Gravity and Me

The bearable lightness of weight

There are a few years in your childhood when you can positively fly. It’s a natural progression, when you think about it. We’re born nailed to the earth. Then we learn to sit up, to crawl, to stand, to run, to dance. I know this program intimately. When I had my stroke seven years ago, I had to repeat the program, every step of the way. And every night in my bed I dreamed of running.

After you learn to run, you know you can fly. You just need to learn the trick of it. Build up momentum. Flap your arms. Fly. You’re small and light. Gravity might take its eyes off you for just a second. That’s all the time you need to break free.

Or maybe you need an equalizer.

When I was in third grade, my sister’s high school put on a production of Peter Pan. She smuggled home the Peter Pan hat. Mind you, it was made of folded-up newspaper, painted green. But it had obviously been sprayed with pixie dust.

That was the edge we needed. We’d take turns mounting the porch railing with the hat on, myself, my brother, and the Burns boys. There was an oleander bush standing guard in the yard between our apartment and the neighbor’s. We figured if we could clear the oleander bush, we could officially fly.

That bush took a lot of punishment. We’d fling ourselves toward it, hoping to catch an updraft. Gravity usually grabbed us by the ankle just before we took off. None of us actually flew, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

When I was in college at Loyola, I spent a lot of time crossing the quadrangle between Marquette Hall (where the theatre was) and Bobet Hall, where the department offices were located (yes, I was a theatre kid). There were hedges, waist-high, lining the sidewalks, which were shaped as a diamond within a square. In imitation of one of my heroes, the Scarecrow of Oz (the lightest of Dorothy’s companions), I’d often make the trip hopping back and forth over the hedges (inflicting minor damage on both them and myself).

I hadn’t yet come to terms with gravity. Mass was not yet the boss of me. I knew I could fly.

Yet as we grow older, most of us seek ways to anchor ourselves to the earth. With relationships, lovers, family, with familiar objects, furniture, households, mementos, knick knacks, souvenirs, scrapbooks, kitsch, junk. Maybe we put on a few pounds, too. Adulthood is a weighty matter. People respect solid citizens. We make allowances for gravity. Excuses.

At the same time, there’s still an ambivalence toward gravity. How many of you, as you get older, have been downsizing: smaller houses, less clutter—bring on the garage sales!—even as the garage fills up with things you bought at your neighobors’ garage sales? How many have heard the siren call of KonMari to unload everything that doesn’t “spark joy?”

But what if clutter sparks joy in you?

Roger Babson, an economist and businessman, felt so offended by gravity that he founded the Gravity Research Foundation in 1948 up in New Hampshire, challenging scientists to figure out a way to shield us from its harmful effects. He had backing from heavyweights like Clarence Birdseye and Igor Sikorsky. They’d hold conferences at which attendees would sit in chairs with their feet higher than their heads in order to counterbalance gravity, The foundation still exists, though it now has a truncated mandate: they study gravity, trying to understand it. To make peace with it?

It do take some studyin’. We have to learn how to balance our desires for gravity and lightness, love and freedom. We have to weigh them in the scales. We often put our thumbs upon those scales.

Lightness and gravity are as important in literature as in science. Don Quixote fights windmills, the perfect metaphor for a man who seeks grounding but has none. Sancho, who is earthbound, tries to warn him:

“Look, your worship,” said Sancho; “what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.”

Quixote does not listen, even when vanquished by the giants magically transformed into windmills by an evil magician.

Mr. Dick, the wise fool of David Copperfield, is always trying to fly a kite—

“I used to fancy, as I sat by him of an evening, on a green slope, and saw him watch the kite high in the quiet air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it (such was my boyish thought) into the skies.”

—while Jacob Marley, seven years after his death, is still held to earth by the weight of his cashboxes.

There are characters in literature who by their very nature buoy the action. Comic relief we call them. Relief from gravity, I call it. Romeo and Juliet is a comedy until the death of Mercutio, who dies with a pun on his lips:

“Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.”

Even his name is mercurial.

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being addresses the problem directly: physical desire is lightness; love weighs you down. To quote:

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Buddhahood is lightness of being, the abrogation of the physical; so are the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business, so buoyant that they can all pass customs by the outrageous tactic of imitating Maurice Chevalier. So is Bugs Bunny in High Diving Hare, where it’s Yosemite Sam that is always punished by gravity.

Just after Sam saws through the plank and he goes crashing down, while Bugs remains in mid-air, the wascally wabbit explains:

“I know this defies the law of gravity, but y’see, I never studied law.”

Absurdity is lightness. Desirelessness is pixie dust.

There’s a point in our lives at which gravity gains the upper hand. Once that happens, it becomes a battle even to stay upright. We need canes and walkers. I remember a day walking with my college room-mate and his father down the street in New Orleans. He fell straight on his face on the sidewalk, a forty-year old man. It was as if someone had taken an axe to a tree. He wasn’t a likable man, the kind of stuffed shirt you’d love to see slip on a banana peel, but still it was frightening. He wasn’t hurt, but he was mightily embarrassed. Grown-ups don’t fall. Not till they get get old.

It’s different from when you fall as a kid. It’s part of the job. I and a friend would play at stuntmen when we were little, constantly throwing ourselves down hills. Our mothers had to deal with a lot of grass stains.

Every year gravity establishes a firmer hold. It settles on our shoulders, bows our heads. When I started taking walks over a year ago, I used a cane. (My balance has been suspect since my stroke.) I don’t use the cane any more, but I carry it with me, just to show gravity the proper respect. (Besides, it was my brother’s cane, so I know it shields me from gravity’s effects.)

Our lives are a constant adjustment to, an accommodation with gravity, ever since we decided to become bipeds, to live with our feet on the ground and our heads in the sky. We neither want to get in a rut nor have our heads in the clouds. But as a consequence of our decision to bifurcate from the quadrupeds, we need to hold our heads high and place our feet firmly on the path.

It’s a balancing act.