Buck And Icarus
"I
often asked him how he managed to stay up in the air. He never could understand why we could not do
it. He just took a leap, held his
breath, and stayed up."-- Nandor Fodor quoting Romola Nijinsky, Between Two Worlds, 1964
Nandor Fodor puzzled over many things. One of those puzzling things was a mystery
associated with the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky whose audiences often wondered if,
for a few moments, Nijinksy somehow temporarily suspended the laws of gravity. Fodor, a Hungarian born lawyer turned
psychoanalyst, mulled the possibility that there was something to an ancient
Hindu belief a person could somehow awaken the Anahatu Chakra through
meditation and breath control and briefly walk on the air...
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| Vaslav Nijinsky |
The famous ballet dancer was not the only
person reputed to have some secret way of briefly suspending the natural laws
of the universe. In 1868, a Scottish
medium named Daniel Dunglas Home allegedly levitated himself in the presence of
Lord Adare and strolled out of a room through one third story window of the
aristocrat’s home and back into it through the window alongside it...
Since nearly a century and a half has passed
since D D Home, the son of a Scottish carpenter, enthralled the high society of
Europe (receiving audiences from Napoleon III and Pope Pius IX), we have no way
of proving he whether was charlatan or a minor miracle worker. We can say that he caused a bit of a rift
between two noted poets-- his admirer Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her
skeptical husband Robert Browning who made the effort to write to the London Times to denounce the man he referred to
in one of his poems as “Sludge the Medium”...
 |
| British medium Colin Evans captured in an infra-red image as he allegedly levitates during a 1938 seance |
Of course, the notion that man could somehow
break the bonds of earth through some mechanical means appealed more to those
of a scientific bent than the idea that a chap might simply will himself into
the sky through some esoteric mumbo jumbo.
The Roman poet Ovid told the story of Icarus, ill-fated son of the Greek
master craftsman Daedalus, in his Metamorphoses. Father and son had been imprisoned by King
Minos of Crete for whom Daedalus had constructed the infamous Labyrinth which
housed the murderous Minotaur. Daedalus
fashioned a set of wings for himself and Icarus, warning his son not to fly to
close to the sun lest its heat melt the wax holding the feathers together. Children rarely heed the wisdom of their
parents and Icarus was no exception when he discovered the freedom of soaring
like a bird above the ocean...
 |
| The Fall of Icarus, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636 |
We should not find ourselves surprised that men
have long desired to rise up into the sky, either through some man-made
apparatus or in a magical way. The
desire appears in our dreams and daydreams.
Fantasies of flight attracted Sigmund Freud’s attention. He saw them, at least in males, as the
product of sexual impulses whose normal channels have been blocked. The desire also expresses itself covered in
the more socially acceptable cloak of religion-- on one occasion, Saint Joseph
of Cupertino, in the words of one witness, “rose into space... and flew like a
bird onto the high altar where he embraced the tabernacle”...
The holy man of Cupertino is not the only
religious figure said to have the power to float in the air or fly. Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified, an Arabian
Carmelite, rose to the top of trees in the garden of a monastery in Bethlehem. Similar accounts popped up in stories told
about Saint Dunstan and Saint Dominic and a number of other righteous priests
and nuns. The religious fanatic Girolamo
Savonarola, supposedly floated in his dungeon cell during his devotions as he
awaited noose and flame. Shamanic
traditions of Central Asia speak of men who transformed themselves into birds
so they could quickly move from one place to another...
 |
| Magician and Pretty Girl With No Visible Means of Support |
Levitation has no adherents in the modern
scientific world. Mystical speculations
about interfaces between man and the divine or states where human consciousness
can twine together with the elements and fundamental forces of the universe don’t
lead to tests whose results can be duplicated.
In the material world, levitation is fraud, delusion, or cleverly done
trickery...
But the dream of flight lingers even in the
material world of testable propositions...
In 1886, Jules Verne speculated that perhaps it
was time for man to begin to think about moving past travel in balloons which
began one hundred and three years earlier with a five and a half mile flight
over the French countryside for the course of about a half hour in a balloon
designed by the Brothers Montgolfier. Verne
tells the story of Robur the Conqueror who has mastered the technology
necessary to achieve heavier than air flight.
The novel telling the story has its moments of action and conflict and
adventure but isn’t quite as exciting as a 1961 movie in which Vincent Price,
playing Robur, is an idealist bent on ending tyranny and violence by bombing
warring nations into a lasting worldwide peace.
Robur himself, of course, would be the benevolent ruler who insured
harmony continued to exist between the conquered nations of Earth...
 |
| Flash Gordon and Dale Arden preparing to take on... |
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| Ming the Merciless (as portrayed by Charles Middleton) |
When Verne penned a sequel to his story in 1904,
Robur had become a madman akin to the character portrayed by Vincent Price. His new thirty meter long craft, named
(appropriately) The Terror, could
travel hrough the skies at a mind-boggling 200 miles an hour. This was considerably faster than the first
sustained flight by a powered and controlled aircrat, a flight of 120 feet
covered in twelve seconds at Kittyhawk, North Carolina, by the Wright Brothers
on December 17, 1903...
Aviation through the clouds above the mountain
peaks of this world offered adventure aplenty to those seeking to cross oceans
and polar ice caps-- and for those who simply wished to travel from New York to
San Francisco in less time than it took a locomotive to drag railroad cars
across a continent...
 |
| The gentleman known as Daniel Dunglas Home to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and as Mr Sludge to her skeptical husband Robert Browning |
The frustrated lad who could find no proper way
to express his affection for a lovely lass could now dream of becoming a virile
hero on distant worlds instead of indulging in the fantasy of hovering over a
playground, thanks to the reality of aircraft travel in the real world in which
he was just another pimply-faced kid with a squeaky voice and an after school
newspaper delivery route...
In August 1928, a pulp magazine called Amazing Stories published Philip F Nowlan’s
novella, Armageddon: 2419, whose hero
Anthony Rogers found himself starring in a comic strip several months later as
Buck Rogers. In the novella, Buck
brought some old fashioned American values to the future. He was born in 1898, fought the Germans in
the Great War, returned home to work for the American Radioactive Gas
Corporation, and then found himself waking up in the 25th Century
after he being exposed to one of those radioactive gases in a Pennsylvania coal
mine. Despite the fact that the United
States has been conquered by Mongol Reds, young Rogers fortunately meets the
very lovely rebel Wilma Deering and joins her in the battle to take America
back from the Communists...
 |
| Dale Arden learns about obedience the hard way |
Buck and Wilma eventually travel into space
where they encountered Tigermen on Mars and other hostile alien life forms. The Buck Rogers comic strips (which debuted on
the same day as the Tarzan comic strip) have no record of any meeting between
these two heroic Earth people and the equally heroic interplanetary trio of
Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and the half-crazed Doctor Zharkov who kidnaped Flash
and Dale after inventing a rocketship he hopes to use in preventing a collision
between Earth and the planet Mongo whose despotic ruler Ming the Merciless could
easily put Fu Manchu to shame in any contest of villainy...
During the Great Depression days of comic strip
and pulp fiction interplanetary flight, the kid who dreamed of flying as a
substitute for kissing pretty girls had no shortage of role models: Superman,
like that daring young man on the trapeze admired by those fellows not willing
to admit they were smitten by those curvy Gibson Girls, flew through the air
with the greatest of ease-- and he could move faster than a speeding bullet. Clark Kent, aka Superman, had his Lois Lane
who admired him as chastely as Dale and Wilma did their swashbucklers. And there, too, was Doc Savage to emulate, a
two-fisted scientific genius whose ability to soar in the sky came strictly
through his skills as a pilot. Doc was
too busy stopping would-be dictators to pay much attention to girls but even he
had to admire his lovely cousin Pat who could outdraw any gunslinging outlaw
and rarely found herself bested in hand-to-hand combat...
 |
| Doc Savage rescuing a Damsel in Distress as he tries to stop the reign of terror created by The Metal Master, a fiend who has learned how to cause steel to melt |
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| Patricia Savage as we meet her in Brand of the Werewolf, her first adventure shared with her cousin Doc |
No idea is rarely without many facets. This is particularly true when we think about
our desire to escape the force of gravity.
As we ponder the notion, we encounter scientific skepticism that the
mind can somehow suspend the laws of physics, scientific faith in humankind’s
ability to study the natural world and learn truths that will allow us to work
within nature’s rules to fashion commonplace realities that would have been
miracles to ancient peoples, questions of religious faith, psychological
ponderings on sexuality and dominance, and pop culture analyses that may or may
not contain valid insights...
Among the last category, we offer this idea for
consideration. While we may see hints of
sublimated sexuality in the comic strip fictions, we also glimpse something else: an incipient feminism where Wilma Deering and
Dale Arden and Pat Savage stand beside men as warriors in their own right. The sexual prowess and intellectual skill of
these women hover over them like a barely noticed halo in the 1930s...
Times do change and by the 1970s, Dale Arden
had become Dale Ardor. But that’s
another and much sexier story...
 |
| By the mid-1970s, tomboy Pat Savage was still as two-fisted as she was in the 1930s but now prone to offering up a little sexual teasing to her notoriously girl shy cousin when she,Doc, and the rest of the crew uncover the secret of the Loch Ness Monster in the 1976 Marvel Comics graphic novel, The Earth Wreckers |
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CREDITS
Note: All
photographs and research for this essay were located through Google Images or
Wikipedia and other readily available public materials, without authoritative
source or ownership information except as noted: Vaslav Nijinsky from Between Two Worlds, Nandor Fodor, Parker Publishing, New York,
1964; the levitational abilities of Daniel Douglas Home from The
Supernatural, Douglas Hill and Pat
Williams, Hawthorn, New York, 1965 and Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical
and Paranormal Experience, Rosemary Ellen
Guiley, Harper, San Francisco, 1991; Freud and fantasies of flight from Fantasies
of Flight, Daniel M Ogilvie, Oxford
University Press, 2003; religious expression of fantasies of flight and
levitation from Shamanism, Mircea
Eliade, Princeton University Press, 1964 and An Encyclopedia of Occultism, Lewis Spence, Citidal Press, New York, 1993;
illustration of Pat Savage from The Earth Wreckers, Marvel Comics, April 1976; Vaslav Nijinsky in costume from National
Public Radio (http://www.npr.org/assets/img/2013/05/29/3202983_archive.jpg)
