John Biscello

A flight of stairs, a flight of birds, a flight of fancy … fly into a bar and the barkeep asks—Which one of you is the fastest? No one answered. They were, in essence, conceptual. Conceptual kin. Three different ways of flying. Do the stairs and birds and fancy see themselves as kindred spirits, as relations, due to their shared “flights?” Upon scrutiny and philosophical consideration, you could say the birds are the realest of the three. The birds with their tiny beating hearts and feathery warmth and offspring. The stairs would be second in that they are solid, dependable, tangible. Fancy is an etheric and abstract term, a sliver of the immaterial, and so that would qualify as the least realistic of the three, yet … does not a flight of fancy promote winged and stair-like excursions to things and places that very muchunder the legislative purview: real. Are ideas real? A different kind of real, a dreaming-real, do ideas possess their own dream-life, carry implicitly within them hopes and aspirations to grow and materialize into something, the journey from placeless place to location, form and zone, ideas requiring attentive and engaged nurturance and caretaking? A flight of stairs, a flight of birds, and a flight of fancy are, in essence, the conceptual progeny of a mother-noun: flight. If called flighty stairs, flighty birds, flighty fancy, they would be adjectival kin. If classed flying stairs, flying birds, flying fancy, they would be verb cousins. Language is bond and adhesive. It is also qualifier, co-conspirator, and progenitor when it comes to raising and defining reality.

A flight of stairs, a flight of birds, and a flight of fancy fly into a bar and the bartender asks—Would you like a round of drinks, a round ball, or a round of golf?