UFOs
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A metaphor is a UFO. This relationship is more commonly expressed in the inverse—a UFO is a metaphor. But the high-profile mysteries of the last couple of weeks have put me in mind of some of the functions of metaphor: to bring distant entities to a closer proximity; to harness the perspective obtainable from a certain angle; to loosen the terms of our certainty about what we believe we know. Metaphors enjoy a common stratum together, somewhere between earth and space, so to catch hold of one may secure readier access to others, as a wristband admits you to a music festival.
Metaphors can also be shot down; maybe you will do that with mine, now. It’s true there is no shortage of bad ones, as impenetrable as a propulsionless octagon trailing strings over a Great Lake. Metaphor failure is the leading cause of poetry death.
A few years ago I went through a maverick phase with a camera drone in the East Williamsburg Industrial Park, a sprawling urban geography with a certain amount of inborn metaphorical force—an aesthetic scar tucked away in a pocket of Brooklyn and organized around one of the most polluted bodies of water in the country, all with enviable views of the Manhattan skyline. The drone took this general symbol of devastation and gave it any number of specific faces: whole huge cement truck drums apparently discarded in a pile; out-of-use brick warehouse chimneys glimpsing downward into the pitch of hell; a fleet of Dorito trucks; forklifts eternally circling a multistory, red-and-blue conveyor, outside a warehouse near the train tracks, that looked like it was built from an Erector Set; wild greenery scaling the brick and glass-block walls of a complex you could imagine no human had touched the inside of in decades; an elaborate metal cage—exactly what size, hard to say—sitting with its door open on a low-slung roof.
Everything in the East Williamsburg Industrial Park looks a bit like Legos from above. Toxic legos, maybe. But Legos invisible from the street, where cinderblock walls topped with razor wire dismiss the onlooker. Inside those walls teems a whole recombinant substrate of the city, literal and figurative, brightly colored and choked with dust.
In the end (for that drone at least), I sent it another direction and crashed it onto the roof of a hospital. From there it was placed in the custody of the police. I thought for sure retrieving it would result in my arrest, but I had to rescue the footage. A cop took my driver’s license and left me tense in the lobby for 10 minutes. When my drone returned to me, it was totaled, but the images were recoverable. One video shows the final moments of the device, as the building’s hulk of rust-colored steel interferes with the connection back home and the poor thing tries to get back on its own, a journey that lasts only a few seconds before terminating, mutely, in a wall.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.