Helga Davis

Soon, things change.

After a week or so of city awe, the senses begin to broaden and deepen, and it's the daytime Earth they come to love.

It's the human-less simplicity of land and sea, the way the planet seems to breathe an animal unto itself.

It's the planet's indifferent turning in indifferent space in the perfection of the sphere which transcends all language.

It's the black hole of the Pacific becoming a field of gold.

Or French Polynesia dotted below the islands like cell samples.

The atolls.

opal lozenges.

Then the spindle of Central America, which drops away beneath them, now to bring to view the Bahamas and Florida.

And the arc of smoking volcanoes on the Caribbean plate, Uzbekistan, in an expanse of ochre and brown.

The snowy mountainous beauty of Kyrgyzstan,

The clean, brilliant Indian ocean of blues untold, the apricot desert of Taklamakan traced about with the faint confluencing and parting lines of creek beds.

It's the diagonal beating path of the galaxy, an invitation into the shunning void.

So then come discrepancies and gaps.

They were warned in their training about the problem of dissonance.

They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth.

You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders, except those between land and sea.

You'll see no countries, just a rolling, indivisible globe, which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war.

And you'll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once.

Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair.