by Kristin Kostick

You’re about to jump from the ledge of the 689-foot Montparnasse Tower in Paris. You have not been threatened, have not lost a bet. The cold steel tip of a revolver is not pressed against your temple. From the perspective of the 40-some-odd Japanese tourists sharing the terrasse d’observation, it looks like you might be trying to kill yourself. A siren wails somewhere far off. You’ve left a note in your bedroom for no one in particular, to clear up any confusion:

“I have gone to jump off the Montparnasse Tower. I am making this jump of my own free will and only because I think it will be exciting and fun.”

If you are Jevto Dedijer, this is your “B,” the first of four types of jumps needed to earn your BASE (Building, Antenna, Span, Earth) jumping number in what has been called the “Idiot’s Club,” a group of so-called adrenaline junkies with a tragically dwindling membership. If you are Jevto Dedijer, you will be one of only 900 people in the world to have completed all four. Consider this in comparison to the number of people who have visited space (499), climbed Mount Everest (1,500), or deep-sea dived to a depth of 800 feet (12). Most non-BASE jumpers equate jumpers’ motivations to those of an addict’s—the leap from a bridge a mere burst of opiates from the needle tip into the vein’s soft, lapping shore. Every new jump must take you higher than the one before to keep the buzz, to feel anything at all.

But if you’re a writer, you understand that BASE jumpers do it for an entirely different reason. Sure, for Dedijer, it’s exciting and fun. But it’s not that fun in the moments leading up to the act. In fact, it seems downright miserable. The wind is whipping around your ears, your entire trembling skeleton is telling you, “Don’t jump.” You are trapped in your own body, with a set of epically dueling minds; one is terrified and wants to go home and cower under a blanket; the other knows you are better than that, knows you are more alive than that, and knows the “real you” can man-up.

Then, suddenly, a calmness sets in, when you know you have reached that sweet spot at the intersection of confrontation and acceptance. It washes over you like a cool wind. “To say you’re calm just before running off a 3,000-foot cliff sounds like madness,” says Shaun Ellison, who jumped from the Beak, a cliff on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic—one of the biggest BASE-jumping challenges in existence. “But it isn’t. I was opening myself up to the environment, to nature, to the energy around me. It felt incredibly peaceful.” Another famous jumper, Dean Potter, says “When I’m jumping, climbing, or high-lining, it’s as truthful as I can be.” What he’s seeking, he says, “is to break free from all my attachments.”

Hark, writers, hark. It’s not just BASE jumpers who are in the business of truth-seeking and detachment. Writers from Graham Greene to John Steinbeck to Virginia Woolf have said they can’t write truthfully about a situation until they have traveled far enough into it, through it, and away from it, to finally arrive at the experience’s opposite, dryer bank. From there, you can finally see not only real story, but also the distinction between the “you” who experienced it, and the “you” who now understands its significance. Which is the realer you? Finding the “authentic self”—or what Vivian Gornick (based on Willa Cather’s writings in the 1930s) might have called ‘the inviolable self”—what’s left at the core when you sweep away all the surrounding debris, is what good writing is all about. In The Situation and the Story, Gornick argues that unearthing the real story beneath the forthright details of a situation requires a level of soul-searching more often discussed in the annals of psychoanalysis than of literature. The ability to arrive at what Gornick calls the “murderous truth-speaking voice” becomes an exercise in self-investigation, interior depth-diving, breaking out the rubber fins and compression suits and getting down—and I’m talking past 800 feet down—to business.

It’s no easy expedition. Just as the interior monologue of the BASE jumper as he or she climbs  toward whatever precipice they say they’re going to jump from is a steady stream of doubts, discouragements, talkings-of-oneself-out-of-it, writers, too, constantly talk themselves down from the ledge. The ledge in this case is the craggy, unsteady foothold over the sheer downward drop, the scary perch from where we see for miles and miles in every direction with unprecedented clarity—our personal future, past, present—where our senses are heightened and we sniff out the sharp uncalculated truth of ourselves, unmarred by the clutter of sundry self-defenses, that painful place of seeing that has over the centuries driven shamans mad on isolated outskirts of their villages, brought men and women on their death beds to reflection, sparked wildfire in the minds of people who suddenly decide to change directions in life. The pain is a good pain, we hope, because it signals the real-ness behind that view, the muscle-clenching, expanded-capillary, adrenaline buzz of confronting the story’s essential humanity. “It’s the ‘something’ we call our real selves,” Gornick says, “the ‘I’ the existentialists had in mind when they spoke of ‘becoming,’ the one that in our time is called authentic.”

Climber David Breashears says the same thing happens during extreme mountain climbing expeditions. “The idea is that all the artifice that we carry with us in life, the persona that we project—all that’s stripped away at altitude. Thin air, hypoxia—people are tremendously sleep-deprived on Everest,” he says in an interview with National Geographic. “They’re incredibly exhausted, and they’re hungry and dehydrated. They are in a very altered state. And then at a moment of great vulnerability, a storm hits. At that moment you become the person you are. You are no longer capable of mustering all this artifice.”

In other words, it takes a ledge, a mountaintop, the shifty terrain of our own internal cliffsides to get to that place where artifice clears and you can see the story—which is to say, yourself—for what it is. That’s scary stuff.

The problem is that when you get scared, you screw things up. Parachutes get tangled. You forget all your Clif Bars on the kitchen counter, find yourself shaking with hunger and fear, staring 600 feet down at a rocky, unforgiving canyon. “Most accidents happen because people are scared,” BASE jumper Ellison points out. “Their body position is wrong, they’re panicking, they open the parachute early. You’ve got to fight your demons to the point that when you exit, you’re calm.” The writer’s equivalent is avoiding writing the story we really want to tell, maybe because we don’t know how or we can’t find the right vantage or foothold, or the words just won’t come and we have no idea where to look for them. We find ourselves perpetually skirting above the story, scared to dig our heels in or lean into the void.

But, like any other psychoanalytic project, you do it—not by forgetting your fears or anxieties about jumping, but by controlling and repositioning them, the act of which is the very parachute that’s going to get you to the canyon floor unscathed. “The idea,” Dedijer explains, is “to learn to control my body during freefall. The faster you fall, the easier it is to execute precise movements in freefall. The faster a person can freefall in a face-to-earth position is 120 miles per hour, which is reached after 12 seconds. It is possible to fall faster, but in a different position: with the head down, arms alongside the body, and legs together, a speed of 250 miles per hour can be reached.”

Thoreau, too, points out that birds fly faster with their wings closed, tucking everything inward for the time it takes to get from point A to B. This is how you get it done, tuck everything inward, fly fast, go deep toward that “truth-speaking voice” that keeps us writing, keeps people reading our work. And when you get there, “if you stand right-fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces,” Thoreau says, “as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality.” That’s the key to BASE jumping, Ellison tells us, “to learn how to be on that plane in freefall, to stay in that beautiful place,” even if it feels like you’re jumping into oblivion.

 

 

CC image of BASE jumpers jumping off KL Tower in Kuala Lumper, Malaysia courtesy of AndyLawson on Flickr.