FALLING
I would jump out my bedroom window and fall until I hit. It was only as high as the highest window in a two-floor townhouse. I don’t need to say when or where this happened but the outside world was a quiet place, mostly still and often freezing. All the music and the beautiful mess and also the white and black noise was in my room and in my head.
The window at night always had the street’s light coming through it and my face would sometimes be pressed against that window like a hooded burglar and despite the music all the time in my room it became a kind of silence so that even in there sometimes or beside a beautiful sea in the best of my dreams there was no sound, no feeling, a void.
The fall was to be free and it was pure and short and thrilling. The moment of letting go was purest and it had no time. These were my only true falls. I’ve never fallen from a plane or jumped from a plane and I think every fall is the same whether a jump or unintentional. All have a downward movement. We cannot go up. There are no wings on us and myth tells they might melt and drip. All falls have a nothingness, a spiralling rush and a vast unknowing. There is an arc of descent; to the Islamic Sufi mystics the first fall of humankind is some of the actual cosmic wayfaring that bought us to existence.
Sometimes on my banal falls I bucked the silence and strapped the old orange Sony Walkman 1980s headphones on — a thin tin strip and two orange ear-pads — and then pressed play on the clunky old thing at the moment of letting go. It was a kind of auto-erotic game, the play and pause buttons of my musical learnings heightened by danger and by the weird blast of the fall with Starman by David Bowie up loud — look out your window, I can see his light.
Here was a song about falling to earth, or at least the forecast of a being or a fable about to fall to earth, but I didn’t know. I was 15 in a cold place; everything was sensory, nothing was examined, not yet. Starman is a kind of messianic announcement, we know this now. I know this now. It tells of an interruption to the normal radio frequency within the extraordinary narrative of the Ziggy Stardust make-believe. He seemed like a woman to me, the robot of a woman, but I knew enough to know he was really man. I would hang onto him as I fell, his waiting in the sky, his window and his light and also his hazy cosmic jive.
Landing was, well, grounding. You are where you were always going to be, with something firm below you again, the weight on the bottom of your feet, no immediate chance of doing it again and no prospect whatsoever but to move forward. From the landing spot on the lawn I would climb a gate and jog across the road. The cold at night always made made for mist from the mouth and nose. Sometimes the grass was already frozen. Usually I fell onto an elbow and shoulder. I always had a small blue backpack on, it belonged to my father, I had cassettes in it and maybe some black paint and a brush.
The fall was beautiful, the landing harsh, yet my father himself always talked about landings; they were important to him as a pilot and an airman who was also a numbers man and who kept a calculator at hand well after he had done all his sums.
He built bridges and tunnels and traipsed through wastelands looking for minerals and he flew aircraft in the dark while other men in other aircraft shot at him. Maps were always one of his favourite things. Lines and terrain by numbers, maps of silts and soils and rock terraces and also maps of the sky. He was deeply interested in both the earth and the sky and he had detailed maps for both. The sky he loved more. He was a small man when he was alive but he said he loved the weightlessness and impossibility; the sky was a calculation that could never really be solved.
He had some cassettes. I don’t think he had anything to play them on when he was well; later when he was sick he had an old three-in-one stereo system in his room. By then his room was my old room, the one with the high window to the beyond. I secreted myself there for so many years losing myself in the music that seemed to mean so little to him and others yet I could save myself with it and hurt myself with it and then heal myself with it once again.
Then he went in his dying days to the old folks’ place and he had pictures of fighter planes from various angles on the walls. They are in my sons’ bedrooms now. They flew across his walls and theirs diving and soaring and twisting their noses to the sun. He told me one of his favourite tricks was the fly fast then wobble the wings in a kind of salute, like a wave. Throwing caution to the wind.
He sat in a chair in his room in the old folks’ place breathing alright in the mornings, the oxygen machine whirring and the fighter planes whirring from his walls in and out of his wartime memory and his old time life. They tried to shoot him down over the sea sixty years before. During these times he was man flying away from death and entirely in the remorseless hands of the fall. A bullet once pierced the edge of his engine but it didn’t explode.
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The picture of him in uniform from back in the day has his soft face with a tight, tight smile and misty, quiet eyes. He has a bold insignia on a tilted cap. There were times, he said, when a mob of them would fly out as an advance party during the fight for the Pacific against the Japs and some blokes would be shot and he wouldn’t and he would see the others floating down through the fire and noise and black smoke into the sea. They might come back or be rescued but they might not and that fall was immense, floating, maybe burning, towards dangerous water.
Survival from these falls or any falls like them would be miraculous and such miracles seemed to happen more back then; the same year my father was darting through the Pacific skies an Australian pilot called Joe Herman was blown out of his bomber without a parachute, at night. He was freefalling through debris and he grabbed something out of instinct and what he grabbed was another airman who was about to pull his ripcord. Both survived.
When the towers fell in New York on September 11 it was war again but of a different kind and of course many people jumped. The defining image of our times is ‘The Falling Man’, from the North Tower on that day, a photograph, his body prone and descending headfirst, his arms by his side in a gesture of total resignation. It was the graceful death of all our dreams, no fire or terror to be seen, just what was left of a cold glass money-tower; a mirror, really, from sky to earth.
I met an Australian man, Paul, whose twin brother died that day. His office was on the 91st floor of the south tower. Peter was his name. Paul never expected to see Peter again. He thought his brother’s body would have been, in his own word, “pulverised” by the enormous fall. He assumed he would have become part of the dust and his soul would remain there forever. Ninety-one floors. Blown out or jumped or whatever, who knows.
Paul went from Melbourne to New York six weeks later to visit ground Zero and see his brother’s family. The day after he arrived Peter’s body was found partially intact by a fireman, buried under rubble 100 metres away. He was identified by an unusual ring their father had given him. Paul tracked down the fireman and went to meet him. Then they buried Peter because they were able to in a little cemetery in upstate New York in the shadow of a Mount Peter.
Ninety-one floors.
Paul told me the family took heart at the funeral and in the years beyond from the Bible’s Psalm 91. “He will deliver you from the snare of the fowler,” it says, “and from the deadly pestilence.”
I heard another story too from the fall of the towers. A psychoanalyst in New York, Alexander Stein; he lived opposite the World Trade centre and watched everything unfold. He watched The Fall. He and his wife and to leave their apartment for three months during which time they drifted, uncertain and unhinged.
Stein write a piece called ‘Music, Mourning and Consolation’ for an American psychoanalytic journal in which he described how during these months his world went silent as if he lived in an “airless vacuum.” Music, which he loved, was muted. Other sounds seemed louder — jets, sirens, his wife’s breathing. But he literally could not hear music. Some time later it returned. He first began to hear a beloved Bach piece internally. Then finally his sense of external music came back too, and life was stable again.
When I fell from the window back in the day, or when back in the day I fell through the air after jumping from a window — one floor, not 99 — it was a thrill to remove the heritage orange headphones once on the ground and feel the auditory sensations of the real world again.
But it was only ever a study in contrasts. I preferred to be cupped and cocooned in sound and the more I think about it the more I realize that it was a sensory game. I wanted to fall and I wanted the fall to be better than just a silly jump from a window. This was around the time when other sensory plug-ins were starting to emerge in my life. Skin and tongue and smoke, and the pettiest of crimes. Anything to make a day or a night burn a little brighter.
How long must it have taken? Those few seconds are with me still. I think perhaps I wanted to be hurt, also. Not to die but to be hurt. I remember landing and rolling and feeling jags in my back and pains in my elbow and shoulder and I’d get wet because of the mist and the dew and I also remember the difference between the fall and what came next, which was to run. The run felt real. The fall never did. I would release myself from the cocoon of the headphones to hear traffic and car horns and gears changing and the hum of a television with only one channel and then I would run.
Originally commissioned for the Dance Massive arts festival, Melbourne 2013.
