Escape

Much as I love words, they can be tyrants sometimes. Swarming together into thoughts and buzzing around my brain, they distract me from my body.

Then I make my escape into the world of numbers. There is nothing so clear and simple and elegant as an equation, where all the powers of x and y are discovered and revealed and work together.


^116

The time came for my escape from Erewhon. I knew that I would have to find an excuse to visit the eastern mountains during the dark of the moon. I told the King that I wanted to observe the residents of Naffity when they gathered the tears of mourning. He raised his left eyebrow, but granted leave.

I was handed a dark lantern and we hiked up to the plateau below the giant fallen statues. Once everyone was bent over with eyes fixed to the ground, I slipped away and climbed up the rocky slope. My hands and arms and face were scratched by the long thorns as I burrowed through the boor-geresy thicket and found the tunnel entrance beneath the up-bent knee of the statue of Xite.

[escape links: Thesaurus | Ish | Frog | Reconstruction | No]
[escape links: Traffic | Law | Beautiful | Common | Toaster]
[escape links: Sex | Submarine | Plexus | Accuse | Gardenia]
[escape links: Regret | Multilingual | Muscle | Invention | Garlic]
[escape links: Muscle | Which | Help | Text | Awake]
[escape links: God | Bombast | Bed | Factors | ^116]
[escape links: Engage | Seattle | Goodhearted | Reality | A-Bomb]
[escape links: Flower | Frame | Fret | Cinema | Understanding]
[escape links: Reasonable | Fridge | Master | Voodoo | Baby]
[escape links: Llama | Picture | Materialism | Will | Gleam]

I NEVER hear the word “escape”
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation,
A flying attitude.

I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars,—
Only to fail again!

~~~Emily Dickinson (1830–86)

Every series, be it books, movies, TV, at least contain one episode that has something to do with escaping:

»Escape from the jungle of doom«
»Escape to paradise«
»Frank's Escape«
»Escape from the planet of the robot monsters«
»Espace from the empire strikes back«

from all the others, from you,
from me ... from me?
how can I escape from myself?

Last week, someone asked me what it is that drives me. I didn't know what to say. Is there something other than architecture that drives me? I searched my mind for hours thinking of what my passion was. I thought of all the movies that I had seen throughout the year, and then it hit me: the thing which drives me is the hope, the promise, that I can be anywhere but Here.
I told her that I liked to travel. She thought I meant something like going to Europe. But I really only wanted to die.

Life, for us, is a series of dramatic escapes. We must leap from bed and escape the unproductiveness of sleep; we must don the armour of our cars and trains and busses and escape hellish traffic; we must escape the office at night and go home to not-work. We must escape into television, into movies, into games, into bars, into sex and into one another's lives. We must escape the conscious realisation that we never wanted to be more than twelve years old; we must escape conscious realisation of ourselves. Finally we escape back into sleep, where at last, for a time, we are free.