« 098: Dodging Research | Main | 100: Books » August 27, 2004

099: The Spire To Heaven

I'm sitting at the Borders at the corner of Michigan and Pearson in Chicago, the Water Tower Chapel rising up behind me. Off to my right behind the steel-clad Water Tower Plaza is the immense black rock of the John Hancock building. I went up to the top last night and looked out as far as I could see. It's a thousand feet or so in the air, not quite as high as the Sears tower, but it is high enough that you can see all the way to Michigan on a clear day. It's a somewhat meaningless accomplishment--"Hey, I saw Michigan today. Well, I think it was Michigan; it looked like any other stretch of waterfront land."--but it is a sight which we, as two-meter bipedal animals, don't normally see. You can see the stretch of mankind's accomplishments from a thousand feet up.

There are spiders at that height. I shared every view with a handful of them, dark fat spiders who have gorged themselves these last few weeks on the plethora of bugs which have blown through the city. Apparently, spiders are very common at the top of skyscrapers, and I wonder how they get there. Do they scale the entire structure to reach this pinnacle? Is that the extent of their lives: climbing the side of a man-made structure? They climb, they feast, they breed, they die. All within a hands breath of Heaven.

Is that what we tried with the Tower of Babel? Did entire generations live, fuck, and die on the ramparts of that tower? Were there children who never touched solid ground, their entire lives spent among the raised stones and the scaffolding of Man's abortive attempt to reach Heaven?

I have a friend who has recently discovered base jumping--the sport of jumping from a fixed point and parachuting. He would jump from the top of the Hancock building in a second if the winds were right. He would leap into space and freefall for a second or two before he turned himself into a bird and soared through the raised pillars of steel and stone.

There is a Frank Lloyd Wright sketch at the observation deck at the Hancock, a conceptual drawing of the Mile High Skyscraper. A structure that Wright believed would have nuclear-powered elevators to get the thousands of daily visitors up and down this metal spike.

I'm down on the ground where everyone travels horizontally, their faces fixed forward. No one looks up. No one wonders what the spiders are doing, no one looks for the shadow of a giant bird soaring through the jungle of tall buildings, no one dreams of standing on the top of the high tower and stretching their hand up just to see if they can touch the edge of Heaven.

Posted by Teppo at August 27, 2004 03:32 PM

Comments

One interesting fact about the Frank Lloyd Wright vision is that those elevators at the Hancock, and in fact every elevator in the city of Chicago is nuclear-powered. Chicago is a nuclear-powered city.

Bastard. I believed you for a second. More than, actually.

I don't understand what you're saying. Really. There's a nuclear power plant in Zion, IL that provides most of the region with power. And there used to be two others, but I believe they decommissioned one. I don't remember what happened to the other.

This is how guillible I am. I thought you meant in every building there was a power plant driving each elevator. I wasn't thinking so globally. :)