Falling
What is it like to fall?
How do you answer a question like that? Well it’s like…it’s like having the ground taken out from under you. So like floating? No, not really. Like…rushing toward something, knowing it will hurt. Hurt. What is hurt? What is rushing? What is toward?
What is it like to fall?
Yesterday I visited my new second cousin. A day old. He didn’t do much more than sleep in his mother’s arms during the visit. But a baby brings so many questions. And then, leaving the hospital we went to visit my grandmother in her small apartment with a 10th floor view of the Ohio River valley and what’s left of Wheeling lit up in the darkness. And as she moved from one room to the next with the aid of a walker, I wondered, prior in time to the memory of the question above, “What is it like to fall?” For one’s legs to give out, unable to support you with the ease and familiarity the young--or should I say those in the middle--take for granted. For a baby needs much more than a walker.
But the question came to me in a dream. From a baby. Not the baby I had seen that day. A dream baby. A spirit baby. As the others drifted off to let the baby sleep, I remained behind, wondering if this baby was having a dream within my dream. Then it opened its eyes and asked, “What is it like to fall?”
I opened my mouth try to answer, but realized that I could not. One can only describe experience with reference to other experience. One can only explain the meaning of words with other words. And even though this child somehow had access to words, the emptiness of words not grounded in experience was more apparent than ever. Any words that I used would just refer to more experiences this new being had not yet had.
“I can’t describe it,” I told him finally. But his curiosity wasn’t satisfied.
“Then show me.”
Show him? How can you show a baby what it is like to fall? I could drop him, I suppose, but as I looked over at the others huddled in the other corner of the room, casting occasional glances in our direction, the thought of legal action being taken against me was the least of my concerns. Vigilante justice would be more likely.
“I can’t do that,” I told him. “I’d have to drop you. You might get hurt. Seriously hurt. You’re young and fragile. You might die. They’d be very mad at me.”
He seemed to consider these things, then replied with the determination, “I want to know what it is like to fall. Show me.” It wasn’t a question. It was a demand.
“But you’ll get hurt,” I said. “Pain. Crying.” How do you explain this to this brand new being. “Bad feelings. Bad. Ouch.”
But the dream baby looked at me blankly. Those words had no meaning. “Then I will be hurt, if that is what happens when you fall. Let me fall.”
I nervously glanced over at the distracted others, took the baby up in my hands, perhaps a mere inch or two off of the surface on which he lay, and dropped him. He was rather unaffected and his look might even be described as one of disappointment.
“Hurt isn’t so bad,” he told me. “You made it sound bad.”
“Well it is. I didn’t really drop you,” I told him. I didn’t want my honesty impugned. “You didn’t fall very far. So it didn’t hurt very much.”
“So there are different kinds of falling?” he said. “Are you saying I could feel more than I did?”
“Well yes,” I said. “But I don’t think you want to. Or…you wouldn’t want to, if you knew what it meant. You could even die, emphasized again, looking at this little warped head from the skull that was not yet fully formed. The brain has too much growing to do for the human skull to be solid at birth.
“I want to fall….for real,” he told me.
I started to speak but fell silent. Shouldn’t I protect him? Let the benefit of my own experience guide him? Or at least, in that favorite phrase of “grown ups” to kids everywhere, “wait until he’s older.” “You don’t want to,” I told him. “You think you want to, but you don’t. Just trust me. You’re too young. You are too fragile. You might die.”
“I will die.” He said it with an unafraid certainty that came from the unshakable truth of what he was saying. But the sheer
I couldn’t refute that. Yes. You will die. And yet he was unafraid of that reality. Maybe it was because he had just been born. He hadn’t existed until a few moments ago. He had no accumulated memory to lose. What would it matter to not exist again? How can one fear an experience one never had? An experience one never CAN have?
“Well yes, you’ll die. But not right now. You don’t want to now. Or for a very long time.”
“Time?”
Oh, Jesus. What was this, a Heidegger seminar? “I don’t think I can explain that either.”
The baby actually huffed at me. “Then let me fall.”
Another nervous glance to the others. Then I picked him up. “Okay, here goes.” I tossed him up in the air a foot or so and then caught him in my hands. In that brief moment from my hands and back to my hands, he bore an expression of unbridled joy.
He laughed, but then looked at me like a stern school teacher. “That was fun. But it wasn’t falling. I want to know what it is like to fall.”
“Once you know, you may regret it.” The baby was nonplussed, despite not knowing what nonplussed meant. Or, I suppose he knew what nonplussed meant, he just didn’t know to call it being nonplussed.
“What is it like to fall?” he asked one final time.
I wrestled with my doubts, my uncertainties. I would feel guilty showing him. I would feel guilty withholding it from him. But if he wanted to fall, who was I to stop him? Even if, paradoxically, I was the only one who could let him.
“I’ll show you,” I said.
I picked him up, and this time took him away from the surface on which he was laying, where the floor was much further down.
“This is what it is to fall.”
I said, and I tossed him high up over my head. Time seemed to slow down as the first thing I noticed was the gaze of the others, looking over in horror, already rushing toward me to stop my insanity. I watched the baby’s face as it seemed to be taking everything in. The rush of air, the loss of support, the freedom of movement. The same look of joy as before, only now it intensified and brightened as my arms did not interrupt the process. Shrieks of horror from across the room as they realized I was not going to catch him, but let him fall all the way to the ground. A look of concern on the baby’s face as it fell through space and time and had a sudden doubt, wondering if I was right, if what was coming would be something bad. Something that would teach him also the meaning of regret. My heart went out to him as I knew what was coming, braced myself for the possibility he would turn against me at the moment of contact, blame me for the pain he was about to experience, as the others already were.
And as he hit the ground there came the inevitable grimace, the contorted face, the shrieking cry as the dream baby experienced pain and fear and hurt for the very first time. The others were still charging toward me to scoop him up and put him back in the care of the doctors who could extend his once again safe life.
But it was too late. The wounds were fatal. And the dream baby who had just become conscious a short time before began to slip out of consciousness forever. The crowd was close in, ready to wreak their vengeance upon me. But in its last waking moment, the dream baby looked up, and he smiled at me.
“Thank you. I know what it is to fall.”