This piece was commissioned following Season Butler’s Non-Criticisms Digital Lab, as part of the Live Art Writers Network. It was first published in Nonconforming Criticisms (slow+dirty press, March, 2026), a limited edition printed collection of writings, edited by performingborders and Diana Damian Martin.

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METAR UNKN 171800Z VRB05KT 9999 SCT020 BKN080

TEMPO TURB

RMK WX UNSTABLE VIS VARIABLE

HORIZON RECEDING

NO INTENTION TO LAND

Flight is both a literal practice and a charged metaphor for movement under contemporary conditions shaped by racial capitalism, climate crisis, surveillance infrastructures and highly mechanised border regimes. To fly is not to transcend these conditions but to negotiate them differently. Once off the ground, familiar reference points begin to fail: distance rearranges perception, visibility fluctuates and orientation becomes provisional. Pilotage works with weather, drift, pressure – not in spite of them – as fronts shift.

This score treats writing in much the same way. It invites us to approach writing less as a matter of expression, confession or explanation, but rather, as a navigational practice undertaken without guarantees. Just for this leg of a much longer journey… 

Like flight, writing relies on planning and technique, but it also assumes misalignment, instability and the possibility of losing lift. Certain borders, features and relations only come into view from altitude, from distance or with the passage of time; others dissolve the moment you approach them too directly.

The instructions that follow are not a route to a specific destination. They offer a set of procedures for staying in motion – for writing with uncertainty, constraint and imagination, and for remaining aloft without resolving where, or how, to come down. 

Instructions for Not Coming Down

(A writing score)

• Fix your horizon.
  Remember: the horizon is a navigational aid, not a destination. It will recede. It is supposed to.
• Fuel up.
  This may or may not be to full capacity.
• This airfield is uncontrolled.
  Do not radio for permission.
• Full throttle.
  Inject all available energy into the engine. Accelerate to V_r.
• Pull back the yoke until gravity fails.
  Lift off. Climb.
• Level off.
  Abstract the ground. Triangulate your position using weather, pressure, drift.
• When you hear the stall warning, you have lost lift.
  Pitch the nose down. Add power.
  Do not pull up.
• Stabilise.
  Find your horizon again.
• Prepare to land.
  Perform all the correct procedures.
• Don’t land.

Create the configuration for gravity to take you.

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Instructions for Not Coming Down is part of Nonconforming Criticisms, curated and edited by Xavier de Sousa, Anahí Saravia Herrera and Diana Damian Martin. Co-funded by the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama – University of London, through the UKRI Impact Accelerator Fund.

Season Butler is a writer, artist, dramaturg and teacher. Her work reflects on ideas of youth and old age; solitude and community; negotiations with hope and what it means to look forward to a future of elusive horizons. Butler’s artwork has appeared at the Whitechapel Gallery, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Tate Exchange, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Hotel Maria Kapel and Zürcher Theater Spektakel. Her debut novel, Cygnet, was published in 2019 and won the 2020 Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel. She creates across forms including fiction, performance, comics, essays and poetry.