|
estebanana -> RE: 13 August: An Infamous Anniversary (Aug. 24 2011 18:25:01)
|
Richard you lived through some really interesting times. I thought about becoming an aeronautical engineer, but choose gluing sticks together instead.
I had a relative who was deeply involved with the Vietnam war at the very top level in the Pentagon, I think much of my cynicism about US policy is derived from listening to him recount the political fights in the Pentagon during that war. Anyway, the space ace was indeed exciting, I was a young child and I followed it with an obsession only rivaled by my interest in hand tying fishing flies and dreaming of catching a tarpon on light tackle while watching a take off at Cape Canaveral.
Regarding Kelly Johnson, I've always maintained he was a very important figure in American life, both militarily and culturally, whom most Americans have never heard of. The car industry culture and industrial design of the mid century was highly influenced on the surface treatment of design by the space age and the jet age. Kelly Johnson was perhaps the best aircraft designer, or among the top few, and his influence over the way aircraft worked and looked as enormous. All that precipitated over into the auto designs of the 1950's and 60's as body style and marketing points. A kind of extended cold war propaganda to sell cars based on the visually seductive nature of high performance aircraft. I love it I must say.
And the aircraft themselves that Kelly Johnson designed have never been out done. His airplane still holds the speed and altitude records. I'm sure you know all about it and that his aircraft pointed the way to making planes with smaller and smaller radar signatures. Beautiful seductive killing and picture taking machines. I think he was a great America industrial designer who's work had abroad influence on all design, but nobody knows who he is except pilots and engineers.
So yeah Cold War! It gave us things to look at. The U-2 and the A-11...SR-71 and Edwin Lands amazing cameras mounted in them that had super resolution from 70,000 feet. It all was pretty heady.
Then one day my English teacher hit me with this: The Birches by Robert Frost
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
|
|
|
|
