What spoke to me most about Mary Pinard’s piece was the language of flight, the sentences about flying that themselves contained a rush of motion and feeling of freedom. There is a sense of waiting throughout the piece, waiting for the actual moment when she jumps off the platform. Right before she describes that moment, she describes what it already means to her, what her childhood self thought about flying: “there was still that flying going on in my head, that leap into freedom, that rush of air around my ears, all waiting ended, all weight suspended as I let go, turn and rotate, wing myself home to safety” (32). The way the sentence itself rushes forward in a long, dizzy series, no longer waiting for anything, gave me the same sense of exhilaration in motion structurally that it describes verbally. A related contrasting example is her description of the actual jump: “And I jumped. And I flew. And it was as if I had always flown, and known this free space as home” (35). This passage is actually very “still” for me. It is describing a movement, but the sentences are still points, suspended in the “time” of the piece. The suspension of movement in the passage has a similarity to her suspension in the air. It feels good, safe, to be here in the piece, the same way that being in the air feels like home.
I still haven’t figured out how to connect these profound descriptions of flight with the long discursive passages about the history of the trapeze and the circus. While I do that kind of research and writing all the time, those passages do not, as it were, fly, at least, not for me. What I can’t quite come to grips with is whether the contrast between the two kinds of storytelling is too big to make the connection or not.
