#60

Erschütterungen, Body building.

The island is getting rather physical. Revolution used to be a geological term: Natural disasters reshaping the surface of the earth.
Streets get inky and syrupy at night, as the string of islands appear so very solitary and isolated on the map, tiny dots on blue expanse, an abstract, synthetic blue the ocean would never actually carry. The observatories up on Mauna Kea demand to prevent any light pollution, deepening the black. At the same time, on clear nights, ungauzed moon and stars making it the brightest place, the stars flitting with insane, touching preciseness. I am driving down the road after sunset, through creamy darkness, on the highway through Waimea, eastwards. As if it was an option at all to take in the island by considering only four directions, an island that does not seem to know angles; the only way to move appears to be going in circles, following the ring road spiraling the island. Or going upwards: crossing the island means rising.
If it wasn’t for the winding roads demanding attention, driving through this chewy mass of black will trick you into a perception of not moving at all. “Stillness is the move,” Solange is singing on the radio before an eerily calm voice repeatedly reads out the Tsunami Advisory issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, followed by Olivia Newton-John chirping “Let’s get physical, physical, I wanna get physical” (I remember the music video being as most sterile and disembodied as possible). The earthquake that struck off Chile’s coast is sending its waves and shivers across the Pacific: “The estimated time of arrival of the initial wave is 0324 am HST Wed 02 Apr 2014.” Down in Puako, elevation 0 m, P and K wake up around 3 am, heavy winds whipping the trees, menacing by sounding like the roar of the surf, like the water receding, being sucked out and pushing back with too much force, too much height. The siren is not going off, the signal of safeness disturbing, leaving them in uneasiness: Despite the monthly Siren and Emergency Alert System Test the day before – does the siren work at all? Did they forget?
Eruptions and disturbances in Los Angeles a couple of days ago, fear haunting, F-M writes, the need to obey to a moving earth. She lives on the sixth floor of an old concrete building enlisted as one of the 1000 buildings in major danger in case of earthquake. Because it will not bed, she says, it will simply implode. The dogs people keep in cages in their backyards here on the island, they howl and bay, before you will feel the bump, before you will hear the bang of the earth’s crust releasing a snap.
And then there is Pele, living in Halema’uma’u crater, puffing and fuming, the lava lake glowing at night, intense red and slight shine. Lava flow has been pouring, viscously eating houses and streets and vegetation, shaping solidified black streams and waves, coils and whorls; a black layer covering the island, stretching endlessly, sometimes smooth swellings, Pāhoehoe, sometimes craggy and razor-sharp, ‘A‘ā, every step on it like crunching glass. It is the earth giving birth, they say, making new land. Walking this supposedly unruly ground feels serene and dense like holding a sleeping baby. “Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation,” I read Pynchon quoting Wernher von Braun. Revolution might be merely a human drama. Later on in Gravity’s Rainbow: “All the shit is transmuted to gold.” And again it is all about transfer, about movement. For moving in space I need eight vertices, I need to be inside a cube, tropical building. Moving along axes of coordinates will not be enough. To grasp and grab, um zu begreifen, I will need to get rid of the flat map-image my fingers were retracing over and over on the globe, lit from inside, bringing out the substitute of blue, hovering in the darkness of my Kinderzimmer. I will raise my head.