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Chapter Four: Flight
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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63 Chapter Four Flight The expansiveness gained by poetry’s incorporation of scientific insight propels the human perspective beyond earth’s gravity. But from the vantage of space, earth itself becomes a radiant particular of decay—a crystal, a seed. Poetry and science, nature and culture, all are included within such an oscillation. – John Elder, Imagining the Earth (207) Flight fascinates humans, I think, because from an evolutionary perspective we have been selected for traits amenable to walking, not flying. Somewhere along the myriad lines of potential adaptations and chance mutations we lost our chance to fly. Bird flight represents the locomotive equivalent of what humans have not achieved and, as such, introduces an ancient nostalgia for, or distant memory of, what might have been:“It must have seemed to early man [sic], earth-bound and leaden-footed, that these graceful passages through an element he could not master were the epitome of all he could never be, the incarnation of that finer part of himself which he felt to exist yet could never define” (Brown Gods 4). W. J. Brown implies that humans’ inability to fly exists alongside a desire to fly. The earliest humans, he speculates, would not have had the capacity to recognize their desire for what it was; they would have known only a feeling—or felt a feeling—of lightness upon witnessing birds in flight. Their bodily heaviness would have made them aware only that they could not join the birds—but it could not, prior to scientific explanations of gravity and physics, explain the twinge they felt as they stood and watched the busy skies. Mircea Eliade identifies such a “nostalgia for flight” (480) as “an essential element in human consciousness” (Lawrence 156). Whether that aspect of human consciousness serves more or less as punishment for something beyond our control, it nevertheless remains. 64 • Chapter Four Rebecca Solnit examines the flip side of the evolutionary story:“The list of what we eventually got from bipedalism is long and alluring, full of all the gothic arches and elongations of the body. Start with the straight row of toes and high arch of the foot. Go up the long straight walker’s legs to the buttocks, round and protuberant thanks to the massively developed gluteus maximus of walkers, a minor muscle in apes [and absent entirely in birds] but the largest muscle in the human body” (35). Alluring though this list is, complex human musculature ensures that we remain as earthbound as our oldest ancestors (some of whom might, admittedly, have been arboreal). We are quite simply too heavy to fly; our sternum and pectoral muscles too underdeveloped. But our brains, as Eliade has it, have capacity enough to imagine flight, to recognize our physical limitations, and to express a desire to achieve and experience flight (never mind the wherewithal to calculate formulas and construct machines that make the dream of flight come true). McKay writes more about pectoralis in his avian poetics than he does about gluteus, but the latter does have its place, usually accompanied by an unexplained sadness. At the beginning of Night Field (1991), McKay portrays a hike that is both emblematic—of the poet’s moving through the world, of the cadences of human locomotion in concert with his immediate environment —and pragmatic. Birders must get to the field (usually by car) and, once there, be able to get around quietly and efficiently. The act of birding requires an act, sometimes many acts, of walking. The act of birding is implicit throughout much of McKay’s poetry, and the act of hiking is often explicitly presented in his books as a way to birding. An early poem in Night Field, “Black Spruce” (7–13), offers a short journal account of the speaker’s hike near rocky Lake Superior. Anticipating the flight poems of Another Gravity in the way a camel anticipates water on the third day of travel, McKay writes: Eventually the pack becomes your hump, the weight of your food and the weight of your clothing and the weight of your shelter and the weight of your forgetfulness of all of the above. Added to the sad dumb sadness of your ass as it tries to reconstrue itself as muscle, lift your life up, over another ridge. (NF 7) [54.157.61.194] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:06 GMT) Flight • 65 The hiker’s ass, having yet to “reconstrue itself as muscle” for...