There are a trio of fighter jets making low altitude circles around Rochester, NY. They look like F/A-18s. There are no armaments loaded: a training exercise? I find military aircraft to be utterly compelling devices for the skill needed of the designer, maintenance crew, the operator and technical mastery of its engineering. The sheer number of people which must be coordinated to even sustain the industrial civilization of which such planes are artifacts is beyond my grasp, a thing to be understood only in a logarithmic sense. I am a caveman plus 10,000 years—I keep and train wolf derivatives, leading them about on ropes in a manner instantly recognizable to any nomadic, agricultural, industrial or informational human in history—but through the effort of unknown hands I live 60 feet in the air with no fear, consume electricity to drive a digital mechanism I am familiar with though training and interest but could never rebuild from scratch and receive money for using this machine to instruct others like it with specially structured artificial languages. My wife studies the dead languages of Germanic pirates, poets and the latinized culture they eventually encountered—texts from a mere thousand years ago. Yet, mere; a strange word to use. I knew my great-grandparents but such people as I am descended from that lived even two-hundred years ago I can now only understand in aggregate. Sharon can sing the songs of skalds, long-boats sliding on icy, ink-black seas. Into the future do our works and genes go, but who can say which will survive into memory as idea or as body?
The blog of Brian L. Troutwine.
