This is the second example which came to me today of the literary nature of reality is, by which I mean how many elements of literature are not stylistic or formal deviations from ordinary life but instead reflect the interconnectedness of life’s themes, symbols, characterizations, and so on.
It concerns pitch phugoids and mental illness.
I have long been obsessed with plane crashes; I read, write, and dream about them often. Without question, the most affecting story I’ve encountered is that of United Flight 232, told by Denny Fitch in Errol Morris’ First Person series. Greg Brown posted the video of it; if you have time and can watch the entire program, you will never forget it.
Without recapitulating the heroic and tragic story, I will say just this: after an explosion rendered the plane basically uncontrollable -without flight surfaces under the crew’s command- it began what is called a phugoid.
In a phugoid, a plane’s natural inclination towards aerodynamic equilibrium sends it on a sine-wave roller-coaster: it oscillates up and down, up and down, up and down, attempting to find a stable speed (which it cannot), and with each oscillation there is a net loss of altitude. Rising and falling, but each time falling further, it proceeds towards an inevitable end. Fitch, who helped fly the plane to its eventual crash landing, referred to it in its phugoid state as a “missile.”
Many years before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I commonly saw an image in my mind, an analogical image for what I felt: a cruise missile whose circuitry had malfunctioned, sending it spiraling frenetically and purposelessly around in the sky, awaiting either a self-destruct command or a lethal, ruinous collision with an innocent target.
To anyone familiar with the oscillations of mania and depression, there is an immediately familiar quality to the phugoid: rising and falling, a machine out of control, blindly struggling for an impossible balanced peace, descending further and further with each cycle. Indeed, there is even a rather poetic resemblance between a phugoid state and fugue state.
I have always uncritically assumed that my interest in plane crashes was spontaneous, casual, free from any deeper significance. I assumed that when I tell people that Fitch is one of my only heroes I am saying so only because his calm bravery and skill impress me as the precise opposite of my immaturity. This is an unexamined life.
But as in a novel, my own characterization was suddenly laid bare before me the other day, when I read a doctor describing our bodies as having systems “of significant redundancy which prevent sudden failure” and recognized Fitch’s words for the systems of an airplane. The metaphor coalesced and I saw at once why crashes transfix me:
Here are men and women guiding the unstable through the air through resolute focus and the overcoming of fear. And here are those who through their rashness and incompetence destroy themselves and those who depend on them.
I admire the former so much but dread that I am one of the latter, and thus come the dreams, the stories, the fixation.
