Crashed Airplane, 1960

Well, the answer seems to be that we don’t all always stay afloat, or aloft. Here flight such-and-such of such-and-such airline (I believe that the dead passengers & crew are primarily Scandinavian) has crash-landed on an iceberg that recently calved from Arctic sea ice. Some few may have survived the initial landing trauma but they are surely dead by now - some 47 years later. Soon their ice floe, their floating tomb, will melt along with all the other sea ice on our planet and their aeroplane will sink to the bottom of the frigid deep.

Landing On Water, 1960

Another plane down. Maybe this one flew over Antarctica in October when the hole in the ozone layer is largest. Excess UV(b) radiation may have fried the controls, scrambled the wiring, impaired the pilots’ abilities; for whatever reason this plane also fell from the sky, this time into water, lessening the impact & allowing a handful of coach-class passengers to escape into a life raft just as the aeroplane begins to sink beneath the waves. A seaplane searches overhead fruitlessly. Or is that plane also diving out of control?

The Trouble I Had, 1960

A man in a beanie or watch cap is walking. Whether this Beckettian character is happy or sad, at ease or troubled, driven or contemplative, is unknown & unknowable. I think that these attributes might all be one in the same, or arbitrary & inconsequential scratches on a wide featureless continuum. I also think that this little man has callouses & is the better for that. I used this as the cover image for a book of the same name (ie The Trouble I Had), a compiliation of several text-image chapbooks I’d self-produced in the 1980s. The compilation was published by anabasis/xtant in 2004.