Flying Things

It was made of broomsticks and rags and old, old wires, but—it flew!  YES, it flew!  Only for a moment, that is so, but it flew!! Flying Thing #1 did fly and young Tommy Malloy was ecstatic.  It fell and crashed to the ground and broke into a hundred pieces; but that didn’t matter, because it HAD flown, and that meant that the possibility had become an actuality even if it was only for a moment.  Tommy danced about the wreckage of his Flying Thing #1. which was in pieces and scattered about in the field.

            Tommy then set out to build Flying Thing #2.  He poured a great deal of time, money and enthusiasm into this project. At night he dreamed of this marvelous machine in flight—and he saw himself in all the papers: “Tommy Malloy creates Flying Thing!”

            When he finished it, he looked at it and thought it was a thing of great beauty.  He started it up.  It wobbled and ran about the field.  It sputtered and strained and popped, but it wouldn’t take to the air.  He adjusted a few things, refueled it, primed it, turned it toward the wind and started it up again; and again it wobbled and sputtered and strained and popped.  Then after many tries, Flying Thing #2 hissed, screamed, choked and died never having, left the ground.

            Did I mention that Tommy was a very religious person?  When he was crestfallen for the failure of Flying Thing #2, he blamed himself for his failure—Not that he was wrong to build Flying Things, no, NO; he felt certain that God had given him a great gift to build such marvelous contraptions as the world had not seen!  No, not that, his error was his arrogance, ego and pride—his heart was not right, he decided, and that led him to dismantle Flying Thing #2 because, as he said to himself over and over again, “God has shut me down! And there is nothing I can do about it.”  He believed that he would have to purify his heart, and when his heart was right, God would call him, in the right time and place, to build Flying Things.

            And so Tommy became even more religious and spent his life trying to purify his heart so that when God called him to build his Flying Things, he would do so successfully and with purity of heart!  He married dutifully, but lovelessly, raised his children according to the will of God, worked hard at a job that he didn’t care for, with a boss that over-tasked him and paid him enough to keep him barely above poverty—for which he gave thanks to God in all things.  And he continued to spend years of devotion to God and to his church. 

Time passed by and Tommy was getting older and older.  Once in a while he thought about his Flying Things—even toyed with an idea for building Flying Thing #3—a little less weight here, lighter materials there, a different angle--but no, he would think, God had shut him down for his sinful pride and his many imperfections.

In time, Tommy died never having built his Flying Things.  He came before Almighty God.  It wasn’t quite like he imagined.  God was in a bar and looked like he would be more comfortable among bikers than preachers.  He was smoking a cigar and drinking shots of bourbon.  The piano player was playing “Stairway to Heaven” on a honky-tonk piano in the background while God poured a shot of bourbon into to Tommy’s glass.  Tommy, being religious, refused to drink, so God, being God and all, gave it to him straight:  “Tommy,” he said, scratching his whiskers, “I gave you a gift!  Son, you could’ve built the most amazing flying things to the joy of everyone, IF ONLY YOU HADN’T BEEN SO DAMN RELIGIUOS!!!

Pasteboard Masks

Here's the passage from Moby Dick I'm reading in the video if you need it:

Hark ye yet again--the little lower layer.  All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.  But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts for the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.  If man will strike, strike through the mask!  How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?  To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.  Sometimes I think there's naught beyond.  But tis enough.  He tasks me;  He heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.  That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.  Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.  For if the sun could do that, then I could do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations.  But not my master, man, is even that fair play.  Who's over me?  Truth hath no confines.

The Dark Side of the Mountain

The Fates slept.

What can I say? They are old women after all, and old women have a right to doze off. I know, I know, they’ve always been old so what difference did it make on this particular day?  

Who knows? The spinning, measuring, and cutting must get pretty old after a while, and if it gets to be a little too rhythmic and monotonous, then who can blame them if, on one hot afternoon in the underworld,they just kind of nodded off.  

The point is, they weren’t watching when Sisyphus suddenly heaved that boulder over the top of the mountain.

Well.  That wasn’t supposed to happen.

Sysyphus blinked.

It took a second to take it all in.  He looked down and watched that great boulder, that he had worn smooth and stained over the years with his old blood and sweat, tumble and bounce down, down, DOWN that incline which he had referred to once, in his silent thoughts, as “the dark side of the mountain.”  By that he meant that he had never seen that side before--like the dark side of the moon--the unknown, mysterious land that had offered such promise if that damn stone ever made it over the peak.

He watched its clumsy descent for what seemed like forever until he could see that boulder no longer but could only hear its great thunderous crashes echoing throughout the vales of Hades’ domain.  Then it was silent.

A great smile cracked across his face, and soon his voice ripped the air with a great howl of triumph such as had never been heard before in all the universe so that it reached even up to Olympus.

It did not, however, wake the Fates; and the great resonance of his voice altered nothing there in them as they slept.

Still, the joy born of thousands upon thousands of years of persistence and pain tarried in him a little while as Winged Victory swooped in and kissed him.

Then as quickly as she came, Victory left him in sober silence on the mountain top.

Haunting thoughts wanted to bubble up from the depths of Sisyphus’ mind.  He tried to suppress them--shove them back down again with all the strength of shoving boulders, but it couldn’t be helped; they bubbled up anyway, and they bubbled up grotesquely, like hundreds of dead bodies, muddy, stinky and rotten, surfacing almost instantly in the Stygian River--too many they came, and too fast to shove back down. The thoughts shaped themselves in an almost visual smell, a kind of a great stench blending itself of all rotten things, and they all somehow began to murmur together as they formed into one, single terrible thought, a whisper, it was, and then a hiss like a demon:

“Now what?”

Unable to answer the question, Sisyphus sat down on the precipice of that mountain and spent a long time thinking.  The clouds of the underworld swirled past him. Overhead a chill wind circled down around him and pushed his hair from his face.  His brow was deeply furrowed, and his mighty, calloused hands stroked his beard.  Then he stood quickly and resolutely, and he hiked down that “dark side of the mountain”--a journey of many days.  

He found his boulder.

He stood beneath it.

He gave a great heave and started rolling the boulder up the mountain.

When the Fates woke, they looked down and thought it odd that Sisyphus was on the wrong side of the mountain, but they were satisfied, after some deliberations among themselves, that nothing had changed at all in the Underworld.