099: The Spire to Heaven
I was sitting at the Borders at the corner of Michigan and Pearson in Chicago, the Water Tower Chapel rising up behind me, about a month ago. Off to my right behind the steel-clad Water Tower Plaza is the immense black rock of the John Hancock building. I went up to the top the previous nightt and looked out as far as I could see. It's a thousand feet or so in the air, not quite as high as the Sears tower, but it is high enough that you can see all the way to Michigan on a clear day. It's a somewhat meaningless accomplishment--"Hey, I saw Michigan today. Well, I think it was Michigan; it looked like any other stretch of waterfront land."--but it is a sight which we, as two-meter bipedal animals, don't normally see. You can see the stretch of mankind's accomplishments from a thousand feet up.
There are spiders at that height. I shared every view with a handful of them, dark fat spiders who have gorged themselves these last few weeks on the plethora of bugs which have blown through the city. Apparently, spiders are very common at the top of skyscrapers, and I wonder how they get there. Do they scale the entire structure to reach this pinnacle? Is that the extent of their lives: climbing the side of a man-made structure? They climb, they feast, they breed, they die. All within a hands breath of Heaven.
Is that what we tried with the Tower of Babel? Did entire generations live, fuck, and die on the ramparts of that tower? Were there children who never touched solid ground, their entire lives spent among the raised stones and the scaffolding of Man's abortive attempt to reach Heaven?
I have a friend who has recently discovered base jumping--the sport of jumping from a fixed point and parachuting. He would jump from the top of the Hancock building in a second if the winds were right. He would leap into space and freefall for a second or two before he turned himself into a bird and soared through the raised pillars of steel and stone.
There is a Frank Lloyd Wright sketch at the observation deck at the Hancock, a conceptual drawing of the Mile High Skyscraper. A structure that Wright believed would have nuclear-powered elevators to get the thousands of daily visitors up and down this metal spike.
I'm down on the ground where everyone travels horizontally, their faces fixed forward. No one looks up. No one wonders what the spiders are doing, no one looks for the shadow of a giant bird soaring through the jungle of tall buildings, no one dreams of standing on the top of the high tower and stretching their hand up just to see if they can touch the edge of Heaven.
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.