Brian Kershisnik, PracticeThe reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly.
~G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"
He says, leaning over remains of soup and noodles and Beef Waterfall, that he has only one recurring dream, a dream that came to him as an adult. The other man leans back, listening, and though he speaks not of dreams recurring or of dreams singular, I know he dreams seldom but that his dreams, when they come, linger long, unsettle the order, can deeply upset him. They are quiet about their dreaming, these two men, but I ask them questions and questions; I cannot stop myself (I do not), I always must know the details, the twists and turns of other people's thoughts directed and thoughts aimless in waking consciousness or of thoughts spinning and twirling in sleep.
We talk of dreams.
I'm one of those recurring-dream people.
The earliest dream of any dream I can remember is of standing on a bridge at night, a bridge lit by city lights, and looking over its edge into distant water so far below me that I can hardly make it out. I gaze and peer and stare, enticed, griped by a formless dread or desire. A river, a river flowing far below the streets of the night city. I get over or through or around the railings and there, built into the edge of the bridge, just below where my feet had been when I still stood safe behind the handrails, is a little platform that pulls out, like a bread board in a kitchen counter, like a writing board in a rolltop desk. In the dream I must pull this out to stand on so I can see further down, over the edge into the water, which is so very far below me. Still I don't see far enough and I pull out the little platform more, and a bit more, but cannot yet see whatever it is I need to see through all the dark distance and I inch the platform out more and then it's too far and it all comes uncoupled and I'm falling and the platform falls with me and I wake up, heart exploding in my chest, just before I die. I will dream of this bridge and its strange viewing platform dozens of times before I turn eight and we move to Utah. I have no idea why I need to look down and down, what I am striving to make out, nor why I must pull out the little platform and pull it out and pull it out til it tips me, slides me into the dropping darkness like a body slides off a plank over a ship's side and into the ocean. That's the shape, the destiny, of the dream, it's how it goes, and it's always the same. I dream this and I am, what? three years old? four? Being the child I am I will hold the horror close and close and never speak of it all the years of my life til now.
Please help me, I'm falling...
Close the door to temptation, don't let me walk through
Robertson & Blair, Please Help Me
One night will be the last time I fall off the bridge. I will catch myself in the dreaming, somewhere between the first look over the side and my climb through the rails. I will recognize the bridge, think, oh, yeah. Here. This place. Why do I do this? Why pull out the platform and strain over the side? Why die for this view? And though I will not quite change that destiny, though I will slide into the river, I will fall slowly enough to think it through, to decide this is pointless and to be done with it.
I will never dream of the bread-board-viewing-platform again. And I will be about eight years old.
Many's the time I've been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and I've often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
Oh, but I'm all right, I'm all right
I'm just weary to my bones
Still, you don't expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home
-Paul Simon, American Tune
Then the jumping dream comes.
In this dream I can jump so very high and then even higher, rising above trees, then above buildings, into sky that is measurably colder and I do, I jump and jump because seriously, who wouldn't? And I keep jumping into air thinner and air stranger til suddenly (always on the way up and up) things take a dream twist and I (every time) realize that I have been here before, I always, always jump higher and higher until I am irrevocably outside my own control. Though I am on to this, canny, realizing the dream, I still follow its shape to the inevitable end. Horribly, now I am a little older I no longer wake up before I hit the ground. In jumping dreams I hit squarely, solidly, flatly, abruptly, and it kills me. I slam awake, dead. There is this literally breathless moment before my heart hits me inside my chest so hard it makes me alive again and I lie in the darkness, gasping, alive, waiting for my chest to stop hurting so I can sleep again.
Flying without feathers is not easy; my wings have no feathers.
~Titus Maccius Plautus
Even though in these dreams I know each time when I feel the dreamscape skid away from me that this is a dream, it is not real, this time round I never get to that why-perform-this-pointless-dream-action-anyway epiphany and I'll tell you why. Unlike teetering on the edge of a bridge-extension bread-board in order to gaze upon distant water drowned in darkness, jumping higher than even mountains can grow is not stupid, folks. It's great. And there's no way, no way, I'm ever going to talk myself into wanting to give it up.
There is an art, or rather a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
~Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
About the time I left home for college these dreams became a terrible burden. I was dying too many times a week and my heart was aching in my chest during the day, during classes. From the strain, I guess. I was losing too much sleep waiting for my pulse to calm down after falling such a long, long way, for my heart to calm back into normal living. Then came a night when, after I hit the ground, the dream didn't end as it usually did. I lay flattened face down into the dream dirt waiting helplessly to be awake and alive again and I was given to know in a firm and kindly way that this could not go on. I was going to have to change things. I was going to have to learn to fly.
And I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
or driven to its knees
but it's all right, it's all right
for we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
road we're traveling on
I wonder what's gone wrong
I can't help it, I wonder what's gone wrong
-Paul Simon
Learn to fly.
Learn.
To fly.
"What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?"
— William Law, 'A Serious Call to a Devout and Holly Life XI,' 1728.
Have you ever wrangled your brain around beginning to learn how to learn to fly? Not wonky sweating with pencil and paper or light wood and cloth or sheet metal and plexiglass to invent or to construct (supposing one were so inclined) a machine on whose cold, unbreathing back one might rest between rigid and strutted wings while an engine performed the work, released the power from fuels stored underground in secret black lakes of oil, freed the force and spark left from myriad ancient lives that can now, with a little geometry, a little physics and good weather, give you, the rocket man, lift, thrust and speed. No, baby, I mean unassisted flight. Just your human soft and squishiness, all by your onesie. No wings of wax and feathers, no rocket pack, no wires. Over a long and painfilled series of nights I stump around the problem, regard it critically from multiple angles, take running starts and stabs, mull on it as I mull over my chemistry chapters. How to begin to try to figure out how I can begin to learn to fly. Do you run and jump? Arm stuck out and stiff, fist clenched, head down, muscling your way into the ether? Appears to work for Superman. And I run, I jump. Jump, I can, (it's a problem, remember?) far, high, as is my wont. And I fall, far and hard, as is my wont. And I jump again. Farther. Higher. Concentrate. Fall. Farther. Hit. Harder. Arm stuck out stiff, fist clenched, diving straight into the dirt. Heart hurting in class during the day.
Brian Kershisnik, Victim ManI try ballerina leaps. Fly like the gazelle flies. This is good. Seven league leaps. Not flying exactly, but certainly running with style. Panache, even. Citius, altius, fortius. And a slip in the structure, a twist in the mindscape and a skid and a fatal crash. Heart break.
And again.
And again.
One night I am surprised in my practice by one I know in dreams, one who wishes me ill. I never saw him coming but come he did, wondering, suddenly, over my shoulder, soft into my ear, just what it was I was doing? And if there was something, some other thing, he and I could do? Together?
I run.
He runs.
I jump obstacles. No one can jump like I can jump. Fly like the gazelle flies. I am forever and forever away from him and I risk a look back.
He can jump, too.
A stagger. A kink. I stumble.
He flies like the gazelle. He does not stumble. He is coming he is here he is smiling and he is not smiling. This is not going to be death like falling. This is not falling.
And I can fly. Not far. Not long. But fly, which he cannot. I know the trick. The trick of kicking free from earth and lying softly upon the air that loves me, will hold me, will swim with me and around me and through me just as water swims me along.
I fly away.
I can sleep in the air.
He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
~Friedrich Nietzsche
Control is troublesome, I am unwieldy, too many thoughts for the sky. I get flushed with victories, over confident at tiny successes and go too high, fall to far, wake with my heart slamming me back into life like it's trying to pound its way out of my chest.
This goes on for about a year.
Then I forget I ever could not fly.
And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was crying
-Paul Simon
So I fly. Because, really, folks, who would not? Around, where people can't see me, at first, because people aren't supposed to know that other people can fly. After a long time I realize people aren't ever going to see me, that people simply don't see one of their own flying past, and I'm not so careful anymore. Still, I try to stay out of sight, try not to draw attention, swimming delicious in my delirious secret. Showing off to myself, visiting exotic and imaginary places for free, flying in the stars after dark, napping in the air. Turning somersaults, walking across ceilings (specialized flight), zipping at crazy speeds between evergreens in dense forests (especially in the crisply blue dusk), prowling through abandoned, ruined buildings, taking the stairs (get it?). And once or twice, in a panic, in a horrible dream, trying to save my own life, I can't fly when I need to, can't get off the ground even though I can, damn it, I can. The bad guys, the monsters, they get me. But here's my terrible truth. Sheer delight wears off after a time. It just does and flying becomes tame, routine, and mundane once you can count on it forever and always. I stop dreaming it every night. It becomes, well, a recurring dreamscape feature, like running very fast and far, or being able to swim and swim like a fish (which I can't at all in this world, or not well) or not being able to open my eyes, keep them open (dream that all the time). First, I come to fly simply out of habit and at this last, seldom ever fly at all.
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
~Leonardo Da Vinci
It has come to this. I am now occasionally expected to fly dream people around with me, to fly large objects from dream place to dream place, or sometimes to fly large objects filled with people. I know, in my dreams, that this work is important, being able to move groups and their stuff, should the need arise, should they be in distress. Fly them and never drop or tip them so that they slide away from me, cascading in helpless streams toward the dream dirt. Fly them carefully around and away from kinks and twists in the dreamscape, never letting things get out of hand, never pushing it too far, too fast, too high (never be cross or cruel, never give them castor oil or gruel). It is important work, but it is work and I confess I find it annoying, working in my sleep. Gently but deeply annoying that these people do not learn for themselves. Learn how to learn how to fly, to swim and to sleep in the air. Learn either how to let go of having to see to the dark at the bottom of things, or, for crying out loud, fly on down there yourself and get a close look.
Oh, and it's alright, it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest
That's all I'm trying to get some rest
-Paul Simon
Brian Kershisnik, Flight Practice with Instruction
