{"id":81974,"date":"2015-01-23T14:03:45","date_gmt":"2015-01-23T19:03:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=81974"},"modified":"2015-01-23T14:05:14","modified_gmt":"2015-01-23T19:05:14","slug":"the-vast-beast-whistle-of-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/23\/the-vast-beast-whistle-of-space\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vast Beast-Whistle of Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

The literature of the fear of flying<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Corey Mitchell, via Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

Before takeoff, when the flight attendants are acting out the ways we\u2019ll save ourselves in the event of a catastrophe, the same thought always occurs to me: it is<\/em> possible not to fly.<\/em> Plenty of people with enviable careers, even careers that require frequent travel, have managed it. The NFL\u2019s John Madden travels across the country in his \u201cMadden Cruiser,\u201d a customized coach bus. Liz McClarnon, the British pop singer and member of the Atomic Kittens, hasn\u2019t been on a plane in four years. Sean Bean (Game of Thrones<\/em>\u2019s Ned Stark) drives to all of his European film locations. He was finally forced onto a plane to shoot The Lord of the Rings<\/em> in New Zealand, though he refused the helicopter ride to top of the mountain where they were filming, forcing the rest of the cast to wait while he walked up.<\/p>\n

Those of us with aviophobia know that flying is safe\u2014it just doesn\u2019t feel<\/em> safe. During takeoff, the plane forces itself diagonally into the air, pinning us to our seats. We feel the strain as the engines grind, trying to lift an enormous, metal, bird-shaped machine packed with humans into the sky. Why did anyone ever think this was a good idea? The air is not our natural element; the first powered plane only stayed up for twelve seconds. At thirty thousand feet, the sounds are unnerving. The poet James Dickey wrote, \u201cThere is faintly coming in \/ Somewhere the vast beast-whistle of space.\u201d It\u2019s hard to think of any sound more terrifying. <\/p>\n

At the root of aviophobia is the fear of falling. For those of us who feel in everyday life as though the world could give out beneath us at any moment, flying is too physically close to the bottomlessness and lack of control we already feel. When you fall, there\u2019s nothing you can do, nothing to grab onto, no one to call. Your plane becomes a plunging death capsule and you are trapped inside.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

On July 31, 1944, Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry, the author of The Little Prince<\/em>, took off in an unarmed P-38 from Corsica and vanished. In The Pilot and the Little Prince<\/em><\/a>, which contains an imagined account of Saint-Exupery\u2019s final flight, Peter S\u00eds rescues his protagonist from falling out of the sky. Antoine\u2019s plane is kept aloft in a blue abyss by the Little Prince pedaling a bicycle beneath him. S\u00eds writes, \u201cSome say he forgot his oxygen mask and vanished at sea. Maybe Antoine found his own glittering planet next to the stars.\u201d It\u2019s a children\u2019s book\u2014of course S\u00eds can\u2019t send Antoine plummeting to his death. But the stories adults tell themselves about falling aren\u2019t any less whimsical.<\/p>\n

There is a man working diligently right now to prove his theory that Amelia Earhart\u2019s plane did not fall out of the sky. A few months ago, Ric Gillespie claimed to have confirmed that a scrap of metal he found on Gardner Island was part of Earhart\u2019s plane. This, he says, proves that Earhart did not crash but landed on the island, where she starved to death. There\u2019s something desperate about this. The idea that she fell from the sky is perhaps so unconscionable to Gillespie that he\u2019s devoted his life\u2019s work to proving that she suffered a slower, more agonizing death.<\/p>\n

James Dickey goes right for the final plunge in his poem \u201cFalling<\/a>.\u201d He reimagines a real-life incident in which a stewardess was sucked out of an airplane when a door burst open. Falling, in Dickey\u2019s version of the story, becomes sensual, erotic. Dickey undresses the stewardess, who<\/p>\n

\n

sheds the bat\u2019s guiding tailpiece
Of her skirt\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the lightning-charged clinging of her blouse\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the intimate
Inner flying-garment of her slip in which she rides like the holy ghost
Of a virgin\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 sheds the long windsocks of her stockings\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 absurd
Brassiere\u00a0\u00a0 then feels the girdle required by regulations squirming
Off her: no longer monobuttocked<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She says goodbye to her body, celebrating her corporeal reality one final time: \u201cshe passes \/ Her palms over her<\/em> long legs\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0her<\/em> small breasts and deeply between \/ Her thighs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The stewardess\u2019s fall is life in miniature. She sees the ground, knows that she will die, but as she watches the ground near, \u201cthere is time to live,\u201d and as she gets closer, \u201cthere is still time to live on a breath made of nothing.\u201d When the ground finally approaches, she \u201cremembers she still has time to die.\u201d We, like the stewardess, are shuttling toward death, but more slowly, so slowly that sometimes we forget. There\u2019s still time to live, we say. But in falling, death is laid out clearly before us. We have time to watch it approach, to meditate on it, and then to surrender to it. Life blossoms in this space before death. It is sensual and corporeal. It is with death in view that Dickey\u2019s stewardess is \u201cliving\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0beginning to be something.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is this the origin of the mile-high club? While it\u2019s tempting to write Dickey off as a dirty old man orchestrating a striptease swan song, something rings true in his reverie. With danger in view, the stewardess\u2019s senses are aroused. She\u2019s hyperaware of her body now that she knows she will soon lose consciousness of it forever. She will never again remove her stockings, she will never again brush her hand across her breasts or her thighs. It\u2019s almost over\u2014rejoice while you can, the poem exhorts us.<\/p>\n

Dickey, it turns out, is not really that different from the Amelia Earhart theorist or Peter S\u00eds\u2014he may not save his stewardess from falling, but he saves her from the ugliness<\/em> of falling. What happens physically to a body when it hits the ground from thirty thousand feet? Do fragments of bone fly? Or are they eviscerated into dust? Is there anything resembling a human left? Dickey does not get into the blood and guts, though he does break the stewardess\u2019s back. He imagines she is indented into the earth, but whole, complete, alive for one final breath and then, \u201cAH GOD\u2014.\u201d God is Dickey\u2019s version of S\u00eds\u2019s \u201cglittering planet next to the stars.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no shame in these stories. They transfigure fear into a more beautiful form, allowing us to remake the world\u2014and the world, seen from that vantage point, is better. If one day I must die in an airplane, give me S\u0005\u00eds\u2019s or Dickey\u2019s ending.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Or better yet, give me my own. One night, my husband and I flew to Arkansas. Terrified, I drank three airplane bottles of Sauvignon blanc in under fifteen minutes, and suddenly, I was very drunk. But the swing from fear to fearlessness was too abrupt, and I burst into tears. My husband looked up from his book stunned.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is it?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

I was sobbing now. \u201cI\u2019m so happy,\u201d was all I could manage.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve since learned that crying on airplanes is a common occurrence (as is crying during sex)\u2014and I\u2019m sure the drinking didn\u2019t help. In 2011, a Virgin Atlantic survey revealed that a shocking 41 percent of men have \u201cburied themselves in blankets to hide tears in their eyes from other passengers.\u201d According to Elijah Wolfson, who wrote about crying on airplanes<\/a> for The Atlantic<\/em>, \u201cWe cry happily when we recognize, deep down, that every connection we make in life could end up severed.\u201d From a bird\u2019s-eye view, life below is suddenly cast in more accurate proportions. The time we spend in traffic, bickering with siblings, and shopping for office supplies is invisible from up here. We are small; our lives are brief; only a few things really matter, and soon they will be gone.<\/p>\n

In that moment, as I was crying on the plane, helplessness was transubstantiated into joy. This three-hour flight, during which I was never once offered peanuts and sat crammed into a cabin among strangers, quickly became one of the most joyous occasions of my life. It was more joy than my wedding day, more joy than waking up at sunrise on Christmas in Burma to see backlit temples rising out of the fog. In her essay \u201cJoy<\/a>,\u201d Zadie Smith writes that she prefers simple pleasures like eating a pineapple popsicle to the feeling of joy because tucked inside enormous joy is equally enormous pain.<\/p>\n

Maybe I lead too pleasurable a life, but pleasure suddenly seemed too ordinary, too insignificant to fill this space between being born and dying. It\u2019s almost over\u2014rejoice while you can. We were thirty thousand feet in the air, headed for Little Rock, and there had never been anything more amazing. Our lives were at the mercy of the pilot, the weather, the machine, and one another. We could plunge at any second\u2014and finally, I was okay with that. I thought of the Sean Beans and John Maddens of the world, bested by fear, stubbornly maintaining the illusion of control as they bus and train across terra firma. There\u2019s something so hopeless, so undreaming, about staying down there.<\/p>\n

I was in the air, and I saw flying for what it was: to fly is to insist on the ethereal in a weighted world. My plane emerged from the clouds leveling off into the nighttime. If you could\u2019ve somehow seen our bodies without the plane, you would have seen rows of humans two by two, reading, talking, listening to music, suspended in the night sky.<\/p>\n

Laura Smith is a writer based in New York. She is currently working on a book about Barbara Newhall Follett, who disappeared in 1939.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The literature of the fear of flying. Before takeoff, when the flight attendants are acting out the ways we\u2019ll save ourselves in the event of a catastrophe, the same thought always occurs to me: it is possible not to fly. Plenty of people with enviable careers, even careers that require frequent travel, have managed it. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":790,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12508],"tags":[218,16739,7581,16735,16743,16737,16742,16736,6346,16738,16740,8607,16741,15199,1079],"class_list":["post-81974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-travel","tag-airplanes","tag-amelia-earhart","tag-antoine-de-saint-exupery","tag-aviophobia","tag-crying","tag-fear-of-flight","tag-flight-attendants","tag-flights","tag-flying","tag-james-dickey","tag-liz-mcclarnon","tag-planes","tag-sean-bean","tag-traveling","tag-zadie-smith"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Literature of the Fear of Flying<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Laura Smith, who is terrified of planes, looks at poems and stories about aviophobia.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/23\/the-vast-beast-whistle-of-space\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Vast Beast-Whistle of Space by Laura Smith\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 23, 2015 \u2013 The literature of the fear of flying. 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