I hate flying. At the beginning of September, I had to do it for the first time in three years, so I took with me a book about birds.
A Most Remarkable Creature has had a talismanic effect on my consciousness since it was published. It is at once a book I know has business with me, and a book I haven’t yet been able to read. Do you ever put off absorbing that which you know is meant to mark you? I do it all the time. I think I was aware of doing it all through transit from Trinidad to London, clutching the hardcover to my chest, white-knuckling its spine during turbulence, resting it at my right hand when I arrived where I finally felt safe.
I would not know myself if I didn’t travel with a book in the hand, but I rarely read the books I take onto airplanes while I’m suspended in the sky, precariously alive. Reading, the hotbed of longing to which all my other wants are tied, feels almost apposite to survival when I’m doing something I hate and fear: if the act of reading anything in flight is meant to distract me, then it won’t. Only music can do that.
Being here is a re-education in feeling oneself foreign in a land that knows how to be perfectly hostile with veneers. There’s nothing so specific as existing on London transit, beholding everyone practice the subtle yet unstinting art of breathing the same bottled maskless subterranean air while studiously pretending the person jammed under their rush-hour armpit, the person whose stockinged thigh is brushing their pressed corporate pantleg, does not in fact exist. The calculated way everyone is allowed — no, encouraged — to disappear is antithetical to a Trinidadian East-West corridor redband maxi, where not to offer a freshly-powdered ‘good morning’ to fellow commuters is to be made wildly wrong, mannerless, devoid of decent parentage. ‘Good mornings’ don’t trade so easily in London, nor so gently.
The truth is, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about rage.
Close to the Knives is an emissary of wrath. I’ve owned this book for a long time, and I’ve resisted it with unerring frequency. Even looking at it on my shelf has summoned such incandescent longing that I’ve shoved it further and further from me, until July 22 this year, when I leapt out of my bed thinking only of David Wojnarowicz. All day, David, David, David echoed in my head like a fracturing bell, until I opened Google, and saw that it was the thirtieth anniversary of his death.
Well. If you fuck with such a powerful portent, you’re fucking up the face of God, surely. So I leapt from a height.
To read Wojnarowicz is to unravel the hidden life, teethfirst. Everything in Close to the Knives sparks with danger and bleeds from what causes it: illegal backroad trysts turn into last rites in hospital rooms, as gay men sicken and die from a disease the United States government lacks the will or the moral compass to treat properly, humanely. Of course David is angry: he’s seeing his lovers and friends, his colleagues and compatriots crumple from failing immune systems. He longs to make art that can satisfactorily provide a response to all this, but the only appropriate answer feels like a long, untrammeled scream. This book is a scream. This book is what remains when you empty the lungs of air and case the joint for one last cigarette into armageddon.
I’ll finish this book here in England, and perhaps I’ll finish A Most Remarkable Creature too: one book for fury, and another for flight. When I walked today, I had both books on my mind. It’s impossible not to feel like an outsider in this place, impossible for me not to count my steps, mind my pulse, straighten my back and (un)tense my jaw. It’s important, in dire seasons, to train your heart not to antagonize itself, to direct your mind not to swallow itself raw. Books like these are ways to keep yourself alive. By which I mean, these two books, very specifically.
Stay alive with me, if that’s what you want. Choose the books you need while you’re here. I hope you’re reading what gives you teeth and bones, beloved ones. I hope you fly better than I do.
Books in this entry:
A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World's Smartest Bird of Prey, by Jonathan Meiburg
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, by David Wojnarowicz