Skip to main content

Hope is the thing with fire. And fueltanks.

Sorry, Ms Dickinson, it's not the thing with feathers.


The BBC did a lil video on an amateur jetpack enthusiast. It's kind of...sad how hard he's trying. And how much time he's probably put into this. But it's also a bit, um, uplifting? {choke, snorkle, guffaw}

The video feels like some metaphor. Like when the dude is walking along carrying his latest jetpack monster on his back as the reporter walks along side--like, literally dogging his footsteps--spewing raw realism about how implausible and impractical jetpacks are in real life.

And then when he's trying to fly it. All tethered up and stuff. And the reporter's kind of standing there--as, apparently, a counterweight. Oh, he took a step back. Slightly less slack in that rope now.

Am I the only one who had the impression the only person in the video actually giving two shits about this guys lil project is the guy himself? It's like everyone else is kind of there to gawk, "Wow, this nutter's for real."

And then his line at the end, after the thoroughly anticlimactic "test flight", "Yeah, we got a few inches off the ground there, but what we probably plan on doing is just going higher and higher and higher and higher and higher and higher.".

That's more than a little heartbreaking, isn't it? Just from the video you can see he's got no control of his flight, really--he keeps spinning this way and that, though moving a little farther forward.

But, interestingly, he's still got hope. Or at least some practical sense of "higher is progress...farther is progress...". I suppose you could call it "certainty", however absurd it is.

Indeed he doesn't have the manic demeanor of your usual hope junkie; no, he's calm and unfazed. Also, he seems genuinely, however very slightly, happy with the result of the flight. Again, in a very practical way. "It works."

Perhaps this is the only kind of viable hope there is. Something so rudimentarily realistic, so fundamentally practical, that there really can't be any disappointment. At least nothing like the pure hope junkie has when the crash inevitably hits. Instead, he has contentment if it works or a reasonable understanding of where to go if it doesn't.

This guy really is like a trick-or-treat bag of metaphor. "he doesn't soar miles above the ground; he only hovers a few inches" "not even the weight of his dreams can hold him down when reality declares itself" It's kind of too easy, so I'll quit while I'm ahead and this post isn't too monstrous.

I will say one last thing. In contrast to what you might usually hear--"Sometimes you just have to lower your expectations"--this guy doesn't seem to have resigned to this point of view. It seems he reached it objectively, by way of realism, if an optimistic realism, rather than wild, uninhibited fantasy.

Perhaps he did, as a boy, dream or make-believe he was jetpacking through the night sky. But nowadays he seems to have adopted the sort of goals befitting an engineer--practical, realistic, hopeful, unfanciful. And it seems it might even bring him some modicum of joy in life. Imagine that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Or just tell me what you think.

Other things that might interest you...

On aging, and fear.

To begin with, I’m not sure you’re aware of it, but I’m middle aged. Oh? What gave it away? Using a blog as my primary literary medium?¹ Hm. But in fact, the APA defines 35 years as the end of “young adulthood.” Yeah. I found out via some shitpost on twitter when I was already 35, so it didn’t sit well with me then either. But my worries about aging began much sooner than that. See, even in my 20s, I feared I’d been wasting my life. I’d struggled with school and life and everything since graduating high school, arguably sooner, and nothing seemed to be going anywhere meaningful . I felt I had a limited social life, a dead-end job, no money, no great travels, a limping love life; I was, generally, a loser, wasting away... There were none of the usual hallmarks of success or happiness. And that scared me. Would my life have been worth it if I continued in this direction? Would it have been a “life well lived” by the end? So, this is my existential struggle. Even now, as I lurch ever nea...

Changing lanes.

I was driving home in some traffic last night when I drifted, in my mind, a long way back (about 20 years) to high school. I was caught in one of those periodic traffic slowdowns as I floated back; you know, those waves of congestion that seem to pass backward through the columns of cars in each lane. (I've heard they start because someone switches lanes, and in response, a rippling emergent slowness travels backward and outward as the cars behind it accommodate the change, one by one.) What drew me back to those younger days was that, back in high school, similar phenomena of congestion took place in the halls between classes, when eddies of young humans would get caught in and around those clumps of those chatting by lockers or retrieving books. Occasionally, backups would occur when groups of people got caught in these eddies, or collided with other groups by the lockers, and slowdowns would ripple back from there. Maybe it's not exactly the same, but as I drove it seemed si...

Oatmeal is tasty.

{slurps up berry-oatmeal-deliciousness} Indeed. I need to work on rebuilding a morning schedule. I can be zombie-like enough that I'll waste a perfectly good morning, and have often slept through many. And, really, it's such a useful time of day.