UD has constantly been in very high places on this trip: A dizzying Neapolitan hotel balcony; the insanely steep cliffs of Matera, where crumbling walls alone fence out death; an outdoor restaurant in the Matera town center, where you twirl your pasta inches from oblivion. Of course your eyes are supposed to fix delightedly on the massive views of caves and churches, while your mind bothers itself not at all with the intimately close drop. Yet UD seems to suffer from (what fun to find a name/diagnosis) High Places Phenomenon, in which you feel “that you might jump off [a great height] despite the fact that you don’t want to die.” Sometimes, at great heights, “your mind is actually saying, ‘You’re in an unsafe situation—back up from the ledge.’ People usually obey that signal and back up. But we can misinterpret that and think, ‘I must have reacted that way because I wanted to jump.’”
“It might have something to do with how easy it would be to do something so irreversible and absurd, that the mere thought that it’s possible exerts some weird fascination,” [one person] said. “I [also] don’t like to sit in emergency aisles in planes because of that big red lever that looks so easy to pull. It probably isn’t, but I start obsessing over … what would happen if my hands just pulled it before I realized what I was doing? I would never actually pull the damn thing, but the obsessive thoughts are no fun,” she said.
The theme seems to be a human attraction to/fascination with the sheer possibility life sometimes affords of doing something absurd, radically and madly free — we’re in the realm of Andre Gide’s acte gratuit, in which you act without meaning or motivation, but simply, and somehow defiantly, because you can. Because, in this case, the amazing, immediate facility with which you could move into, er, an entirely other realm weirdly and excitedly enthralls you… There’s a hyperdramatization here, a melodramatization, of Stevenson’s insistent point in his great essay Aes Triplex, and of Mrs Dalloway’s thought as she walks through London on an ordinary day:
She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.
It is very very dangerous to live even one day; but we rarely feel and see that danger; and anyway, as Stevenson points out, you’d be stupid to miss your chance at a rich life by being always, as it were, on edge. Millions of people live cheek by jowl with volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, flood plains, and earthquakes, and they transact perfectly wonderful existences. We all happily carry around with us scads of internal organs, any one of which could turn sour on us at any moment. Bah! There’s a life to be lived.
And maybe this weird HPP of UD’s is just that – a distillation, in a moment of obvious peril, of the love of life, the immediate pulsing stuff of life, a life which includes the absurd fact that, in some twisted way, witnessing the ease with which we could lose life turns out to be a moment of wildly gratifying affirmation.
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I wonder if it all resonates in some way with ‘Brian Eno, who talked of “idiot glee.” Idiot glee is a kind of sheer joy at the mad fact of the world.’
