Falling by Garrett Soden

 

Source of book: I own this.

 

This was a book I watched for used, because our library system didn’t carry it, for some reason or another. This seems strange, because it seems the sort of book that people would like to read, and well in line with other pop sci cultural things they carry plenty of.

 

Anyway, the book’s subtitle is “How Our Greatest Fear Became Our Greatest Thrill.” So, as one might imagine, the book is about humans taking the fear of falling and making it into a something we do for fun. 

 

[Note: this is the hardback version. The paperback is entitled Defying Gravity.]

 

The book is laid out in an interesting way, with a semi-chronological approach, but also with some chapters discussing more than one topic. In the chronological sense, it starts with the indigenous bungee jumps, first parachuting and acrobatics that included ballistic components, then goes through roller coasters, mountain climbing, wirewalking, and pretty much every sort of “gravity” sport or stunt that has captured the human imagination over the last several hundred years. Since it was written in 2001, it isn’t exactly up to date - Tony Hawk gets more play than Shawn White, for example. (Not that Hawk isn’t a central figure, but that the book ends before the Olympics essential start poaching the various X Games sports.) 

 

The penultimate chapters are interesting because they explore primate evolution and how our experiences as tree-dwellers that eventually made it to land formed our brains in a way that we both fear falling and yet find falling thrilling in its own way. 

 

Soden tells plenty of great stories along the way, stories of the men and women who pushed the boundaries, and how they won popular acclaim and fame. He also looks at the way that our very language incorporates “fall” to mean so many things, including ideas with moral and spiritual significance. This ties in as well to why for every person who engaged in gravity play, there was another who condemned it as immoral. 

 

It’s a fun book, well written and researched, full of information but never boring. 

 

There are some fun passages worth mentioning. As I noted above, the objections to extreme risk weren’t so much the “be careful or you’ll hurt yourself” kind - these were indeed said, but it seemed to be the successful stunts that drew the most ire. Sam Patch, early high diver, was told that he had “incensed God,” to cite just one example.

 

Puritanic condemnation, however, did nothing to counteract the growing popularity of gravity stunts. Quite the opposite. Instead, then as now, those who dared were given an image that increased their appeal. 

 

The image of the gravity hero, though, wouldn’t go away. Instead, that image - a rebel who rises from the masses to confront nature on behalf of the common man - became a powerful and enduring archetype. Since its inception in the eighteenth century, it has shaped the view of virtually every gravity challenger since. It is with us today, updated in our cynical age as antiheroism and embodied in rebellious skateboarders, pot-smoking Olympic snowboarders, and outlaw BASE jumpers. It is with us in nearly every portrayal of an extreme athlete we see. 

 

One of the incidents that I was unaware of was just how brutally the first missionaries to Hawaii suppressed surfing. Unsurprisingly, these missionaries were Calvinists (and of German descent), and looked askance at something both fun and clearly indigenous. 

 

In 1838, W. R. S. Ruschenberger wrote that the missionaries “state these sports to be expressly against the laws of God, and by a succession of reasoning, which may be readily traced, impress upon the minds of the chiefs and others the idea that all who practice them secure themselves the displeasure of offended heaven.”

 

Sigh. If one were to cite a central practice of white “christians,” it would be that they view everything not-white as somehow demonic. In my own childhood, my parents (particularly my mom) decided to follow after charlatans who taught that music with “African” roots was of the devil. I’ve talked about that elsewhere on this blog. But also, break dancing, kachinas, the voodoo magic in The Princess and the Frog (which was apparently better than the European magic in older Disney movies), and, indeed, as I look at the subculture as an outsider now, there is a pattern.

 

Every cultural practice of indigenous peoples was looked on as witchcraft, as a false religion. Which in turn fits with the idea that white culture is God’s favorite - indeed, the only one he finds acceptable. 

 

In the case of surfing, it meant that the sport practically disappeared for a while. Until white people took it up; then it was cool. 

 

One of these men was George Freeth, who in addition to surfing, rescued boats of fishermen - swimming out to do so. He also invented the lifeguard buoy, brought water polo to the US, and laid the groundwork for the surfing craze that would sweep the nation in a few decades. But, alas, he died in the 1919 influenza epidemic, and never saw it. 

 

I found the chapters on neuroscience and evolution to be particularly fascinating. Longtime readers of this blog might remember The Gap by Thomas Suddendorf. That book looked at what separates humans from animals. In this book, some of the similarities and the events that led to the differences are explored in more detail. 

 

In particular, Soden looks at why a ground-bound animal would have two conflicting instincts: one designed to protect us from gravity, and the other urging us to play with it. The answer seems to lie in the fact that we were arboreal in part even after we learned to walk upright. (The book goes into far more detail than I can here. It’s a good read.) 

 

Not only that, but our arboreal experience likely led to specific brain adaptations. 

 

Looked at this way, many of our cherished intellectual abilities are just a fantastic side effect of trying not to fall out of a tree. 

 

Not that everyone agrees that this was a good thing, of course. 

 

This in turn ties into the chapter on rock climbing, and the way that someone who is truly skilled at something can enter an altered state of consciousness - what is sometimes termed the “flow,” or “The Zone.” The book has a great description of this. 

 

Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” to describe the state, and defines it as having eight components: the activity involved is challenging and can be accomplished through skill; it requires complete attention; it has clear goals; it provides immediate feedback; it shuts out all thoughts except those of the moment; it provides a feeling of control; it dissolves inhibiting self-consciousness; and finally, it causes time to seem to expand or contract. “In our studies,” Csikszentmihalyi writes, “we found that every flow activity…had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of-states of consciousness.”

 

I am by no means athletic, but I have experienced this in another situation: when I make music. Particularly as part of a challenging concert, where timing is everything, and there is some risk of messing up, I have felt that expanded consciousness, where time flows at a different rate even as the music stays the same. 

 

One final bit warrants mention. The chapter on how our languages seem to universally use “falling” in a metaphorical sense is quite fascinating. Clearly, like religion and ethics and indeed language itself, there is something inherent in humanity that finds falling to represent so much more than its denotative meaning. The ending of this chapter is too long to quote, but Soden quotes Claude Levi-Strauss (the anthropologist, not the jeans) regarding the mythology of “The Fall.” In the evolutionary sense, our descent from the trees meant not just a change, but a need to confront food scarcity and dangerous predators. In that sense, it was a loss of innocence. 

 

For many years, I have regarded the accounts of the Creation and the Fall in Genesis as metaphorical (it’s blindingly obvious, once you step away from the literalist approach even a tiny bit), so I love all of the different ideas about how that metaphor may have come about - it is in practically every mythology in some form or another. Whether you see it as a metaphor for the switch to agriculture, or for the descent from the trees - or something else entirely - these ways of looking at it never grow old. 

 

I had a lot of fun reading this book, and definitely recommend it.