I remember being able to fly.
Okay, don't switch off right away, give me a moment to kind of explain that statement ... because, you know, I realise it's a pretty ... ridiculous thing to say, but I've never really told anybody about this, because it's not important really, it's just a stupid ... thing.
But I remember from somewhere, the actual sensation of flying. I remember the air feeling not solid like a staircase or something, but like water, the air had texture and if I relaxed and concentrated and assumed I would make that first movement into the air, then I could push off from the floor and swim/glide around the room.
Now I haven't ridden a bicycle in years, but I remember the sensation, the change from being balanced as I slowed down to wobbly off-balance, needing to extend a foot to the ground upon stopping, the easy weight of changing gears, the sudden silent adrenaline push as if I'd slipped through the sound barrier or something ...
Well my memories of flying have that same sensual, tactile truth.
I guess that's the great thing about shared experience. If you've known someone for a long time, your wife, husband, partner, a close friend, you know that when you say, "remember that flock of bluejays walking around that restaurant at Big Sur, and how they would nick a chip, dunk it in ketchup and run away under a bush to swallow it whole," and your partner smiles with recognition? It's a sort of independent verification, yes I'm not crazy, there is a real quantifiable objective world out there where bluejays only like their chips with ketchup, I do have a life.
*
I went to this thing recently.
I was dreading it really, but it turned out to be a wonderful experience, actually quite important to me in a way I can't seem to quantify. I've certainly thought about it several times since. I'm writing a film, and Channel 4 asked me to go to a lab for five days to workshop the script, talk about the future of TV/film in this country, and generally interact. The in-house producers and we invitees were all very different people with very different views, but something about the intensity of the environment, the fact that most people's work was very personal, mine certainly was — a story based around a friend's suicide — something about the communal dinners and the ruthless sense of humour really made me feel connected to these people in a remarkably immediate way. As I say I can't really give the experience any rational, logical substance.
My film is as much about anecdote as anything else, people telling stories, some true, some not so-, so I watched people very closely as they related to each other, and took part in the round table swapping of true-life bizarreness and embarrassing confessionals. Many included bodily functions of one sort or another. Some were just daft. I started to define these people by the stories they told and their reactions to others. I told my current favourite apparently true newspaper story:
So this circus dwarf died recently in a tragic accident during his troupe's act that included jumping off a platform onto a trampoline and up onto another platform, various animals wandered around the edge ... this was sort of a grand finale type of thing. And this dwarf lost his footing slightly and jumped/fell off the platform, bounced on the trampoline, but at the edge so he came off at an angle, flew into the mouth of a hippopotamus which has an automatic swallow reflex, and the dwarf disappeared. The crowd went wild, huge applause, standing ovation ... you know, they thought it was part of the act.
One girl at the table, Louise, a storyboard artist and filmmaker, fell off her chair, tears streaming down her face. She was completely hysterical with laughter, she couldn't breathe. I decided I liked her a lot.
On the third evening, about 2:30 in the morning, after a great pasta salad and coffee cake and wine and a midnight viewing of Being John Malkovich, we started swapping favourite children's television programmes, and golden memories of dreadful shows like Randall and Hopkirk and The Champions — a very common conversation I think. Strange how often these shared memories come up.
There was a pause. There were only four of us still up, the house was silent, the night was dark dark blue, a slight smell of fried onions and garlic from the kitchen.
Louise looked at me and said, "I remember being able to fly."
"Yes," I said.