Friday, December 18, 2015


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...


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...

 
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

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)