Bone

 

Actually, it is their place to move across a landscape. Balance requires some Contour firm to be upright. Be Cause. Artificial intelligence may say this, a thousand ways. But here this is the original transcript, the A-text, not the B-plan. Title: Choreography of Calcium. Aeronautics must get down to the layperson’s level, ground level. Down on the ground again. For verily, of the Earth they were created. Out of the effort to stand erect they stumbled forth. Internal compression drafted the frame, it started somewhere. Fabulous frame forth go. Gravity made them, all creatures great and small, standing on their own feet, little links of toe bone. What the. Recline with every joint at rest, Earth in a holding position. Fine. Great. Hefty and many learned dissertations will be written. Fieldwork on ribcages will proliferate in Journals. Aeronautics gets down to the lay of the land. Ground level. Trolls will pitch how the space race has crossed a finishing line. Haha! Anti-trolls will find waterfalls on Venus. Houston, they have a problem. Internal compression. Inkling of inglenook bones. Jarring of just so jaunty bones. Jumping Jupiter! Kneel they may upon the sacred stone, hard like stone themselves. Lo! Science fiction never counted on porousness, white holes. Every sentence must be rewritten. Cancel Mars at this rate, the grand canal, could Martians so much as stand straight. No, not ordinarily. Problem. Question. Request. Spacemen specimens of decalcification input data as they embryo go from deck to dial, galaxies at portholes. The more they float the softer their bone tone. Months with the comets wear down the sockets. Time soon to re-enter their skeleton atmosphere, gravity compressing the fixtures. Up is out there or down and out or here and now of there and then, in outer Space. Transfer the space race trillions to renewable do-ables, bonehard facts. No star trek osteoporosis limps the command deck on zimmers bent forward with replacements. Let them face facts. The weight downward of Earth keeps bones thick. Flesh likes it that way, compact against the elements. Upright vertebrae. Whereas up there, out there where there’s all the time in the world, bone thins and fractures without a foothold. White holes might be terminal. Only a test run to Jupiter can say. What the. Soft bodies in capsules, joined and white-bright, don’t touch the ground. Touch the buttons for mission to airlessness. Their fingerbones change in gloves of skin, eyes wanting UV moon views. While down there, which is blue down weighed down there white paisley ribbons over continents, where islands could be stars, down where gravity made them front up to the X-ray yes she said yes alas poor Yorick and the whole Zoo, too. Their yearning Ground Zero.

Photograph: Keith Haring work, taken at the Haring-Basquiat exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in late 2019. This wakese spacewalk with the alphabet is written in response to articles that are coming out in numbers about astronauts’ loss of bone density after long trips outside the Earth’s gravity. Here’s one of them: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/30/lost-in-space-returned-astronauts-struggle-to-recover-bone-density-study-finds