Once me and Dinda were having a discussion with Erik, a good friend and a mentor of ours, actually it was an interview session that we did for an online media. At some point during the discussion we talked about one of his photograph of a bucket full of drowned moths that died after circling around the lamp situated above the bucket. The photograph was to commemorate the death of the Indonesian activist Munir. Erik continued by saying that he had read somewhere that the one that attracts men to come to cities was not the opportunities that you could get in the place, but at the very primal level it was lights, city lights that attract humans. In a very similar way that light attracts months and how the city was a bucket full of decaying bodies.
Erik had his relationship between lights, the city, humans and moths and after a while, I had my experience as well.
While flying for a working trip to Bali, I was taking the last flight, it was guaranteed to arrive well before midnight in Denpasar. I had finished my meal (chicken or was it fish?) and getting ready to dozed off, but before I decided to see what they offer in the entertainment section. "Ah Stoker was available", so there I was watching the movie forgetting the need to sleep.
The movie was abruptly ended by the staffs because we need to land, as usual "prepare for landing" in Indonesia would mean a good 30-45 minutes of circling the air without your seat being reclined and your entertainment stopped. A time where suddenly you realized that you're all alone aboard this plane surrounded with strange faces and your only salvation is of course to turn to the most familiar face, yourself. So then you started to speak to yourself and flood your head with thoughts.
When humans created the airplanes, they were thinking of making themselves free from the tyranny of gravity. Over time, it began to look like a good idea to use it as a mass transportation method as well, but mankind is also a species who easily forgot and easily distracted, nobody wants to be confined for two, three or eight hours by just sitting, so in order to make us bear the cage they give us entertainment, they give us lights so our eyes can be transfixed on that brightly lit small screens. And there we are, a species who never once learned, we created planes to free us from the tyrant only to be bound and watched a flickering light. Like moths.
Fortunately there were the times where the lights and the screens were off and our minds come back to its rightful owner. The time where our thoughts and imaginations crawls back into our head feeding us with memories and stories, freeing us from the vessel we called body. That time happens when you had no flickering lights to distract you or when you spend 30-45 minutes waiting for your plane to land.
And that's the time that you should realized that how our life was just a series of flickering lights.