Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Going Up

Going Up 1 I am a gawker. A bumpkin, a hayseed from the Midwest, I stand on the wide sidewalks of cities to look up at the tall buildings. The pedestrians stream grudgingly by, parting into channels on either side of my shoal-like stillness. The walls launch from the same concrete on which I am standing. They vault into the air. This looking creates pleasant illusions. My vision, as it swipes along the lithic or glass facades, recreates the sped-up record of the tower’s construction, brick on brick furiously morphing into a solid sheet, raining upward. It is that cinematic technique of vertigo, that pulled focus of the camera lens, the simultaneous clarity of the very close and the brilliant detail of distance itself stretching, stretching even further away. I am looking straight up! All that is square to the solid deck beneath my feet, all these truly true vertical lines, diminishing as they go (and they do go), vector toward that very center of the endless sky. All lines point to the vanishing point. I am looking straight up! I can see the point of vanishing. This perfect lesson of perspective. This gawking is, perhaps, a function of my midwestern-ness, an expression of my eyes’ evolution on a flat plain. The horizon is all periphery, one endless sentence. The horizon is not this concentrated speck of attention up there, not this black pinprick of convergence, not this dot at the end of seeing seeing, not this infinite period. 51 2 They are called cars. The first one I remember was piloted, its operator uniformed identically to the then contemporary, early ’60s stewardess. The white gloves. The fitted flannel suit. The military buttons. The raked hat with affixed winged device and contrasting piping edging its many folds. Now elevators are selfservice , and we forget because they are designed to make us forget , that they are vehicles moving through space. The hobbled acceleration of that motion, today, is so damped, disguised. You enter. The doors close. The doors open. And you are somewhere else. It’s as if the building rearranged itself outside while you waited in the closed box, or burly work crews struck the lobby like a stage set behind the sliding curtain. Sure, the numbers flash as you pass from floor to floor but that is simple distraction , the only real movement this awkward analog one. My first trip? The first one I remember. I traveled from the ground to the third floor of a small department store. The operator manipulated levers, turned wheels guiding our vehicle. She stopped at the intervening floors, the stool she leaned on springing back up against the wall as she reached across the car to open the first set of double doors. “Going up. Mezzanine. Going up. First floor.” The landings were never exact, the floor of the car and the floor of the floor misaligned like a square of sidewalk dislodged by a tree root. She inched the two floors together, the nudge teasing the tension in the cables to sing, covering her operations with recitation of the floor’s merchandise, a kind of tour guide. “Watch your step.” Later, I waited on the third floor. I was in another world, the world of underwear, husky pants, school shoes, brownie uniforms, belts, handkerchiefs, flatware, china, lunch pails, luggage, and travel alarms. But I lingered at the landing. I watched the cars arrive from below, depart. There were two shafts, the cars’ alternating rise and fall, a kind of breathing. A distinct shadow filled the squares of light in the opaque windows of the outer doors. The bell struck flat, the tinny ceremony of arrival. “Watch your step.” I made no move for the empty car. 52 Going Up “Going down.” The doors slid shut. The muffled announcement of the next destination filtered through. I watched the shadow sink, compress into a line at the lip of the floor. Going, then gone. 3 Z is the other axis of travel. When we travel, we think in terms of going north, going south, even thinking of that as going up or down, the three dimensions of our world constantly flattened to the two of our maps. We laugh at the flat earth notion but we operate happily within it. Altitude, the forgotten coordinate of place, escapes us when latitude and longitude will suffice...