Flying home from Seattle to Love Field staring out the airplane window over the wing where I see the words no step on the part of the wing that curves over the edge and I imagine stepping there where it’s forbidden on that forbidden ledge slowly falling slipping over easing into oblivion in slow motion while the Boeing jets along at 500+ miles per hour racing toward the curve of the earth in the distance. I think about the phenomenon of gravity, how it’s strong enough to keep the moon in orbit, to keep billions and billions of people grounded and in place, but so readily overcome. I lift the pen from the tray attached to the back of the seat in front of me and begin writing. Hardly any effort at all is needed to render gravity null, to void the otherwise constant downward tug, the slow-motion fall toward the center. I remember a professor from graduate school who complained about unnecessary signage, a proliferation of longwindedness where words were unneeded and uncalled for. He was German, daher [ergo] unnecessary words and signs were an indictment of (sneered) Amerikanische Kultur and the suburban Texas milieu he currently found himself in. Being German, and of a certain age, he therefore as a boy had served in the HJ, the Hitlerjugend, the Bund deutscher Arbeiterjugend: Hitler Youth, League of German Worker Youth. Now I think about unnecessary German words ah Youth! and German signs Arbeit macht frei! I’ve seen on several occasions hanging over entrances to certain locales…. Und das Problem scheint doch nicht sehr amerikanisch zu sein. Mountains below fold themselves up into snowy pillows. Deep ravines that the curve of the mountains peer into. No step. And it’s the middle of March in the second year of this pandemic, just two days before the Biscoff cookie Alaska Airlines handed out as a snack expires. I’ve never seen a product so close to its expiration date before. I see myself expiring falling over the edge of the wing, over the ledge of the mountain range, over the abyss of history, all stamped and imprinted with unnecessary best-before words no step, kein Schritt, and I’m slow motion falling. We seem to be leaving the snow-capped mountains behind, back west, as the land starts to stretch itself out in its flat browns. Instead of the snow and ridges being the dominant feature of the world down below, it’s now muddy tan with blurred charcoal shadows of clouds and slight white capillaries. I’m nodding off again, and as I doze I imagine a megaton explosion in the engine just outside my window, just outside seat 15F. I imagine the cabin losing pressure, masks falling from the panel above our heads, us removing our face masks in unison, replacing them with yellow oxygen masks. The wind is fierce, the cold, bitter. Our tears and snot turning to frost, knowing we are falling, in flames, as gravity pulls us back to its center. I think about Herbert Marcuse and surplus repression—his attempt to explain the intellectual, emotional, and psychological complicity with a world, with a culture, whose sole purpose it is to destroy thought itself and the humans who would enact thought, those thinkers, those thinking machines whose program is so buggy that it requires extra-systemic, extra-textual reinforcement to enforce a code as malignant as it is ubiquitous. No step. To critique prevailing societal structures. The excessive, unnecessary constraints steps were taken imposed by a repressive society on individual freedom and expression beyond what is required for maintaining social order: modern industrial societies not only regulate basic instincts and impulses necessary for social functioning (basic or primary repression) but also suppress innate human potential and desires that could lead to revolutionary change (surplus repression). In the form of consumerism, mass media, and cultural norms that promote conformity and discourage critical thought: academia post-1989. Discourse and content as manufactured contentment. Aim: to perpetuate existing power structures and prevent the emergence of genuine social transformation. My head jostles back into place as the fasten-seatbelt sign chimes on, as my head drowsily snaps to attention. A landscape illegible to colonizers’ eye. We have to keep adding signs where they are least needed in order to compensate our inability to read what’s already there. A sign chimes on or off as we begin our initial descent over Amarillo and I’m stepping where no step is possible, pas de pas pas un pas le pas au-delà, a slow-motion step (not) beyond the edge, and my head jerks back after falling forward and I jolt awake.
Since I am currently traveling, I reached back into the the archive—my Moleskine journal, because I’m just that kind of asshole writer who travels—to find something for this month’s column. “No Step” was written March 19, 2021, after helping a friend move to the Pacific Northwest during a global pandemic.
Writer and translator Frank Garrett shops in Dallas, Texas, and is essays editor at Minor Literature[s]. His series Better Shopping Through Living will appear monthly. He has begun a journey of a thousand miles with not even one single step.
minor literature[s] 