spirit of st. louis
April 01, 2012
Awhile ago one of my best friends sent me a card in the mail. It had a picture of a Boeing 737′s wingtip on the cover and inside was the question – how do you feel when you are flying?
Free I thought. I feel free.
And that was it. That one word. That one feeling. Nothing more and nothing less. At the time I wanted to elaborate but I just couldn’t. F-R-E-E in big black block letters was the only description I could give. The only thought I was thinking. To how I really felt and why I felt that way. Why the sky and the clouds and the air and man and his great flying machine is my great dream. Why the grooves of a gull run deep and high and hard.
That was in February. It’s now April 1st.
And I guess what’s changed since then is that I can now see what I couldn’t before. Now I can elaborate. I can say that flying is more than the feeling of freedom only. It’s more than that and everything else. I can tell you about the unrestricted climb into the clouds, the dark pivot over a wing, the roaring over earth, the daring and the dreaming and the singing after and tell you that it is the one thing that really fosters all of my fantasies of childhood. My fantasies of omnipotence. Fantasies of being. Of having beautiful miraculous moments and half-knowing you’re in them.
Charles Lindbergh once said that flying sometimes felt too godlike to be real. That the earth from above always seemed too beautiful. Too wonderful. Too distant and secret for the human eyes to see. It was as if we were breaking into a new world we didn’t belong to. Storming the gates of a paradise we had no right to enter.
I think he’s right. We are flying in the face of nature. Who knew the human horizon would grow so large? Who knew Eden would have to handle so much ambition?
Flying stirs our capacity to dream because it is itself a dream. The beautiful image of Icarus and his waxed wings blazing under that bright and burning sun has haunted the heart of man since the beginning of time. It was the unattainable. The lost and hopeless fantasy. But for the last hundred years it’s been a reality. And if you think about it – it’s because of the dreamers. They’ve made it happen. The aviators. The flyers. The pilots. The explorers whose souls have cursed the ground in hope for the heavens.
And this is why I think the descriptions didn’t come to me at first. It’s because flying, being a pilot – whatever you want to call it – it’s more than just a description. It’s an attitude. It’s cockiness. It’s aggressiveness and self-confidence. It’s a streak of rebelliousness and competitiveness. Against the world and the elements and all of those who’ve traded their imagination for the easy and uninspiring. It’s having the stubbornness to dream. But there’s something else also. There is a spark. To be alive and feel alive. To not settle. There is a desire to do good. To do well. Not only in the eyes of your peers, but also in your own mind – to be second to no one. The sky is your playground and competitiveness is your life. You’ll never understand it if you just travel from A to B straight and level. Running with your hands in the air. That’s because you’re only moving through the basement of that blue playground. A pilot is a man in love with flying. He sees not a cloud but beauty. Not the ground but something remote from him, something that he does not belong to as long as he is airborne.
You begin to become something more than earthbound man when you’re flying. You and your plane together, conquer the bonds of earth and in the words of John Magee – “join the tumbled mirth of sun-spit clouds…wheel and soar and swing high in the sunlit silence…chase the shouting winds along…and while with the silent lifting mind, you tread the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put your hand out and touch the face of God.”
Lindbergh, in answering a gentlemen who had asked him about the name of his plane, said he named it in honor of the people of his hometown – St Louis, Missouri. He said they were the face and heart to his adventure. They were the spirit and the mind that thought and believed he would really make it all the way across the Atlantic. That he would break through the unknown. That he would make the impossible happen. He said the people of St Louis were the real dreamers. He just happened to be the lucky one.
So I guess when it’s all said and done, here’s to raising a glass – to not only the flyers, the pilots and aviators – but to all of you who still think about the impossible and all those things that really, if you think about it, shouldn’t be. Adventure. Exploration. Love and all the other profits of your imagination that we all wish for and wait for and want to make happen.
Because you’re the real dreamers. To me you still are the Spirit of St Louis.
And when I’m flying – I feel like I’m part of that spirit.
—-
This post was really more or a less an excuse to post this video. These are Navy pilots flying a training exercise at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in the upper Northwest part of Washington. If you really don’t want to watch all 4 minutes. Look at the maneuvers from 1:48-2:58.
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keep dreaming
March 22, 2012
It’s funny how sometimes with the bright city lights and the hustle and bustle we forget that the stars are still there. That they still shine and burn. That they still explode and fall violently out of the sky.
These days it’s all street light and lamp light, the marquee sign or your sister’s sparklers on the 4th of July.
That we forget that the stars are still there is why I think we stop trying to shoot for them. We forget to look up. I don’t think it is necessarily that we don’t want to dream anymore – it’s just that we have forgotten that there are big and important ones to be had.
A penny on the sidewalk these days can apparently buy a lifetime of opportunities. I guess the real issue is knowing and addressing why we are so malnourished as to not kneel and pick it up.
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VIII
March 15, 2012
If we did not hold so much, I would not write.
If it were not for memories, for the ghosts
carrying the hundred clamoring moons,
I would be safe. The forests keep
saying I should not remember, but always
there is the sound of their breathing.
If it were all right just to love and die,
I would not be in this empty place
three stories up looking out on nothing
I know. If I could bind my mouth
or teach my heart despair of living,
I would not be here learning what to say.
