Microgravity
(liner notes for track 3)
They speak of it
reluctantly,
the astronauts of few who admit
to the sensations
and frustrations
of the first days
in weightlessness:
when your head feels
something like
a watermelon with a cold,
and your lower back feels wrenched
longer than it’s design,
and your stomach is doing cartwheels
somewhere in between.
when everything is not
where you have always
known it to be:
no up or down now,
no ceiling, no floor,
only walls that seem
to crash so easily
into you.
when you try to move over there
and suddenly find yourself careening
in the opposite direction…
not to mention the aspect of
putting things down,
(dropping things),
the things you seem
to need most at the moment,
and they quickly float away and vanish
into air ducts and socks
and the most unexpected places.
In contrast,
the astronauts of many
cannot wait, it seems, to describe
what it is that replaces
that initial period
of nausea and quiet frustration.
For there is a moment they speak of passionately,
a very pure and crystalline moment,
when one suddenly knows
how things are now, how to move now in microgravity…
they say it doesn’t happen
after calculated
intellectual reasoning, no,
but instead it happens
rather suddenly, surprisingly,
a visceral realization
when you least expected it.
Bingo!
It’s like the light bulb went on,
and you get it!
You get it!
Suddenly, you know how to do it!
From that moment on you can never
get enough of microgravity.
For they say that
the experience of it
is sheer joy,
sheer ecstasy,
unlike anything you’ve ever
experienced
on earth before.
Some astronauts have called it
an amazing choreography,
a dance, a ballet…
for me as the composer,
in this music
it became a swirling, spinning,
and triumphant
waltz.
copyright 2008 Anne Cabrera
Tags: Columbia, liner notes, microgravity
