Skydiving

DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract . . .

And so T.S. Eliot saw, even when no one else wanted to, that World War I could not yet be over.  It had not reached the limit of its thirst.  We didn’t know what had happened to us, for we had always fought wars; they were a sacred part of the give and take, our cycle of life.  They always followed certain rules, they always came and went, and we kept right on breathing; each death followed by rebirth as easily as spring follows winter.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

And things had been getting so much better, so much more magical.  not only our machines, burning ancestral sunlight in an orgiastic bonfire of new growth, but also our philosophy and our understanding of the cosmos.  We were going to touch the moon some day.  We were going to meet the goddess in person, earning our own throne on Mount Olympus, a testament to our spirit, to our will, to our fraternity.  But it was time to fight a war first, so we proceeded as was customary.

And we had to withdraw prematurely, something no one could remember being done before.  Because for once we could really see it, and no one could make sense of what we saw.  Our machines lined up, eating our sons and the hearts of their wives and children, impassive like gods themselves, so alien and yet so pridefully our own.  Our land ground to meaninglessness.  Our purpose forgotten.  A field of endless suffering with trenches dug at either end like the cleft lips of an open mouth screaming its agony forth with no hope of release.  No one knew what to make of it.  No one knew what we had become.  No one but Eliot.

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

We withdrew uneasily, bundling that war up like we had done those of times past.  But men who violate the laws of gods have to find our own way out of hell; the cycle of life that has sustained us for so long could not stretch to absorb World War I without snapping.  So we broke free of her embrace, and before setting about our new task of meeting her again and accepting the new terms by which we must now live, we took a long moment to wrap our arms around ourselves, feel our terrible loneliness, and try to deny that it had happened.  And so we cursed ourselves to World War II, to ongoing horror only predicted by World War I the way that a small arc predicts the circumference of a huge new circle.

But there is no water . . .

-

My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract . . .

In that moment we are severed irrevocably from our ancestors, forcing us (So rudely forc’d) into the crisis of the adolescent, the crisis of finding faith even in isolation so that we can reach out to them anew.  The crisis of identity.  It is always, always, always an awful daring that breaks us thus, and that is how we can bring ourselves to redemption, for what can we call that but faith?  The hand we raise to violate the ancestors is moved by the purest expression of their joy, the cosmic seed of creation which grows and festers until finally we give bloody birth to something new.

And as all patterns in nature, the scale is small and large at once, microcosm repeated greater and greater, cells becoming stars becoming galaxies.  And so our songs, his and mine alike, are songs of gratitude beyond even grief or warning, gratitude to the universe for having shown us daring.  I too have seen the dry pain and heavy sadness of the damned, and it weighs in on me always from supermarket and school, from both reaching arms of my lineage.  I have seen the empty bravado of my mother dancing grace without joy, I have heard the tragic heartbreak of my father singing love without courage.  And I have felt the bleak barrenness of my own belly in a world gone brittle and hollow, beyond dread to resignation, the laboratory dog who doesn’t move to escape the electric shock even when the restraints are long gone:

Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only

But now I have also felt my belly singing orange with angry joy, I have felt the bonds that used to hold me stretch and snap, I have seen the wars ravage my tiny tribe, and I feel myself finally pregnant with the roiling soul of something new.  I remember everything I heard, as the low pressure centered around me and lightning struck here and there, and I remember your voice, a voice I knew in that instant in a way that was both ancient and forbidden, in a way that merely required my  surrender to destroy me forever and teach me how to soar:
“Jump.” You said. “Try it.”
So I did.

Before that night, all was fire, with a tension so great it was unbearable. Three fires were offered as I graduated into the unknown, burning embers thrust into my awed hands when I least expected it.  That night it rained, and for weeks afterward the rain and lightning chased me, water and fire together.  The war raged on, and as the first stalemate was stuck and our friendship ended, I started getting invited up into the sky, just as you had promised.  When I knew it wasn’t going to leave me alone unless I declared myself openly and forever a coward, the date was set and the fear began.

It hasn’t ever been fear of heights that makes my palms break out in sweat whenever faced with an image of a rock climber, a view from the top of a Ferris Wheel.  The fear only comes in a split second after, when my rational mind registers the intense, shivering desire I feel in response to the promise written  in that view, the blissful aching freedom of a gaping void filled with landscape.  How many times have I stood on a cliff and looked down, envying the buzzards circling just below me?  How close have I come then to jumping?  The part of me that dwells close to passion, the awful daring we all have inside - the part that may kill me, the part that shows I’m alive, always whispers, “do it”.  No questions, no regrets.  So my heart edges closer to the brink even as my sweating palms and shaking mind force us back, a little more resigned and a little less sane every time.

The fear was all I felt as I waited for my hour to come, as I watched the clouds block the sky and wondered if they would clear, the fear and the war inside me blocking my vision of all else.  My inner joy watched with unseen despair as my palms and my brain found fantasies of skies that never cleared - if the clouds didn’t clear, I couldn’t jump.  If I couldn’t jump, I wouldn’t die.  But if you wouldn’t die, you’ll never live, whispered my joy sadly.  Please. And because just for a second you had smiled, because neither one of us were afraid for just that one moment
which an age of prudence can never retract
I listened.  I quieted the fantasies of remaining unchanged, I conserved my energy, I felt nothing but the fear.  My joy was quiet, waiting, as I let them lead me up.  And then, at twelve thousand feet, when the time came, I jumped.

The experience fell short of a complete release only because I wasn’t alone; I didn’t have to force my hands and feet to pry themselves through the rattling metal door, only my head to nod yes, but I didn’t notice that for long.  Because finally, lord and gods above, I was falling.  I was flying.  I was filling up and filling up and still staying deliciously empty, my mind as useless as a newborn’s, my reality dissolved into nothing but curiosity as all the rest drowned in wordless song.  The world was vast, and the world was utterly silent, and finally the condom was off and I was in it.  I was part of it.  Below me were the clouds that had cleared just enough to let me come up, and below them the sunlight glittered minutely off the blown-glass waves, showing the long, thin shoulders of the coastline.  I was falling fast, but it felt only like the exact right speed, like the way I had always known it was for the buzzards.  If it had been my job to pull the chute, I may not have managed - as it was, it got pulled and all of the sudden I was standing still on my feet in the sky, pause pressed on a dream become suddenly lucid.  I knew immediately what I wanted.

“Take me through the cloud,” I asked my dream, afraid I would wake up too soon, giddy with the knowledge that this time I wouldn’t.  He told me he wasn’t supposed to, that another plane might hit us, but I knew who was controlling this dream and the parachute spun
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
around and as my stomach lurched I faced the top of a sudden mountain range of ocean clouds, and I was not surprised as we disappeared inside.

It was pure, bluish white, homogenous yet at the same time infinitely varied in white and silver.  But this I had known from flying in a plane - what I didn’t expect was how it felt, how it smelled, how it tasted.  Not just damp but shockingly warm, at least fifteen degrees above the crystal dryness of the open altitude we had been riding.  And stinky, softly reeking of the velvety funk of ocean and bay brine, sharper in my nose but slightly more bitter at the back of my chilled tongue as I inhaled, the aftertaste an unpleasant sparkle decorating the beautifully soft texture of drinking heaven’s mist.

And then we were out, and I looked down, and I saw the tiny heads that already I could recognize, though it seemed unlikely they would be there so soon: my father, my husband, my daughter.  We were back.  Already, we were back.  We would land, and I would feel nauseous for a few hours from the spinning and the lurching, and I would have to hunch my shoulders and shuffle again into the trenches, scrabbling to reconcile my crying newborn vision with the death throes of the rules I have always lived by.  People would pass in and out, truth would change its mask for another and then another, but one thing I know will never be undone.  I have jumped now, I have surrendered, and I have known a cloud.  So I carry this child now to term, bearing all the violence, twisting around to ask the ancestors: what will I be when I am born?

DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land