You have not grown old, and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret.—Rainer Maria Rilke
I have a confession to make.
Given that I am writing on a Saturday, confessing is perhaps fitting, as Saturday was the day the priests heard confessions at our church—which, inconveniently for a boy who wished to avoid confession at all costs, was just across the street. The enjoyment of every Saturday morning spent watching Bugs Bunny and Scooby Doo was corroded by the knowledge that come afternoon, I faced the option and obligation of walking fewer than 100 yards to climb into the confession booth and tell the priest everything I’d done wrong since my last outpouring of sin. This is how I ended up watching the horrid Saturday afternoon shows, like “H.R. Pufnstuf” and “The Banana Splits.” They offered some cover by helping me appear occupied, but they were admittedly suspicious, for no kid in his or her right mind would watch those shows willingly. Thank God for “The Monkees,” “American Bandstand” and “Soul Train,” my moral high ground that made my busy Saturday afternoon schedule of exploring the arts somehow legit.
This Saturday afternoon all these years later, however, I am only glad to confess to something that is a little embarrassing: I’ve never seen David Copperfield live.
This may seem unusual for someone who calls himself a magician. I’ve never seen Penn & Teller live. I’ve never been to Las Vegas, the mecca of spectacular live magic. I never saw Siegfried & Roy. Outside of magicians’ conventions, the only big magic acts I’ve ever seen are Doug Henning when I was 13 and Jeff McBride and Shin Lim in my adult years—and I saw Jeff’s show in a church, the opposite of Sin City.
I’m just not that interested in big illusion shows. I prefer my magic up close and personal. I like to be right within the energy field of close-up mystery, and I wish to host my spectators within that hallowed space as well.
I do have some regret at not having seen Copperfield live, however, mainly because of his legendary “Flying” illusion. During it, David shares that his greatest dream since childhood has been to fly. Then, through seven minutes of progressively jaw-dropping moments, he flies high above the stage and back down, floats inside a box, glides through hoops proving there are no wires, grabs a spectator’s hand and lifts her to the heavens as well. It is incredibly moving, at least according to the very dated YouTube version I watched today for the very first time.
For me, flying isn’t just a dream—it is my dreams. I’m not sure why, but in my later years my nighttime dreams have me flying quite a lot. It has become a recurring theme. In my dreams I have flown to the tops of cathedrals, my hair grazing the painted ceilings, occasionally floating too close and having to push myself away from the rounded corners just above the cornices that are responsible for such soft, forgiving acoustics for church musicians. I have flown over tall city buildings, conscious even in my dreams of challenging my fear of heights by ascending ever higher, not quite touching the clouds, always quickly swooping back down to a rooftop covered with protective asphalt shingles, careful not to get my shoes stuck on the gooey tarry surface if the dream occurs during an August heat.
I don’t remember most of my dreams, but flying is different. Flying is the only sensation from my dreams I seem able to recall, aside from the other recurring theme of not being able to find my way back to a parking garage or an airport gate. Unlike that sensation, which feels eerily similar to this scene from “Spinal Tap,” the feeling of flying is something I enjoy replaying in my mind during my waking hours.
How does it happen, this flying? How do I do it?
It seems to begin with a will for something to be different. Something in the dream is not to my liking, and I decide to escape this reality that is, interestingly, an unreality. Often, I am at a party and there is absolutely nothing going on. In real life, I might offer to do a card trick. In dreams, I go for real magic and kind of rise.
There need to be witnesses. I am always surrounded by people. Essentially, I decide I’ve had enough of small talk and group think. I stand on my tiptoes, let go of everything that is going on, and up I go. Each time this occurs, I am aware that I have done this before, in dreams, only each new time I believe it is happening for real. I don’t yet know that I am dreaming again.
It is as if each dream is a short story. For, like the hundreds of short stories I have read, I only remember a moment or two that makes me wonder whether I really experienced something or only read it—or dreamt it—because great fiction, like great dreams, compiles the truth. It is hard sometimes to know whether you have lived a truth or simply heard it, and then you wonder whether that matters as long as the truth has entered you. Great fiction does that for you. Dreams can, too.
I guess it’s appropriate that one of my favorite short stories is about a dream, Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Here is a summary, courtesy of Wikipedia:
The story tells of an unnamed young man who has a dream that he is in an old-fashioned movie theater in 1909. As he sits down to watch the film, he starts to realize that it is a motion picture documenting his parents' courtship. The black-and-white silent film is of very poor quality, and the camera is shaky, but nonetheless, he is engrossed. Soon the young man starts to get upset. He yells things at the screen, trying to influence the outcome of his parents' courtship and the other people in the audience begin to think he is crazy. Several times the character breaks down. In the end he shouts at his parents when it appears they are going to break up, and he is dragged out of the theater by an usher who reprimands him. In the end, the character wakes up from his dream and notes that it is the snowy morning of his twenty-first birthday.
For an oddly moving experience, you can hear Lou Reed reading the story here. In the last stanza of this purely poetic story, as the usher is dragging the protagonist down the aisle and out of the theater, he reveals the secret to flying as he upbraids the young man:
“What are you doing? Don’t you know you can’t do whatever you want to do? Why should a young man like you, with your whole life ahead of you, get hysterical like this? Why don’t you think of what you’re doing? You can’t act like this even if other people aren’t around! You will be sorry if you do not do what you should do, you can’t carry on like this, it is not right, you will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much.”
The usher is the voice of the divine, whether you call it God or something else, telling the young man—and the reader—that they have the power to change absolutely everything. With their choices. With their words. With their actions. With that kind of power, what could possibly be holding us down?
During seminary I watched an interview with the Buddhist scholar and environmental activist Joanna Macy. The interviewer asked Macy, who was nearing 90, whether she felt discouraged that more progress on climate justice had not occurred in her lifetime despite all her efforts.
I am paraphrasing, because I no longer have access to the interview, but I will never forget Macy’s exasperated reply: “Stop taking your pulse all the time!” she laughed. Macy went on to say that we have no idea what lives we have changed any more than other people have any idea that they have changed our lives.
We not only have the power to change other people’s lives, we have probably done so. To appreciate this power you yourself have, it helps to let go of where you are at any given moment—your spiritual latitude and longitude, your Google Maps’ emotional timeline. You are more than all that. You are not just where you are. You are also all you have been and, more important, all you could be.
Hey: You could be in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, watching David Copperfield performing “Flying,” and yelling out, “It’s fake! It’s an illusion! There must be wires somewhere!” And a kindly usher might gently guide you down the aisle and out of the theater.
You would be right, of course. It is done with wires, as a casual search on the interwebs will tell you. But that’s not the point. The whole point of “Flying” is that dreams can come true, yours and mine. The point of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” is that we have the power to change our own trajectory and that we should stop worrying about trying to change everyone else’s.
And the point of remembering where you were on any given Saturday, the folly of your choices of what to watch and where to be, and the narratives you told yourself to justify the day, is to realize that all of it, every bit, was a launching pad, a point of ascension. We are never limited by our choices. The secret to flying is not so much reaching for the sky, but of letting go of the ground.
Behind the Curtain
“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” first came to me when I was 18 in an anthology published by Douglas and Sylvia Angus. Sylvia was an English professor at my alma mater, Potsdam College. I took her short story course my freshman year. Sylvia wore thick, Coke-bottle glasses and walked with a cane; unbeknownst to us, she suffered tremendous chronic pain. I still remember Sylvia beseeching us clueless early MTV addicts to glean the greater wisdom from this story, reading passages aloud with tears welling up in her eyes behind those thick lenses and gazing out at all of us to see if any of us even cared. We stared back blank-faced and she kept on going.
Sylvia passed away in my junior year at age 60, younger than I am now. I am glad to see that both SUNY Potsdam and nearby St. Lawrence University offer scholastic awards in her name to this day. For, if I had to pick a “big magic act” from my past, the one that changed my life, I think it might be that short story class with Professor Sylvia Angus. She gave flight to my imagination, and she taught me how to fly.