Flight

I wish I could fly a plane. Not the huge commercial planes, just a small one that would take me over fields and rivers. On clear days, when I'm out driving, I'll notice several planes pulling across the sky, dragging air and plumes of smoke. They're marvellous to watch, and I imagine that their view of the land below is splendid. One of my guilty pleasures is watching the movie Fly Away Home. I was always envious of Anna Paquin's character who got to fly with her geese, escorting them to warmer pastures for winter. And to fly over Canada. Exquisite.

Hayao Miyazaki, I read somewhere, has a fascination with flight too. Many of his movies feature at least one flight scene or deals with creatures that fly. Let's see - in Laputa, we have a floating castle; in Totoro, we have a leaping Catbus (okay, maybe that doesn't quite count); Spirited Away has Haku, who morphs into a flying dragon and takes Chihiro on a nice ride; Porco Rosso is about pilots, and has a flying pig for its hero; and now, Howl's Moving Castle is about a flying castle. He always adds lovely flight sequences in his films. I also read that Miyazaki was very taken with a story by Roald Dahl. The short story is titled "They Shall Not Grow Old," taken from Dahl's collection, Over To You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying. Dahl himself was a fighter pilot during World War II, and the stories in the collection are about pilots who died - their duty, their trials, the beauty and horror they witnessed.

For all its wonder, flying is not without its danger. Often, the most wonderous things are the most terrifying - the ocean, dinosaurs, icebergs. I once read a wonderful essay titled "The Stunt Pilot" by Annie Dillard. Dave Rahm was one of the pilots often seen at flight shows, pulling amazing stunts, creating art with their machines. Dillard describes it as such - "The black plane dropped spinning, and flattened out spinning the other way; it began to carve the air into forms that built wildly and musically on each other and never ended." Rahm died performing a dangerous maneuver for King Hussein in Jordan. He was training the aerobatics team, the Royal Jordanian Falcons. At the same time, he was visiting professor of geology at the University of Jordan. His wife was watching him perform that day.

Another essay, "The Right Stuff," by Tom Wolfe, describes the extraordinary experiences of military test pilots who later became the astronauts of the American space program. What does it take to be a fighter pilot? In Wolfe's words - "But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life. The idea seemed to be that any fool could do that, if that was all that required, just as any fool could throw away his life in the process. No, the idea here (in all the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment - and then go to up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite - and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a peole, a nation, to humanity, to God. ... A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even - ultimately, God willing, one day - that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men's eye, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself."

After reading Wolfe's essay in my creative non-fiction class last fall, I began to understand why pilots are always labelled as swaggering, ego-filled men who consider themselves above civilians and even other men in the military. Perhaps the judgement has a grain of truth, but the manner of flight, the power to command a plane, requires a certain frame of mind, a certain psyche, that few possess. That right stuff indeed.

Maybe I should watch The Aviator this weekend. It's Oscar weekend, after all. But today's poem on The Writer's Almanac (the main reason for this long post) made me view flight from a different angle. The perception of flight still retains its beauty but the terror of a moment strung together with death is what surfaces here.

Beauty or Flight

The man who jumped from the highway bridge one afternoon
who drove his car along in rush hour traffic
then carefully pulled it over, fussed with something briefly on the dash,
so casually that another driver passing
thought he was looking for a map, or a cassette tape,
that had slid during the last turn before the bridge-that's all?
and then stepped out of the car, standing, stretching,
and closing the door routinely, a man in need of a break
on a long drive, a man untroubled by his next appointment,
a man who felt himself growing tired and thought
he needed some air, looked up the highway once
and then down at the almost frozen rows of traffic
under the haze that lingered above the bridge
and then broke simply and suddenly into a run, a dead run,
one motorist called it, crossing in front of his car
and not even stopping at the railing between the bridge
and the empty space beside the bridge, entering that space
and opening his mouth in what one driver called a scream,
though she heard no sound above the drone of traffic, and
other drivers saw as a gasp for breath, not unlike a child takes
when diving into a backyard pool, and he executed then
a nearly perfect, if a little rushed, swan dive out across the space
next to the bridge and into the water ninety-five feet below.

One fisherman in a boat a little upstream
saw the man who jumped from the highway bridge,
the moment he left the bridge and entered his dive, and the fisherman
swore he saw not a man but a large bird, a falcon or an eagle,
shot mid-flight by an angry driver, a large bird
who was trying to regain some sense of beauty, some sense of flight,
in its final dying seconds.

~ by Denver Butson, from Triptych

Posted by Monoceros at February 26, 2005 1:18 PM