'The Ledge Itself Invents the Leap'

Good hearts try to talk us out of phobias. After all, people are naïve about the powers of rationalism: “Explain it, and it goes away.” As a kid I fell for that, almost literally, when I tried to muscle my way with sheer will power past the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland, formerly the second-tallest building in North America. It was the only time in my life when I fainted -- only briefly, but a friend caught me and pushed me into a doorway. With age I’ve added to tall buildings a cluster of new but related irrational fears – large open spaces (indoors or out), being a passenger in a speeding vehicle, escalators. All have in common a spatial component, the feeling of a free-form fall into space. I have a recurrent dream of being suspended upside-down by a rope hanging from a horizontal flagpole at the top of a skyscraper. Jonathan Swift had similar terrors and scholars have retrospectively diagnosed him with Meniere's disease. 

No doubt talk therapy and/or pharmaceuticals could ease the distress, but it’s a little late for that. Besides, I’ve crafted a lifetime of avoiding certain situations and venues. I just don’t go there anymore and the loss is minimal. Perhaps this is why I feel safe and confident with words – no danger of dropping into the abyss, metaphysical or otherwise.

 

A.E. Stallings has a poem, “Fear of Happiness” (This Afterlife: Selected Poems, 2022), that nicely diagnoses my condition:

 

“Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had:

As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator

I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight,

Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through,

Though someone always said I’d be all right—

Just don’t look down or See, it’s not so bad

(The nothing rising underfoot). Then later

The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch,

Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view,

The merest thought of airplanes. You can call

It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep;

But it isn’t the unfathomable fall

That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch,

It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap.”

 

I can imagine simply standing by an open window in one of those obscenely tall buildings in Dubai and I get shaky. Hold it, and I sweat. The power of imagination.