ON FALLING

Annette Habel

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .............................................

NOSTALGIA .....................................................

SCHADENFREUDE.............................................

DESIRE .............................................................

9/11 ................................................................

BYSTANDERS ...................................................

OBLIVION ........................................................

AFTER THE FALL ..............................................

EPILOGUE ........................................................

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...............................................

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

5

11

17

23

29

35

41

45

49

53

Annette Habel, On Falling, 2009.PDF version of hardcover book.

All rights reserved.

5

I. INTRODUCTION

William Wallace Denslow, Illustration for Mother Goose, 1902

7

I. INTRODUCTION

1 The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, p910

Falling is a way of inscribing space.

‘Falling’ can be synonymous with an involuntary state of being, often associated with a sense of failure.

to be overthrownto break down

to diminish

Phrases containing the verb ‘to fall’ describe the fateful and inevitable transition from one state of being to another.

to fall pregnantto fall in love

to fall ill

The Greeks thought of birth as a fall – from one mother (the womb) to another (earth). In English, the birth of lambs is also called a ‘fall’.1

A soldier lost in combat is ‘fallen’.

8

I. INTRODUCTION

2 ‘As nothing breaks up into the world of things, the moment of entropy becomes irreversible … The human condition is the fallen condition of time and fragmentation.’William Irwin Thompson: The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1981, p93 ‘our method eliminates a problem … namely, the quest for the true version, or the earlier one. On the contrary, we define the myth as consisting of all its versions; to put it otherwise: a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such.’Claude Levi-Strauss: ‘The structural study of myth’ in Structural Anthropology, New York, Basic Books, 1958, quoted by William Irwin Thompson, ibid, p114 William Irwin Thompson, ibid, p10

A fall is elemental to a number of mythical events. The biblical Fall of the angels is a ‘prelude to the Fall of man’, itself preceded by the fall of the ‘cosmic egg’ as echoed in the children’s rhyme of Humpty-Dumpty:2 all symbolise irreversible and unavoidable moments of change.

Let us assume that the above are fragments, or segments, of one theme or idea, one central myth. Myths have been described as cumulative rather than linear in nature; the sum of all variants, old and new.3 So, in the case of the Fall, it ‘is not only once and long ago; it is recapitulated in each instance of consciousness’.4

In this text, we will examine the notion of falling through a series of chapters or sections. Each section will represent a particular fragment of the overall construct. In NOSTALGIA, thematic cornerstones - alienation, evolution, the loss of innocence - will be explored within the contexts of biblical and mythological narratives of the Fall. In SCHADENFREUDE we will look at the humour of pratfalls. Perceptions of our ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ selves, and the transcendental nature of passion, will be discussed in DESIRE. 9/11 and BYSTANDERS will examine the taboo attached to the imagery of falling bodies, and the guilt of the onlooker. The relationship between notions of falling and mortality, and the role of pictures therein, will be addressed in OBLIVION. AFTER THE FALL will be dedicated to the idea of resurrection.

9

I. INTRODUCTION

The theme’s cumulative nature will be reflected in the structure of the writing. Each section should be viewed as an independent body of text, although the individual ideas are by nature interlinked, with numerous overlaps and cross-references. Though no concluding summary in the conventional sense will be given, the text as a whole will follow a natural curve, and many ideas will re-surface in the Epilogue.

11

II. NOSTALGIA

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1559

13

II. NOSTALGIA

1 Robert Graves: The Greek Myths, London, Penguin Books, 1992, p3132 The English translation ‘hubris’ will subsequently be used3 Edward F. Edinger: Ego and Archetype, London, Shambhala, 1992, p314 Eg Revelations 12:7-9: ‘And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down – that ancient serpent called the devil or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.’5 ‘How you have fallen from heaven/ O morning star, son of the dawn!/ You have been cast down to earth’ Isaiah 14:12New Bible Dictionary, Leicester, Inter-Varsity Press, 1982, p7136 John Milton, John Leonard (intro and notes), Paradise Lost, London, Penguin Books, 20007 Latin: lux, lucis = light, ferre = to bring8 2 Peter 1:19

Pride comes before a fall. Icarus, on his fabricated set of wings, ignores his father’s advice, flies too close to the sun and falls to his death, not before being mistaken for a god by onlookers.1

In psychoanalytical terms, Icarus suffers from an inflated ego, or excessive confidence; his condition was known to the Greeks as hybris,2 ‘the human arrogance that appropriates to man what belongs to the gods… the transcending of proper human limits’.3 His fall is the consequence of his excessive enthusiasm for soaring heights.

Revelations contain specific references to Satan’s fall after his uprising against God.4 Another biblical fall is taken by the king of Babylon, ‘who in his glory and pomp had set himself among the gods’.5

The name of the fallen king is Lucifer. Whilst the Bible gives no conclusive link between Satan and Lucifer, Milton, in Paradise Lost,6 gives to Satan the name Lucifer (and is neither the first nor the last to make this association). In Milton’s narrative, it is Lucifer who leads Eve to taste from the tree of knowledge, thereby inducing the Fall of Man. The use of language is poignant. ‘Lucifer’ translates as ‘light bringer’,7 also as ‘Morning Star’.8 Light is a metaphor for conscious thought.

14

II. NOSTALGIA

9 New Bible Dictionary, ibid, p36810 ‘…for dust you are and to dust you will return’ Genesis 3:1911 Edward F. Edinger, ibid, 1992, p2512 C.G. Jung: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Vol. i par. 420 ff as quoted in Edward F. Edinger, ibid, p16

In the Original Sin, Adam and Eve taste from the Tree of Knowledge against God’s instruction. Their act of rebellion consists of the following three sins: they doubt God’s word, disbelieve it, and finally disobey it.9 Consequently, they gain knowledge of good and evil; but they are also cursed by God, expelled from Paradise, and become mortal.10

It is significant that the Fall of Man should be called ‘Fall’. Once again, it denotes punishment for breaking with one’s given place in the world order, thereby upsetting a complex, finely wrought system.

In psychoanalysis, the Fall and subsequent expulsion are associated with the emancipation of ego consciousness, symbolising the individual’s rebellion, through doubt and then deed, against an established order or system of thought: a ‘necessary crime’.11 As an essential developmental process, it is repeated throughout life, in a spiral of continuous learning and evolution.

At the same time, a very real element of hubris - of rising above one’s position - is retained in this process, leading to real feelings of guilt, alienation and loss; comparable perhaps to Prometheus’ torture after stealing fire and meat from the gods.

‘There is deep doctrine in the legend of the Fall; it is the expression of a dim presentiment that the emancipation of the ego consciousness was a Luciferian deed. Man’s whole history consists from the very beginning in a conflict between his feeling of inferiority and his arrogance.’12

15

II. NOSTALGIA

13 Milan Kundera, Linda Asher (trans): Ignorance, London, Faber and Faber, 2002, p514 ‘God said, “The man now has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”’ Genesis 3:2215 New Bible Dictionary, ibid, p369

The wish to return to a prelapsarian state of bliss is so common that it even has its own name - nostalgia. ‘The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering”. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.’13 The context of the fateful, irreversible nature of falling makes this idea the more interesting. The biblical narrative inextricably links guilt and mortality,14

and ‘does not portray man as risen, but as fallen’.15

It is a basic human dilemma that the loss of innocence can neither be avoided nor reversed. Furthermore, the perceived link with mortality indicates that we associate the temporality of our existence with a sense of punishment. In the Fall, a complex set of ideas is tied up in a narrative, an image, central to our view of the nature of our journey.

17

III. SCHADENFREUDE

Harold Lloyd in Safety Last!, 1923

19

III. SCHADENFREUDE

1 Charles Reisner (Dir): Steamboat Bill Jr,, 19272 James Agee: Comedy’s Greatest Era in: Agee on Film, ed. Martin Scorsese, New York, Modern Library, 2000, p3943 Keaton’s nickname originates from a particularly bad fall he survived as a toddler. George Lellis: Critical Survey of Oevre in: George Wead and George Lellis: The film career of Buster Keaton, Boston, G&B Arts International, 1977, p124 Feet First (Clyde Bruckman (Dir), 1930) is essentially one big fall off a tall building. 5 Richard Schickel: Harold Lloyd - The Shape of Laughter, Boston, New York Graphic Society, 1974, p5

Picture this: our hero, a tender college boy, arrives at his parental home, a decrepit old steamboat. We learn that the owner of the flash steamer next door is also the father of the boy’s sweetheart. The girlfriend, oblivious to the less than glamorous situation of her beau, picks out for him his working clothes at the local shop: a captain’s uniform, buttons and all. The hapless boy, reporting to duty (in new attire) at his father’s rustbucket, first suffers various run-ins with assorted apparel; then, arriving on deck, he spots his girl and her old man standing at the quay. In an effort to catch his girlfriend’s adoring eye, and to impress his potential father-in-law, he begins to stride up and down, showing off his glorious uniform. We spot a rope lying on deck. Inevitably, it is picked up by a crewman at just the right moment to send our hero deliciously, hilariously, flying.

The scene is from Buster Keaton’s classic silent comedy Steamboat Bill, Jr.1 The genre’s enduring success has often been ascribed to its physical nature. ‘It was [the silent comedian’s] business to be as funny as possible physically, without the help or hindrance of words. So he gave us a figure of speech, or rather of vision … that everyone understands.’2 As the simplest of physical gags, pratfalls were Silent comedy’s bread and butter. They had names: the Brodie, the 108, the Buster.3

Harold Lloyd’s acrobatics were most extreme and his falls the deepest, sometimes encompassing entire high-rise blocks.4 His struggle with skyscrapers marks a time of rapid progress, embodied by architecture’s sudden embrace of heights; his ‘obsession with high places, his literally nightmarish discovery of himself clinging to ledges, … makes perfect sense for his time – and has a resonance for us as well.’5

20

III. SCHADENFREUDE

6 Fred C Newmeyer, Sam Taylor (Dir): Safety Last!, 19237 James Agee, ibid, p4038 Robert Knopf: The Theater & Cinema of Buster Keaton, Princeton University Press, 1999, p12

There is a direct and literal relationship between humour and verticality in Lloyd’s comedy, vividly expressed in scenes such as his iconic hang from the clockface at the top of a building in Safety Last.6 There is also another, more universal analogy. Lloyd’s growing fear and frustration, his sense of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the increasing height he acquires during his climb, are mirrored in the comedic build-up. ‘Each new floor is like a stanza in a poem; and the higher and more horrifying it gets, the funnier it gets.’7 A typical build-up of gags accumulates vertically,8 each calamity a variation on the previous, and the structure is finally crowned by the ‘topper’, the climactic joke.

In the scene from Steamboat Bill, Jr., the topper, the final fall, is a classic case of the protagonists’ delusions being levelled via his physical flooring, his crushed aspirations reflected in his bodily descent. Pratfalls are visual shorthand for loss of dignity, the flattening of an inflated ego; we can all relate to that. Clowning consists of serial catastrophe, the more painful the misfortune, the funnier the joke.

Why do we find this funny?

Does not the Clown’s catastrophe reflect our own disaster?

21

III. SCHADENFREUDE

9 the point has been somewhat simplified for the purpose of this text. Mircea Eliade looks in great detail at the role of the Shaman in works such asMircea Eliade, W.R. Task (trans): Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Arkana, Penguin Group, London, 198910 ‘as centrally representative of humanity, as many-sided and as mysterious, as Hamlet’ James Agee, ibid, p40011 George Lellis, ibid, p11

The role of a performer has been linked to that of the Shaman within primal societies. One could say that performers act on the audience’s behalf.9 Acrobats risk life and limb so we don’t have to. When they put themselves in danger, we empathise. We get sweaty palms from the safety of our seats.

The most successful clowns are those who give us the opportunity to project onto them our own hopes and fears. Consider Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp,10 Buster Keaton’s ‘great stone face’,11 or Harold Lloyd’s boy-next-door appeal. We want to identify with the clown, sympathise with him. Our heart goes out to him, but we want to laugh at him, not with him: a laughing clown is not that funny.

When we laugh at the clown, we conceivably also laugh at ourselves: the clown’s calamity and confusion are a stand-in for our own. There is an intricate link between our shock and our laughter at people falling; they are two aspects of the same sentiment. The hilarity we find in falls, the simplest of personal catastrophes, may be our thumbing a nose at the indignities of our own predicament; it may also be a kind of letting-go, a surrender that comforts and heals.

On the other hand, perhaps our laughter comes from the relief that it is someone else’s turn, and the Clown is simply the fall guy.

In either case, laughter, as they say, is the best medicine.

23

IV. DESIRE

Annette Habel, Falling Bodies (1), 2008

25

IV. DESIRE

1 David Mamet (Director), Jonathan Katz (Screenplay): House of Games, Filmhaus, 19872 Chariot Allegory, sections 246a-254e, in: Plato, Christopher Rowe (trans and notes): Phaedrus, London, Penguin Books, 20053 It is remarkable that moral impulse should be grouped with rationality, even though it could also be described as a desire.

What is it you think I want?

I’ll tell you.Somebody to come along.Somebody to possess you.

To take you into a new thing.Would you like that?Do you want that?

Yes.

So begins a woman’s descent into an underworld of desire, deception and sleaze in David Mamet’s House of Games.1

In philosophical terms, desire poses a problem. It has been identified as the force that drives human behaviour, but where does it lead? Is desire good for us? Plato, for example, paints the picture of a pair of horses that guide the soul, the black horse of desire and the white horse of moral impulse and reason,3 and so puts the relationship between desire and reason at the heart of the philosophical problem.4

Elizabethans viewed humanity at the centre of the Chain of Being, between heaven and the animal kingdom, sharing reason with angels and passion with animals. Reason is good, godlike and ‘high’, passion is base, ‘low’. In the hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’, divine and base, humankind is positioned exactly in the middle.

26

IV. DESIRE

4 Chariot Allegory, ibid5 Alfred Hitchcock (Dir): Vertigo, 1985

There has been little change in that perspective. We still see human nature within the context of impulse (ascribed to our ‘animal nature’) versus rationality (seen as an expression of our ‘higher self’).

Does desire make us fallible?

It was Adam and Eve’s desire for knowledge that caused the Fall. Paradoxically, it was also a desire to ‘be like God’. Whilst we may (rather, must) aspire to develop upward, aiming too high is hubris, outrage. Gravity reminds us that we remain mortal, imperfect.

Desire means longing and wanting. Buddhism, amongst other teachings, identifies desire and want as the root of suffering. Its call for detachment may be in vain. If it is human to feel desire, and if desire leads us to suffer, then, by definition, suffering is encapsulated in our existence.

If desire is the cause for our fallen condition, is it also its reward?

Plato called love ‘divine madness’.4 To become mad is often called a ‘descent’. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo,5 Scottie’s mounting obsession for Madeleine is portrayed as such a descent, and matched only by his extreme fear of heights. On two occasions, a deadly fall, taken (apparently) by the woman he loves, is the consequence of his state of uncontrolled desire.

If falling is a way of inscribing space, then perhaps this type of descent inscribes a path between our ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ selves. To succumb to desire is akin to stepping off a ledge: in itself, it is an active, voluntary deed.

27

IV. DESIRE

The next part is loss of control; freefall. To succumb means abandoning oneself, abandoning one’s self, letting go of reason. It implies that one gives oneself over; that one allows oneself to be taken. For a moment, one is annihilated, face to face with the void.

Paradoxically, the act of self-abandonment one the one hand, and the process of being at one with oneself, with one’s desire, both occur at the moment of letting go, in simultaneity.

Perhaps, then, it is the transcendental nature of our experience of desire that draws us to it. If that is the case, it could be argued that desire has qualities that are closer to the divine. Of course, there has to be something to transcend for transcendence to take place. Perhaps we prize our existence in that precarious position, part angel, part animal; and from there, to catch glimpses of the sublime, and to return to that moment of terror and awakening time after time.

If we were given the chance to give up our ability to experience desire, in exchange for an immortal existance, what would our choice be?

29

V. 9/11

Richard Drew, Photograph of the ‘Falling Man’, 2002

31

V. 9/11

1 Henry Singer (Producer/ Director): 9/11: The Falling Man. Channel 4, London, 20062 ibid3 Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others, New York, Penguin Books, 2003, p78

There is a reciprocal association between 9/11 and the depiction of human bodies falling. The footage of the ‘jumpers’ falling from the Twin Towers - notably the ‘falling man’ photographed by Richard Drew1 - will be etched on the mind of anyone who has seen it. These pictures inhabit our consciousness whenever we think of 9/11.

The image-world of 9/11 has a biblical quality, the burning towers, the smouldering landscape of Ground Zero, a case of life imitating art, calling to mind panoramic representations of the tower of Babel, the Apocalypse. The calm acceptance with which the ‘falling man’ appears to be hurtling to his death is reminiscent of Christian iconographic paintings, but as a news photograph it is, of course, a real trace of a real event.

Its publication drew widespread protest when published in the States shortly after the day;2 subsequently, the various images of the ‘jumpers’ - there are many more than the ‘falling man’ - have largely been erased from public view.

In Susan Sontag’s words, ‘photographs of the suffering and martyrdom of a people are more than reminders of death, of failure, of victimization. They invoke the miracle of survival. To aim at the perpetuation of memories means, inevitably, that one has undertaken the task of continually renewing, of creating, memories – aided, above all, by the impress of iconic photographs.’3

The question might be asked why the photographs of the falling people of 9/11 have, for the most part, been excluded from that process. We know, for example, that the photographs of Ground Zero really depict a mass graveyard, but on this occasion, our better knowledge does not detract from our ability, or willingness, to look.

32

V. 9/11

4 Sontag employs this argument when explaining why we do not get to see the faces of our dead soldiers, only those of the enemy. ibid, pp 63-655 Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, New York, Penguin Books, 2005 The images of this falling man were taken by Lylse Owerko.

It may be argued that we are simply not accustomed to seeing the en-masse victimization of our own splashed across the news, used, as we are, to seeing rather than being seen.4 A photograph showing someone at their moment of death may also, rightly, be deemed as too intrusive and too shocking for mass consumption. Yet does this fully explain the potency of these images of tiny anonymous figures, taken from such a great distance?

Where are the shrines to the falling people of 9/11?

Jonathan Safran Foer, in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, creates a kind of photographic monument to those who fell at 9/11 - by reversing the fall. The last pages of this novel are a flick-book where successive photographs of a falling man are arranged in backward order, thus depicting a man is actually floating upward.5

What if the taboo of the falling people lies in their falling? Falling denotes misfortune, predicament, fate. An act of throwing oneself, voluntarily, from a great height, even if the choice was made under duress, turns a deep sentiment on its head. It is akin to embracing what we normally shy away from: our own weakness; death.

Still, the people who jumped, faced with the choice between two kinds of death, made an active choice. Here is the paradox: the fact that these people decided the mode of their deaths also carries an element of hubris. What we can see in the falling bodies is therefore a paradox of two taboos made flesh.

33

V. 9/11

6 Susan Sontag, ibid, p797 Denis Darzaq, La Chute, 2005-6, denis.darzacq.revue.comalso Ryan McGinley’s fashion shoot, Feeling Falling, Pop Magazine, Fall 2008 issue, Bauer Media, Londonalso Li Wei, www.liweiart.comalso Jacob Sutton, www.jacobsutton.comalso the write-up on Kerry Skarbakka in As Easy as Falling off… Metro, April 14 2009, Associated Newspapers Ltd, London

In the sense of a global watershed, Sontag argues, the idea that America ‘like every country, has its tragic past, does not sit well with the founding, and still all-powerful, belief in American exceptionalism’.6 As a consequence of 9/11, America joined the ranks of those who have experienced collective trauma at home, in full view of the world. If one were to describe 9/11 as a fall from grace, the people plunging from the Twin Towers are also an embodiment of that fall.

It seems that recent times have seen an increased appearance of ‘falling’ imagery in art and the media (amongst others, by Denis Darzaq, Ryan McGinley and Li Wei).7 The work may not directly refer to 9/11, but if one is to assume that post-9/11, images of falling bodies also emcompass the memory of that day, then no direct reference is necessary for the work to be relevant in that context. This proliferation, then, may be a sign that the images of the ‘jumpers’ are finally filtering through the collective consciousness. Perhaps the process of enshrinement Sontag described is taking this particular shape - a kind of anonymous remembrance - on this occasion.

35

VI. BYSTANDERS

Denis Darzaq, La Chute, 2005-2006

VI. BYSTANDERS

1 Albert Camus, Robin Buss (trans and notes): La Chute (The Fall), London, 2006, p102 ibid, p92

In Albert Camus’ 1956 novel La Chute (The Fall), the protagonist Clamence, formerly a high-society lawyer in Paris, recalls his ‘fall from grace’ in a series of monologues set in Amsterdam, the Dantesque termination point of his descent, situated below sea level, its layout of concentric canals likened to the ‘circles of hell’.1

The story’s centrepiece is an unknown woman’s jump off a bridge in Paris, presumably a suicide. As the only witness, Clamence fails to rescue her and is subsequently plagued by increasing feelings of guilt. The young woman’s fall becomes a trigger-point for his loss of confidence and social descent, but also his increased self-awareness and ultimate shedding of hypocrisy.

In spite of the novel’s pessimistic undertones, the text, written as a dialogue with a fictional listener, can be seen as a direct appeal to the reader. Camus’ nihilistic view encompasses a moral imperative: the death of religion and the loss of objective truth and absolute forgiveness impose on us the burden of our own guilt. If God does not exist, who is going to carry our sin? Accountability becomes the price of freedom; our fallen condition encompasses guilt and the ability to determine our behaviour in equal meaures.

Clamence, in the book’s final passage, appeals to the woman to repeat her fall, so might save her, and himself, this time. He closes with this provocation: ‘just imagine, dear colleague, if someone were to take us at our word. You’d have to do it. Brrr … the water’s so cold! But don’t worry. It’s too late now, it will always be too late. Thank goodness!’2

37

39

VI. BYSTANDERS

His imagery appeals to the viewer in a similarly direct way as Camus’ narrative structure. The strength of the pictures lies in their very literalness. Darzacq very simply creates images directly representing ideas such as ‘being left to crash’, ‘in freefall’.5 They embed themselves in the mind not dissimilarly to the images of 9/11.

Whilst Darzacq’s images concern specific political issues, he addresses, like Camus, also more general questions: those of compassion, guilt and responsibility, and the role of the bystander. ‘I like the fact that you can read into these photos whatever you want. Will we let them hit the ground? Will anyone rush out to scoop them up?’6

VI. BYSTANDERS

3 Denis Darzaq, La Chute, 2005-6, denis.darzacq.revue.com4 Angelique Chrisafis: Down and Out in Paris, in: The Guardian Weekend, March 24, 2007

Picture this: a photograph of a street, the dirty white façade of a townhouse, shutters closed, an anonymous place that has seen better days. The street is deserted bar a young black man in jeans, captured in mid-air, horizontally and face down, three or four feet above ground, a slight, dark figure, almost a silhouette. We cannot see his face, he could be any young black man. His arms are outstretched in front of him, as if he is grasping for something to stop his fall. There is nothing, and we can see that he will hit the ground.

The photograph gives no answers. There are only questions. Who is this boy? From where did he fall? Is there no one to help him? Does anyone know, or care, about what is happening?

It is a picture of need. The boy needs help. The viewer is given the role of bystander, witness. It is blazingly obvious that this young man has been captured in actual and real freefall, and it feels wrong. The viewer is also given the tickle of not understanding. This is what makes the image so compelling.

The photograph is part of the series La Chute by the Photographer Denis Darzacq.3 The images all depict similar scenes of young people falling in empty Paris streets, surrounded by bland architecture. The series portrays a young urban French underclass, a generation abandoned by society and political leadership. Darzacq’s photographs are a political statement, a protest related to the here and now.4

38

41

VII. OBLIVION

From The Bridge, Eric Steel (Dir.), 2005

43

VII. OBLIVION

1 Eric Steel (Producer/ Director): The Bridge, 20052 ibidIt should be stressed that in her soliloquy she does not glorify the suicide; later on, she refers to the bridge’s ‘false romantic promise’ and concludes that ‘hitting the water can’t be fun.’

In The Bridge,1 a documentary about the Golden Gate suicide jumpers, much is made of the bridge’s magnetism to those wishing to end their lives. One of the bereaved brings up, in interview, the idea of the ‘romance of the bridge’, which she compares to ‘the romance of the bottle’ as experienced by alcoholics.2

The image on the preceding page, a still from the documentary, depicts one such suicide: it is just possible to make out the tiny splash of impact at the foot of the bridge. Note the parallel to Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (page11).

Do these ‘jumpers’ feel compelled to create a simulacrum of their condition in their last moment of glory? The image of falling is also a picture of mortality. We are all slowly falling to our deaths: the impact is a certainty and every moment we live brings us closer to it. Gravity spares no mortal. The ability to hover and fly is reserved for immortals - gods, angels, spirits.

Darzacq’s photographs, with his dancers forever frozen in mid-air, may translate as imminent disaster, but they are also pictures of immortality. So are the images of the 9/11 jumpers. Foer’s device of sending the bodies upward is more than enshrinement: it is an expression of a deeply human desire to resist gravity and death.

It is through images that we transcend our mortal condition.

45

VIII. AFTER THE FALL

Gustave Doré, Illustration for Il Purgatorio ed il Paradiso (Dante Alighieri), 1867

47

VIII. AFTER THE FALL

1 Ad de Vries, Arthur de Vries: Elsevier’s Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, London, Elsevier, 2004, pp585-62 ibid3 ibid4 New Bible Dictionary, Leicester, Inter-Varsity Press, 1982, p368

In mythology and religion, the underworld is usually associated with afterlife, or the destination of souls of the newly dead.1 There are many examples of a descent into the underworld leading to subsequent ascent, renewal or resurrection, described in stories of deities (Christ, Ishtar, Osiris) as well as mortals (Odysseus, Aeneas, Jonah).2

In psychoanalytical terms, the significance of ‘underworld’ lies in its connection with the subconscious, the suppressed part of the psyche. The descent into this underworld is the challenging but essential path, through inner renewal and acquisition of self-knowledge, to becoming an individual. In this respect, the path to personal resurrection reflects Adam and Eve’s journey.3

To be an individual means to be separate. We separate ourselves from the world through a continued process of alienation. Let us consider Humpty-Dumpty: And all the King’s Horses/ And all the King’s men/ Cannot put Humpty-Dumpty together again. We may regret the breaking up of the continuum, but there is no going back. To learn to embrace our separated, fallen state is probably the best we can hope for.

Is that so bad?

Adam and Eve, ‘mankind’s first parents’,4 separated themselves from God and became mortal. In the process, they gained self-awareness; this made them more god-like.

VIII. AFTER THE FALL

5 Dante Alighieri, Karl Vossler (transl),: Die Göttliche Komödie, Gütersloh, Bertelsmann Lesering, c.19506 Thompson draws parallels with Vedic and West African cosmology. William Irwin Thompson: The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1981, p9

The two poets in Dante’s Divine Comedy,5 having descended deep into Hell at the centre of the Earth, escape it by simply continuing to move in the same direction, thereby emerging in the other hemisphere. They eventually reach Paradise via the terraces of Purgatory. In other words, they descend (or perhaps ascend) through Hell into Heaven.

William Irvin Thompson states that the image of the shattering of the cosmic egg, as reflected in Humpty Dumpty’s verse (the egg standing for the beginning, the whole), suggests that ‘there is unity and fragmentation, eternity and time. The fall into time is not so much an event itself as the conditioning of time-space out of which all events arise … and so it seems as if it must be The Event, the single action which echoes down throughout all ancient mythologies, children’s nursery rhymes and modern stories.’6

It is a remarkable thought that our predicament may be like an echo of something all-encompassing, eternal.

On the other hand, we may have simply created a huge, detailed and multi-faceted structure of thought around our perceived fallen-ness. Come to think of it, that would be no less remarkable. Does not our ability to create thought, and shape our world according to thought, also touch on something eternal?

48 49

IX. EPILOGUE

Image of Joseph Kittinger, US Air Force, 1960

51

IX. EPILOGUE

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excelsior2 http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=11143 Ibid4 The Long, Lonely Flight National Geographic, Feb 1985

On August 6th 1960, the test pilot Captain Joseph Kittinger travelled, in a small cabin attached to a balloon, to an altitude no human had previously reached outside of a spacecraft. The ascent took just over an hour and a half. When he arrived at 102,800 feet, he waited for his gondola to drift into the right position, then stepped out into space and fell to Earth. He spent 4 minutes and 36 seconds in freefall, during which he reached a speed of over 600mph. Eventually, at 18,000 feet, he opened his parachute. 1 2

Project Excelsior was a series of high-altitude test jumps. At the time, the US Air Force was developing fighter jets with the capability of reaching the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere. It was not known whether the human body could withstand the physical effects of this extreme height, or a fall of such magnitude. While the tests were, by all accounts, well prepared and equipped with the latest technology, there was a real risk of failure. Excelsior III set records for the highest ascent and the longest fall.3

It is said that during his ascent, as the world around him became empty and dark, Kittinger, a deeply religious man, began to doubt the existence of God; as he jumped, he was sure he would die; and that for him, the most testing part of the adventure was not the thought of death, or the physical pain, but the extreme loneliness at what is really the edge of the world.4

He came down largely unscathed. Later, he took part in a number of similar adventures and is, apparently, alive to date.

His record remains unbroken.

53

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993The Holy Bible (New International Version), London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1979William Irwin Thompson: The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1981Robert Graves: The Greek Myths, London, Penguin Books, 1992Edward F. Edinger: Ego and Archetype, London, Shambhala, 1992John Milton, John Leonard (intro and notes), Paradise Lost, London, Penguin Books, 2000New Bible Dictionary, Leicester, Inter-Varsity Press, 1982Milan Kundera, Linda Asher (trans): Ignorance, London, Faber and Faber, 2002James Agee: Comedy’s Greatest Era in: Agee on Film, ed. Martin Scorsese, New York, Modern Library, 2000George Wead and George Lellis: The film career of Buster Keaton, Boston, G&B Arts International, 1977Richard Schickel: Harold Lloyd - The Shape of Laughter, Boston, New York Graphic Society, 1974Robert Knopf: The Theater & Cinema of Buster Keaton, Princeton University Press, 1999Mircea Eliade, W.R. Task (trans): Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Arkana, Penguin Group, London, 1989Plato, Christopher Rowe (trans and notes): Phaedrus, London, Penguin Books, 2005Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others, New York, Penguin Books, 2003Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, New York, Penguin Books, 2005 Albert Camus, Robin Buss (trans and notes): La Chute (The Fall), London, 2006Ad de Vries, Arthur de Vries: Elsevier’s Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, London, Elsevier, 2004Dante Alighieri, Karl Vossler (transl),: Die Göttliche Komödie, Gütersloh, Bertelsmann Lesering, c.1950

Feeling Falling, Pop Magazine, Fall 2008 issue, Bauer Media, LondonAs Easy as Falling off… Metro, April 14 2009, Associated Newspapers Ltd, LondonDown and Out in Paris, in: The Guardian Weekend, March 24, 2007The Long, Lonely Flight National Geographic, Feb 1985

Films

Charles Reisner (Dir): Steamboat Bill Jr,, 1927Clyde Bruckman (Dir), Feet First, 1930Fred C Newmeyer, Sam Taylor (Dir): Safety Last!, 1923David Mamet (Director), Jonathan Katz (Screenplay): House of Games, Filmhaus, 1987Alfred Hitchcock (Dir): Vertigo, 1985Henry Singer (Producer/ Director): 9/11: The Falling Man. Channel 4, London, 2006

Internet

www.denis.darzaq.revue.comwww.jacobsutton.comwww.liweiart.comen.wikipedia.org/wiko/Project_Excelsiorwww.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=1114