Falling

So then I fell like that girl from a balance beam.
A gymnasium of eyes were all holding on to me.
I lifted one foot to cross the
otherand I felt myself slipping.
It was a small mistake.
Sometimes that is all it takes.
---Bright Eyes, "From a Balance Beam" on Lifted...

In Western culture (and perhaps in others too), the metaphor of falling is central to our way of self-understanding. From Icarus to Rome, and from Adam (and certainly Eve) to Superman all of us are cast out of somewhere. MaryEtta told me, and some experts agree that there are two inborn human fears: fear of loud noises and fear of falling.

What is it with falling? Why do we “fall” into love? Why does Chicken Little’s sky fall? And if it is so terrifying, why do we build thousands of theme parks so that we can ride roller coasters and free falls? Why do we skydive?

In his article, "Why We Love Falling," Garrett Soden says:

Just the idea of falling has been a powerful negative metaphor for millenniums. Our culture is filled with stories that equate falling with failure: Icarus fell because he lacked humility; Lucifer fell from Christian heaven to become Satan; we say that leaders fall from power, that civilisations fall into barbarism, that sinners fall from grace.

In my dictionary, there are 72 definitions of the word fall, and dozens don't refer to the act of moving up or down in space. It seems that the only universal factor here is that falling is used in a general way to express things quickly going wrong: 'to fall to pieces', 'to fall out', 'to fall over oneself'.

Linguist Zoltan Kovecses has pointed out that metaphorically 'up' is good, 'down' is bad. So healthy is up; sick is down: Lazarus rose from the dead. He fell ill. Conscious is up; unconscious is down: Wake up. He sank into a coma. Happy is up; sad is down. I'm feeling up today. He's really low these days. Virtue is up; lack of virtue is down. She's an upstanding citizen. That was a low-down thing to do. This idea seems to be universal. Researchers have checked three unrelated languages - English, Hungarian, and Chinese - and found that all described happiness with 'up' metaphors.

Our falling marks our separation from perfection, from grace, and/or from innocence. This separation even happens in psychoanalytic theory where children are separated from their mother in the Real stage through the insertion of the Phallus or the Law of the Father. It seems that no matter what mythology I study, humans are described as once having had perfection and through their greed, need, or social environment, that perfection was lost through a fall.

From my heap, my crumpled body soaking in my "lack of virtue," I see the world I have created for myself. In this world, I must fight against gravity. I wonder if some worlds allow gravity to keep us from flying away.