fear and lure of falling and flying
Standing close to an edge of a steep cliff I am gripped by a fear of falling. A fear so irrational and fierce that I almost topple myself over in my giddiness. The dissonance inside my head causes a forgetfulness of feet on solid ground. In my mindโs eye I am tumbling down, air screeching past, a time out of time, until eventually I collide somewhere below, softness hitting hard ground.
Some things remain ungraspable, even about oneself, and my speculation is that the lure of standing so close to the edge was to see endless possibility stretching out, to have a glimmer of insight into lightness and flight, to gasp in the capacity to feel emboldened, to know that things cause a response and to just feel alive. Yet that place on the edge terrifies me and I step away.
If I am being honest I have always felt the pull of weight in this life. I remember the sting of being told (more than once) โto lighten upโ, - always by menโฆno woman has ever said those words to me. I wondered if the heaviness I have long inhabited came from an anxiety that if I lifted above the ground that there would be nothing to catch me if I should fall, no safety net, support or cushion in place.
I have occasionally dreamt of levitating. My waking realisation that the act came so surprisingly easily; a certainty of knowledge that the ability was already within me and then a letting go and lifting up, my body as light as a cloud. I recognised the creative impulse involved; artistic pursuit of drawing (an action determined by a life-force) had taught me something about how things can โtake offโ. I understood the process of leaving the demands and judgements of the world aside, to simultaneously care and not care (that old trick) and to make visible a mark (a thing) that came alive and flew.
And these past few days of my life I have been feeling myself in inner freefall. I am in withdrawal from a serotonin inhibitor I have been taking for a number of years. Despite trying to slowly taper off the drug all the symptoms of depression are plunging full ahead. Fatigue, memory problems, dizziness, bad dreams, and possibly an extra one on top of obsessive behaviour in the form of (window) clothes shopping online.
The shopping is tied into a fantasy of a future selfโฆan improved version of me wearing clothes that I do not (yet) own. (I know in reality that this person canโt be made through clothes but by creative work...which the shopping fixation is unhelpfully absorbing up time away from). This lack of ability to direct myself in waking life, when it rationally seems I should have control over this, if nothing else, makes me considerate of what else I am not consciously managing to do?
There is an etching print by Francisco de Goya โA Way of Flyingโ made in 1815, it is from the series โDisparates (Follies/ Irrationalities)โ. The men strapped to mechanical wings, wearing bird helmets donโt look sublime, enlightened or free but rather mawkish and ridculous. Neither do they seem to have anywhere to go but instead are contained within the picture frame, endlessly enraptured like moths around a flame.
I wonder how much aspirations are always like that? To dream and fixate on the โsuccessesโ we want for ourselves without doing the necessary work of figuring out the why and the where. To not know โwhyโ or โwhereโ is to circle around a bright light fluttering our wings, trying to trick the world into thinking we are birds when really we are just being fools.
โWhen the human realm seems doomed to heaviness, I feel the need to fly like Perseus into some other space. I am not talking aout escaping into dreams or the irrational. I mean that I feel the need to change my approach, to look at the world from a different angle, with different logic, different methods of knowing and provingโ. Italo Calvino from โSix Memos for the Next Milenniumโ, chapter on โLightnessโ, Penguin 2016.
This cusp of spring and summer I find myself on the edge of something yet againโฆa metaphorical one this time. I recognise it is an abyss because I have the same giddy lightheaded-ness as I had looking out from upon the top of the cliff. Perhaps it is time to try instead for a different viewpoint?
Rather than give in to the weight of earthly life and fear (and lure) of falling I am determinedly leaning in. I am putting an energy of lightness into the vast unknown and am learning to ask for directional help. Who knows, maybe one day, all going well, I might find myself doing the seemingly impossible (flying not falling) thing.
Alison Carol