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I'd hoped that my intermittant sneezing was caused by the explosion of pollen this week. The pears and cherry trees are in full flower, dotting the city with whitish-green and whitish-pink blooms, and causing hordes of tourists to descend on the mall.
Unfortunately, not; Friday I woke up to full-fledged misery of fever and flourescent fluids and achiness. Now I've got a lovely cough going on, as I didn't allow myself any chance to rest, much less recover.
In honor of the cherry blossoms, though, I spent some time at the Udvar-Hazy center looking at another sort of cherry blossom, the ohka-22. I don't know what draws me to this plane, exactly; I look for it every time I visit the museum, and just spend time contemplating it. None of the 22s were ever put into service (and if this one had I obviously wouldn't be able to look at it), but even as an unfinished prototype it projects- tragedy, simplicity, purity of purpose. Explosives instead of a large engine. A human instead of instruments.
It seems to me that that plane encompasses both what is beautiful and terrible about the human race. Over and over again, we send our young men as terrible sacrifices to the gods of war, on all sides, for all purposes. We engineer beautiful and deadly machines in the crucible of conflict. It is our advancement and our destruction. These things- hope, anger, brilliance, will, death- they are all in each of us, and so we are inexorably tied to the songs of poets and the madness of war.
In the ohka, I see humanity's epitaph.
Unfortunately, not; Friday I woke up to full-fledged misery of fever and flourescent fluids and achiness. Now I've got a lovely cough going on, as I didn't allow myself any chance to rest, much less recover.
In honor of the cherry blossoms, though, I spent some time at the Udvar-Hazy center looking at another sort of cherry blossom, the ohka-22. I don't know what draws me to this plane, exactly; I look for it every time I visit the museum, and just spend time contemplating it. None of the 22s were ever put into service (and if this one had I obviously wouldn't be able to look at it), but even as an unfinished prototype it projects- tragedy, simplicity, purity of purpose. Explosives instead of a large engine. A human instead of instruments.
It seems to me that that plane encompasses both what is beautiful and terrible about the human race. Over and over again, we send our young men as terrible sacrifices to the gods of war, on all sides, for all purposes. We engineer beautiful and deadly machines in the crucible of conflict. It is our advancement and our destruction. These things- hope, anger, brilliance, will, death- they are all in each of us, and so we are inexorably tied to the songs of poets and the madness of war.
In the ohka, I see humanity's epitaph.
