James Hannaham - Pilot Impostor

Contents

Advance Praise for Pilot Impostor

A funny and compelling meditation on the self and knowledge, authenticity and identity, mortality and chance, Pilot Impostor unfolds in tragic and comic fragments, allusions, and inventions. Unexpectedalso beautiful.

VIET THANH NGUYEN , Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Sympathizer, The Refugees, and The Committed

Pilot Impostor takes us on an exhilarating, incandescent ride. Words crash, meanings disintegrate and reincarnate, histories disappear and appear on the radar, and against all odds the pilot knows exactly where were headed. As Juliane Diller, the lone survivor of the 1971 crash of Lockheed L-188A Electra turboprop, once described the paradox: I hadnt left the plane; the plane had left me.

MONIQUE TRUONG , author of The Sweetest Fruits and The Book of Salt

Micro-essays, flash fictions, prose poems: however you choose to label James Hannahams rebuses of posture and imposture, self and anti-self, they are endlessly inventive, thought-provoking, and delightful. Mixing text and image, playfulness and profundity, Pilot Impostor updates the flight manual of shape-shifting twentieth-century mastersCalvino, Borges, Perecand most of all Fernando Pessoa, poetic champion of identity theft. So too in my soul do aircraft vanishwell now, thats the type of pilot weve been looking for!

CAMPBELL M c GRATH , author of Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems

A wild symphony of language, image, and philosophico-political outrage, James Hannahams Pilot Impostor is a gift to the genre-curious and Genius-averse: gorgeous, brutal, funny, intimate, enraging, cathartic, anti-cathartic, romantic (small-r), and deliriously, entirely itself.

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS , International Booker Prizewinning translator and poet

Praise for James Hannaham

A writer of major importance The New York Times Book Review

A propulsive storyteller The Washington Post

Hannahams prose is gloriously dense and full of elegant observations that might go unmade by a lesser writer. ROXANE GAY , Bookforum

A writer of spectacular sentences who has trained his sights on a world that has hardly been touched by literary fiction. JENNIFER EGAN

PILOT IMPOSTOR

ALSO BY JAMES HANNAHAM

Delicious Foods

God Says No

PILOT IMPOSTOR

JAMES HANNAHAM

SOFT SKULL NEW YORK

Copyright 2021 by James Hannaham

All rights reserved

First Soft Skull edition: 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hannaham, James, author.

Title: Pilot impostor / James Hannaham.

Description: First Soft Skull edition. | New York, NY : Soft Skull Press, 2021.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021018482 | ISBN 9781593767013 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781593767020 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Essays. | Flash fiction. | Prose poems.

Classification: LCC PS3608.A71573 P55 2021 | DDC 818/.608dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018482

Jacket design by

www.houseofthought.io

Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

Published by Soft Skull Press

New York, NY

www.softskull.com

for my brother

Contents

When considering the self as the unifier of our experiential world, it makes sense to understand it along the lines of a pilot in a flight simulator. From a range of perceptual input, our brain creates the image of the world in which the self operates. We cannot step outside of our brain, so we have no way of finding out what the world beyond the intracranial simulation is like. To us, it does not even feel like a simulation. But the problems with the Cartesian theatre suggest that there is no pilot, no self, for whose benefit the simulation is put on. Rather, the collection of our physical and mental constituents acts like a total flight simulator that not only simulates the information received in the cockpit, but simulates the pilot as well. The self as the unifier of our perceptual input is a simulation or illusion, yet there is no non-simulated or non-illusory someone experiencing the simulation or having the illusion.

Reality: A Very Short Introduction

Jan Westerhoff

What we see of things are the things, writes Caeiro. But the city insisted otherwise. For example: Our first night in Lisbon, we found a restaurant that stayed open until 2 a.m. (Making our first night a morning.) While waiting, I moved the silverware and discovered that the handle of my knife attracted the fork. Using the knife, I dragged the fork in a circle on the table. I saw a knife and I saw a magnet. Which thing of the thing did I see? I saw a magnet and I saw a knife. Until the food arrived, the thing was more magnet than knife. What I saw of the thing had no thing of the thing in it. If you could ask the thing, what would the thing say? Would it use some word known only to things like itself? Ive seen that. Ive seen myself as several things when someone else saw only one and I used a word unknown to those outside. Maybe I saw my reflection in the silvery surface. What we see of ourselves is not us. Is what we see of things ourselves?

The Keeper of Sheep (1), Alberto Caeiro

Sometimes I feel like a commercial jet pilot, sitting here with my eyes focused on my lighted display, the artificial horizon indicating my attitude, fingers at the ready. I have so many systems to monitor as I work; each aspect of the writing might as well be a knob or a dial on the console of an airplane. So many souls depend on my ability, so many people put their trust in me without having met meor at least I imagine that they do. Like you (though you may have met me). The risk of losing altitude and the difficulty of maintaining attitude remain constantly in mind. Its as if I am a pilot without knowing anything about how to fly an airplane.

I have impersonated things that I never became. But everything I did become, I faked at first. (Some things I might still be faking.)

Id find it easier to pass myself off as a shepherd than a jet pilot. A shepherd has a very simple job description: KEEP SHEEP .

One can purchase real pilot uniforms online. Frank Abagnale Jr. bought one, made a fake FAA identification card, stayed in hotels for free as a pilot, and flew in jump seats for a million miles. He did not try to fly the plane. Few people who have impersonated pilots have also attempted to fly the plane. More often, people have taken flying lessons while secretly intending to crash planes. Professional pilots have downed planes on purpose for various reasons. Sometimes, without proper training, pilots have failed catastrophically.

At one point, Frank Abagnale Jr. had at least eight assumed identities. Eventually, after years of fraud, he became a security consultant for banks. Abagnale came from my hometown. More pertinently, he may have grown up near the wealthy enclave people from my hometown say they live in if their houses lie close enough to it. Or if their houses look as if they belong there. My husband grew up there.

The Keeper of Sheep (1), Alberto Caeiro

Science keeps discovering that subjects never before thought to have significant consciousness or the ability to think actually do. In no particular order: crows, sunflowers, Black people. Researchers presume that their subjects cannot know, experience, interpret the world, or understand that they will someday die. This assumption pays the human salary, allowing us to eat, torture, and profit from any entity we deem less conscious than ourselves.