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.
2 comments:
Linked over from "I Don't Know, But..."
I understand. I did reasonably well as a child in certain situations. If I was over water, or a guardrail was above my center of gravity. Through my teens I would force myself to climb moderate heights for the adrenaline rush. But it all slowly went away. I could not look at a photo of a person on a cliff in National Geographic, I imagined being blow off a cliff even if I were 25' back, and at the Empire State Building was unable to move off the back wall where I had plastered myself. Much of my fear is that I will impulsively jump, just to break the tension. I am no longer sure I could rescue a child in a high situation.
Like you, I simply stay away. It seldom affects my life as I work around it.
From Updike's "The City Outside", written from his hospital / death bed:
" ...
I had a fear of falling: airplanes
spilling their spinning contents like black beans;
the parapets at Rockefeller Center or
the Guggenheim proving too low and sucking
me down with impalpable winds of dread;
engorging atria in swank hotels,
the piano player miles below his music,
his instrument no bigger than a footprint.
I'm safe! Away with travel and abrupt
perspectives! Terra firma is my ground,
my refuge, and my certain destination.
My terrors--the flight through dazzling air, with
the blinding smash, the final black--will be
achieved from thirty inches, on a bed.
..."
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