There are all kinds of talents on Substack—writers, podcasters, poets, chefs, painters. For this post, we decided to combine a few. We asked animator
of to create a short film inspired by a passage from ’s “Virilio’s Grey Ecology,” a meditation on motion, disconnection, and the flight paths of long-distance birds.In Service of the Great Expanse
—An excerpt from Virilio’s Grey Ecology by
, published inI will never, for the life of me, understand why people run marathons. They’re a psychotic bunch, really. Just clinically insane. To train and train and go absolutely nowhere? What in god’s name could you possibly be running from?
Lately, however, I’ve begun to empathize. In a daily reality defined by desk jobs and driverless cars, I imagine it’s invigorating to know what 26.2 miles feels like in the body. It’s a knowledge I do not possess. Perhaps I never will.
Over the course of its migration from Brazil to northern Canada, a semipalmated sandpiper will fly the human equivalent of 126 marathons in a row, with no food or water in between. To prepare for this feat of endurance, these tiny athletes pack on 40-60% of their body weight in pure fat, until their blood chemistry resembles that of a diabetic with chronic heart disease. Their bones hollow out and their digestive organs shrink and atrophy. At the same time, their pectoral muscles grow by nearly 50%. All without a single chest press.
What would it be like to offer one’s body to the distance? To shape and reshape oneself in the service of expanse? By the time a bar-tailed godwit dies, it will have flown the equivalent distance of the moon and back. How else would a body come to truly know our planet?
Recently I’ve been tracking the ways I retreat into the elsewhere. How I clock out from reality and hide inside my phone. I have a habit of stuffing my daily commute with entertainment, as if I’m terrified of what might happen if I just let myself be. I will stand in the threshold of my door for up to fifteen minutes, frantically searching for a podcast, unable to take another step until I hear the voice of Ezra Klein.
One morning a few weeks back, as I walked over to the subway, I popped in a podcast about Paul Virilio’s early life. Did you know he worked alongside Matisse as a stained-glass artist in Paris? Two guys near the corner store started screaming something about car parts, and the smell from the dumpsters made the hair in my nostrils curl. I pushed my noise-canceling headphones deeper into my ears, until the sound from the outside became nothing but a murmur. I listened as the podcast host discussed his early lectures.
Somewhere in the back of the audio, I could hear a seagull cawing. I wondered where the podcaster was in that moment, and whether he lived by the coast or near a beach. Maybe he lived a life on the wing, recording from one warm location, then another, spending his free time lying in the sand. I wished that I could lie in that sand. I began to grow jealous of this man’s nomadic lifestyle—of the freedom he had to move about the world, with nothing but a microphone, following his whims. I realized that I longed to have that kind of freedom.
Just then, a massive glob of bird shit splattered across my hand, oozing down my finger and into the seam of my phone case. It was a ring-billed gull on a long-haul flight to Newfoundland, reminding me of my place in the sensuous here and now.
We’d love to do more of these. Got a post, creator, or art form you think we should pair up next? Drop it in the comments.
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