Fallen
Texts from the Performance

By Jess Curtis*
























“Immortal Birds” has been paraphrased from a story by Peter Sloterdijk

I could tell you a story,  a legend of immortal birds that fly high above the peaks of the Himalaya.  They spend their whole lives suspended in the air, released from gravity.  They need no food and make love in flight, never once setting foot on the earth below.

The only moment of danger in their divine lives is at the very beginning.  Without a nest, the mother bird climbs high into the air to lay her egg.  As the egg falls the sun warms it and wakes the sleeping chick inside.  If the mother has flown high enough the chick has time to break the falling shell, feel the wind in it’s young feathers, spread it’s wings and begin it’s lifelong flight.  

Sometimes the young bird is not so lucky.  Perhaps the mother bird has not flown high enough, or the clouds have covered the sun that day.  The fall is too fast, gravity too strong.  The unborn chick remains in it’s chalky prison, unawakened by the sun, as it is sucked down to shatter on the surface of the earth.

If it survives, the young bird emerges, dazed, from the shards of broken shell.  Broken winged, it lies on the ground, having missed it’s chance to fly.  It gathers itself, resigned to the feeling of it’s own weight against the earth and slowly tries to teach itself to walk.

Most succeed.  They find a life as vertical beings, running around on the surface of the earth. Some of the grounded birds talk later in their lives of the importance of keeping an erect posture.  But often they are haunted by the feeling that something is missing.  In a hidden corner of their minds the suspicion lingers that once other possibilities had been open to them.
 
*****








Often, in dreams, I’m on the top of a tree and it starts to fall.  I feel the momentum building and the wind rushing past me.  I spread my arms and they resist the wind.  My fall begins to travel forward.  I shift my body and my path responds.  I am still falling, bu,t falling horizontally now.  A gust of wind catches me and I am buoyed up.  I can see the earth below and all around me.  Fear becomes excitement, becomes a kind of ecstatic oneness with the air.  I know that I will eventually come down; that this long flying fall will have to end, but I’m not afraid anymore.



Note to Self:

Don’t worry about being important.  Take small actions, but quickly.  Notice details.  Take irrelevant, unrelated actions that have little or no meaning to anyone.  Take revenge on meaning.  Get back at meaning for holding you hostage all these years.

Take actions that seem like they should mean something but don’t.  Insinuate to people that there is meaning somewhere inside what you’ve done, but don’t explain it.  Go to places where people speak a different language.  Communicate with people in a language that nobody speaks.

Try to be misunderstood. Give people permission to misunderstand you. Try to give false meaning to unimportant things.  Try to give up your attachment to being understood. Try to give up the desire to have an impact.

See if anyone notices.  See if anyone cares  See if anyone believes you.  See if anyone figures out what you mean. Don’t be afraid to be mean.

Don’t be afraid.

*****
There is a dizzying sensation.  A lack of control.  A surrender to a force greater than any of us.  We feel our bodies more deeply than normal.  We feel the pull of a kind of gravity toward another being.  It is exhilarating.  Our senses come awake.  Perhaps we are more alive than in other moments. For a moment we feel as though we are flying.

And there is risk. The risk of not being caught.  The risk of landing hard and being injured.  We know that there is a bottom beneath this fall.  That in the end gravity will have it’s way with us.  

Still we surrender.  We trust.  We commit our equilibrium to the connection with another.  Sometimes we crash spectacularly.  It is painful.  But we go on. We pick ourselves up and continue.  We find ourselves on our own two feet once again.

Other times the falling ends and we barely notice it.  We just begin to feel the weight of our bodies and we know that the falling is over.  The lightness is gone.  We are once again creatures of the earth.  

Fallen,  our love must find a new way or die.

*****



I saw photos of people falling.

People who had jumped from a burning building, knowing that they would die when they reached the ground. People who had chosen death by gravity over death by fire.  Each photo  the last moment of someone’s life frozen.


I was particularly struck by  the shape of each of their bodies in the air as they fell.  Each told a different story.  One man looked as though he had backed out the window and pushed himself away from the building.  He was falling,  back toward the ground, head down, but with his arms out wide to each side and he was was looking up into the sky.  I imagined him praying.  He looked like he was praying.

A second man was falling in a much more controlled way.  He was long and straight, legs together,  with his arms folded carefully across his chest.  He was already in the position to lie peacefully in a coffin, except that he was  a thousand  feet in the air and at this strange diagonal upside-down angle.

The last photo was of a woman I think.  She was fairly large and her clothes were flapping behind her body very chaotically.  Her arms and legs were flying wildly and she was facing straight down at the ground in a way that made it look like, at that moment, like she was running as fast as she could down the side of the building. Maybe she thought if she an fast enough she could run straight through to the next life.
I looked at those photos for a long time, trying to imagine the feelings in one’s body at a moment when jumping from that building would make more sense than staying.  The heat of approaching flames burning one’s nose, mouth and skin. the rush of looking down from a broken window at the street far below.  A sense of space.  A very big space.


How would I feel?  


How would I fall?