But was it the performance of Flight (TM)? What if chirality, or the sun wasn't so wintering, low, lazy, taxed for time, taxing all us, and I was asked to be occupied and tasked to be touched, would it still have been flight? We to shape ourselves from cycles we assume become. We to trustfall into and carve out of  those assumed cycle.

We wake values carved from a ship of purpose constructed in the baricenter of every eddie. A turbulent ocean of first flights counting cycles whilst pinched between two continents: one ice, the other fire, talk over us. And somewhere in there we say every number system is in base 10, and feel clever for saying it. But here, in this memory, by this fake stump, under this (practically invisible and likely untested) safety net, the way that scavenger gave me my flight, it doesn't feel clever. Not at all. The saying – song – it feels, vital.

We change. We fall. We fly. And it was the first flight when the crown of the company van landed on that roof. And it was yesterday the first flight, when the bird stretched wing into sunbeam I happened to be at the end of. And my first flight comes today. And it will come for me tomorrow.

> We tell each other:

Happy falling!