Wonder

April 27 2019

It's not so much a fear of flying

as it is resignation.

Not the pulse quickening

martyred gripping

hard parched swallow,

but more

a calm accepting shrug.

The decision had been taken

once I entered in

to this closed curved space,

and now, resigned to my fate

I sit,

lap-belt snugged, knees pressed-up

as the hermetic door swings heavily shut

behind us.

Looking out over seat-backs, all upright and locked,

evenly receding

like neatly standing dominoes,

imagining

how easily they'd topple;

on impact

snapping-off their plastic frames

and sandwiching us flat.

There is release

in ceding control,

an inanimate object

passively strapped

into this narrow-hipped cylinder.

And there is release

in the moment of lift,

the inflection point

when this massive craft takes wing;

the thwack of wheels

the throttled roar

the disconcerting rattles,

the long narrow aisle

teeter-tottering upward.

The white noise of level flight

where we have lost the grace of wonder,

an airborne speck

so fast, so high

so effortlessly jetting,

as the drink trolley rumbles

and the recessed lights dim

and the thin seat reclines

a few mean inches.

As if inured to miracles

in this cynical age.

The release

of time out of time;

a few hours aloft

with our busyness behind us

the press of affairs on pause;

the wretched earthbound left

to their far-off drudgery.

In this weekend's Globe and Mail, Marsha Lederman interviews Melinda Gates about her new book The Moment of Lift. Which I know has nothing to do with aviation! But as soon as I saw those words, it struck me literally, and this poem revealed itself almost in its entirety: the complex emotions, the physics, that crucial inflection point when a massive aircraft becomes airborne.

I'm not a fearful flyer; more a fatalistic one. Fatalism may be an essential feature of most traditional religions and world views, but it is in bad odour in our modern secular age. Nevertheless, I think this is one of the few times when fatalism feels both right and permitted. And it is a rather enjoyable feeling: the relinquishing of control; the surrender to forces beyond oneself.