I’ve never seen them. But most mornings. I wake hearing them tear silence from the sky, heaven torn apart by winged chariots dragging wheelless trailers of thunder. Or, when I’m walking, the invisible echos roll down the shiny tiled walls of narrow alleyways, lanes of lives, livelihoods, and plants.

I’ve tried to write about this several times before, three or four times at least, but it felt naive, trite, an observation of a sheltered tourist into the everyday reality of somewhere else. I discard those attempts with distain, and with the decision to wait till some other item of interest appears.

But then I hear jets, I imagine purpose, sabre-rattling, preparedness training, a deterrence-dance or defensive manoeuvres. I come from quiet skies, where fighter jets are rarely seen, and the dominant use of the overhead is for commerce and passengers. These are the naive skies of home.

Yet, the story of the jet never leaves. I cannot shake its’ company. It returns again and again, a persistent interjection that I feel compelled to consider more.

I’m told that these war machines may be in the hands of pilots in training. But we’re not certain. There is a larger airbase northward that interacts on the geopolitical frontlines over the Taiwan Strait, the identity-crisis of contested waters, are they ‘internal’ to China or international? It is a geopolitics that I am painfully aware of being under-informed about.

In a conversation last weekend, we were told about the inconsistency between the local geopolitical realities’ vs the repetitious ‘Western’ media cycle. The sabre-rattle of print, the pundit and the podcast that gets rolled out with clockwork precision to meet some other agenda elsewhere. Not of the people down here in the laneways.

There is half a bottle of water sitting on top of the fridge in the kitchen, a captured millpond of drinking water. The sound-waves of the jets reaches into the insides of the container, we see the sound of the jet ripple the fluids surface. Like a tiny earthquake, but from above. Or not. Later I question this idea, maybe I’m just connecting dots to a story that doesn’t exist. Did I just rock the vessel by closing the fridge door moments ago?

Pattern recognition is when the brain imagines a line between two dots. The line doesn’t exist, but we believe it to be true. This act of recognition is evolutionalily useful in finding familiarity, but not fact. Bias will launch the brain in to all manner of inaccuracies and batshit cul-de-sac’s, media will have us believe all sorts of distractions via approximate associations. My naivety feels exposed. It’s good to spot it in action. The best response is to, first, be quiet and then learn.

My thinking turns to others’ airspaces. Recent scrolling presented videos of the celebration of silence as the Israeli governments, eventually fraudulent, ‘ceasefire’ came into effect. Palestinian skies minus the jets and drones, monstrous machines designed for one task, to deliver earthquake munitions with heartbreak precision. For a moment, the skies of Gaza are silent, songs rise from the earth. Weeks before, videos from within the apocalypse zone, video clips of teachers teaching students to sing in tune with drones. I can not truly comprehend such coexistent bravery and horror.

We recently played a show in a cafe in Taichung. On the walls hang an exhibition of posters of invitation and resistance from Palestine, organised by local DIY, punk, and communities of solidarity. 

The oldest image, from 1901, is a romantic invitation to Cook’s Nile & Palestine Tours. Depicted is a lone human, on top of a dressed camel, beside a river, looking towards the setting sun. On the surface of still water are sail boats and a steamship of leisure. Across the water is a building to house hundreds in restorative comfort. Perhaps the skies are quiet except for dusks birds. An invitation to tourists and visitors alike. As the posters in the exhibition move toward our current time, the imagery becomes more desperate, painful, deadly. Posters are a silent format. But in this point in time, as in many previous, they aim to tear apart the silence, sending, like soundwaves, out into the future, connecting action to meaning.

Free the skies for all!