The last time i flew, i blacked out during the plane’s slow descent into Dallas. i don’t have any anxiety that i’m aware of about flying, and it’s never happened before.  i was hungover, but i always am when i fly. i’d been out in the sun the day before, and when it started coming on, i thought i was just feeling the heat on my skin from the first hour i’d spent by a pool, just sitting there, in years.  i’ve passed out enough to know what was happening. i was hot–seconds before i’d been freezing. i took off my jacket and my bare arms were covered in cold sweat. i kicked off my shoes and just kept telling myself to breathe. Slowly my vision went tingly and began to fade. Everything within my line of vision kept breaking until i felt like i was staring at a television turned to a channel that had just gone off the air–back when television stations still went off the air and i still watched TV.  Narcolepsy has trained me how to be ready to have consciousness taken away from me, so i just closed my eyes and waited as my body took over for a minute. i was out.  i was back. Waves of nausea crept in, but thankfully my vision  quickly returned.  By the time the plane was on the ground, i mostly felt okay. i grabbed a peanut butter chip cookie and a Caesar as i passed the food court. i splashed water on my face in the bathroom.  i just made my connecting flight.

i’d packed meticulously for a visit i’d recklessly undertaken.  i carried one big black canvas bag and a tiny black leather purse.  i’d gone to Muji and purchased little containers for the liquids. My new bikini was tucked into a side pocket and my new little black dress was folded around a black satin slip. Overdetermined by absence and difficult to read, the visit was not designed to provide answers or hope. It had just been necessary, and it was already over, and i was barreling back to New York and work and a life i had just started learning how to love. Almost no one knew i had gone, or where, or why.  Packing–collecting everything i would need, imagining the scenarios in which different articles would be worn and removed, had given the whole thing structure, but now that those days had passed i knew that if i unbuckled my seat belt i might disappear. Nothing would change because of the trip, but something was certainly different.

For two completely unrelated projects, i was re-reading Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism. When i’d left New York, as i was slowly making my way through first class into coach, a handsome, extremely vital man seated in the first row got excited when he saw it tucked under my arm. “That’s a great book,” he assured me. “You don’t see it much anymore. It’s fantastic to see it.” Yes, i know, i replied. i am very familiar with it. He asked if i was an academic and i said something like, why else would i be carrying this right now? “Well, there are those of us who have an avocational interest in it,” he explained. i gave him my, “How nice,” grimace and kept shuffling along, but i had appreciated his excitement. Anyhow, here is the passage i am fixated on now:

“There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as ‘the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence’.  Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (51).

See, i’m not entirely convinced that i could ever claim to really know where my real conditions end and where the imaginary ones pick up, especially when my conscience seems to be so delicately wired into my capabilities for consciousness. Nonetheless, these places and times where my body reminds me of my lack of complete control might be the closest i will ever get to honesty, and i am happy for them.