The Heavy Air: Capitalism and affronts to common sense

Abstract

34 meditation we do not pay rent for the air we breathe, but we do share it with a farrago of the built: windmills, airplanes, drones, satellites , kites, chimes, skyscrapers, clotheslines, balloons, radioactive clouds, automobile exhaust. What is overhead is not exactly free; it is merely unevenly owned. Nations claim airspace, militaries plot no-­ fly zones, and clouds reside without permits. Ideas are the correlate of air. Clouds are air’s objectifications, and, as perspiration and respiration, air is where effort goes once our effort is spent. This crowded air is the stage of everything dematerialized’s abiding dematerialization. Everything solid melts into it. We suspect the difficult-to-grasp—gods, ghosts, abstractions— of residing in air, and philosophers, at least if we are to believe a tradition from Aristophanes on, have heads in the clouds and essay The Heavy Air Capitalism and affronts to common sense Anne Boyer A The Heavy Air | 35 feet which stumble over the vulgar obstacle of earth. The air is the precinct of not only the difficult but also the adorable: songbirds, butterflies, bumblebees, stars, moons, heavens, rainbows, sunsets. Sound is made in air, and scent too. Angels are nearly exclusive to air: like the wind, messengers of unseen cause and undeniable effect. An angel is a machine of wings, sometimes six of them, and, according to the book of Revelation, “full of eyes within.” Borders are helpless against angels, radiation, and migrant geese, ridiculed by winds and thwarted by what the winds can blow over them. Air is an engine of accelerated resistance of the nonhuman world to the violence of capital and its multi-­ specied count of corpses. It is in the air that the storms come and by it that the fires spread. It is via the atmosphere that the earth’s temperature rises. Infections move through air, too, traveling nearly immaterially from one to another in our coughs and our breaths. Time, too, is an aerial animal, flying but never landing, even when hunted by finance and ground into management. Light rises up through air, the darkness falls into it. And air is all we have to breathe, so before we had clocks or dollars, life was the measure between first and last breath. The air, insofar as it is both completely necessary and generally invisible, offers all who breathe it an at-­ hand primer of belief. We gasp and die in the absence of what we cannot see, and in this way the invisible’s power is proved. That is, we know that air is real and necessary because of the miserable and deadly consequences of its absence, and by this we learn how to take a position of certainty about what evades the senses. The gods live both in the air and because of it, and our capacity for the sacred is allowed by air’s pedagogy in the transcendent. A wing means little without the sky, and without flight feathers are less impressive, but, as Plato explains in the Phaedrus, the air is some anatomy’s possibility: “The natural function of the wing is to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of the gods. More than any other thing that pertains to the body it partakes of the nature of the divine.” 36 | Anne Boyer It is at a crosswords (insula/crossroads—Don Quixote) of breath and text that poetry often resides, as far as lyric poetry exists in a special, specific relationship to the air and what attends it: breath, flight, transcendence, sound. When Shelley imagines himself, in “Ode to the West Wind,” it is as air’s aspirant comrade. Emily Dickinson called herself an “inebriate of air.” Vladimir Mayakofsky proposed to “grow irreproachably tender / not a man, but a cloud in trousers!” We know the certainty of air not just when we are gasping for it, but also when it becomes the substrate of something foul, dirty, or toxic. We can smell death in it, the approaching storms and rotting flesh, the tear gas that burns our eyes, the burning forests that choke us, pollution abrading our throats and sinuses. Despite the advice to breathe...