Yesterday I heard on the BBC that the Indian government conducted some ceremonies to mark the 150 th anniversary of the 1857 mutiny. By coincidence, the other day I was reading a book called “A Sahib remembers” which is a collection of interesting anecdotes and commentaries about the days of the British Raj. One of them was about the blowing up of the Delhi Magazine during the Mutiny. The Indian Mutineers had surrounded the Magazine, which contained a vast amount of weaponry and gunpowder, and was guarded by some British soldiers. The latter decided to blow the place rather than surrender, given the vital importance of that arsenal . Of course, that meant they would be killed on the spot.

Amazingly though, it seems that some of the British soldiers did survive the explosion. If I do remember well, one of them was picked up by a friendly Sikh soldier who hid him in his village for the rest of the Mutiny.

This morning, thinking back of the news about this ceremony in India , I was led to thoughts quite far removed from the politics and warfare of that period- I was thinking of that British soldier who survived what must have been a huge explosion. I was fascinated by the image of that man, probably in the redcoat uniform of the British Army of those days, flying up against the blue sky, his legs spinning as if he was pushing the pedals of an invisible flying bicycle. The cartoonish humour of it – the comical movement of his legs, looking for ground to tread on, he looking punily human against the vastness of the sky, that impression emphasised by his old fashioned uniform, all brass buttons and regimental insignias, a mere mortal visiting for a moment the domain of the gods, only to be punished the moment after by the fall back to the ground.

The image is funny yet one also feels some envy for him, as for all those who take to the skies, even for a brief moment. Of course we do fly nowadays, but in different manners, about which I guess there is a scale of disappointment corresponding to the degree of distance from what would be ideal flying. Lowest on that scale would be commercial flying, which is basically sitting in a narrow seat, flipping through magazines in a sort of train which happens to glide up high in the air rather than go on a railtrack. Much better is what one sees audacious people doing with delta planes, these big flying sail contraptions which take off from mountain slopes. They maneuver them with some levers by which they guide the sail up and down prevailing winds, and from what I have seen them do on television, it seems the more adept ones practice what is the nearest humanly possible form of ideal flying.

The latter being flying such as we do in dreams : soaring up from the ground simply because you feel like it. In my case, I will occasionally , in the middle of a dream, realise that I am not subject to gravity and I will then slowly rise. I am aware, during the dream, that this is due to some special “technique” which I must master. There is some “lifting power” which enables me to go up, and it usually emanates from the palms of my hands. I must let go of the fear of falling, and then I go up, avoiding the tree branches and electric cables. At some point, usually a bit over the rooftops, I feel vertigo, and am afraid to rise further. I then try to move forward, but for some reason, it is pretty laborious. People are watching me, with amusement or annoyance rather than amazement. Sometimes they point at me and it seems they want to tell me to get down now.

Their annoyance I guess would come from the fact that they feel I am doing something reserved to a special few, normally saints and prophets: The Virgin Mary carried by angels , Prophet Muhammad on the Borak Mare, Elijah on his ladder, Saint Anthony on his pig. Or superheroes, our modern gods: Superman, Flame On, Iron Man (1).

Flying in a machine, on the other hand, does not bring about that idea of sacrilege. It is understood that flying this way is more like driving, and is usually even more cautious and rule based than driving a car. It is acknowledged to be the very serious business of steering an intensely serious looking piece of machinery.

In his anime works, Miyazaki constantly invents flying machines which correspond more to what, in our subconscious, flying machines ought to have been.

To begin with, they often have flapping or vibrating wings, like those of birds or insects. Airplanes strike us as being boringly machine-like because they have those static wings, jet engines being the worse, because at least turbo propeller airplanes have those fast moving propellers which make them look a bit insect like. His machines seem to be consciously doing the effort of swimming through the air. Even the huge evil looking bombers in “Howl's Moving Castle” have a row of slowly flapping winglets on either side. Real airplanes look like huge pieces of metal which hang in the air as if they negated it. One almost feels annoyed with scientists for inventing a piece of machinery which so completely defies common sense. ( In a post in December, I think, or maybe November , I have written about the discomfort we feel about scientific revolutions , because they tell us things which simply do not make sense- that the earth is round, that it is not the centre of the world, that we descend from apes, that a particle can be in two points in space at the same time, that the act of observing a phenomenon affects its behaviour)

Also, Miyazaki’s flying machines are often insanely maneuvrable , such as the dragonfly –like small airplanes of “Howl”, which even zip through the air with a buzzing insect sound. This is what flying a small airplane should have been like, an intensely fun roller coaster experience, instead of being so much about watching dials and checking coordinates.

Finally, they are not deadly. In the few Miyazaki anime I have seen, nobody ever gets killed from an airplane crash. If damaged, his airplanes simply zig zag down to the ground with a hurt sound. A real-world airplane, if damaged, plummets to the ground with merciless force, the speed with which it crashes down being revelatory of how profoundly alien to its aerial element it actually was. It is basically a sort of car engine which has been made to fly by some trick of playing with air lift.

Such is our destiny. Unfortunately, we are not a flying species, except maybe for some of our saints and prophets. Or maybe some of our deltaplane flyers. But I don’t know if even they can experience the lightness of being which ideal flying would be about.

Not even that British soldier was able to experience this blissful feeling: I have just checked about him in “A Sahib Remembers” ( by P.J.O. Taylor, by the way). His name was Raynor and he and his wife were standing under the one of the rare arches which did not fall down under the huge explosion, which was heard thirty kilometres away in Meerut. Both were uninjured and were helped through the rest of the Mutiny by friendly Indians.

Well, at least miracles do happen.

(1) Batman does not fly, but then he is a pretty special kind of superhero. He represents our wish to swallow a pill of evil, so that we could take revenge on those who oppress us – the child’s fantasy of becoming a big, fearsome man who will terrify the schoolyard bully. He is Night, but a Night in which we have become the bogeyman, that most earthlike of our frights, with his heavy steps, his rough, hairy hands and dark, unknowable face. The immense arsenal of weapons he hides under his mansion, those massively built, overweaponised cars and airplanes he rides in represent a wish to subdue Matter, so that we may fight back at Its grotesque, hostile manifestations ( the Joker, with his stiffened face and poisons, is a Troll of Matter). But, by virtue of his intimate contact with Matter, Batman cannot fly, for this is the attribute of the Spirit. He can only briefly hover and swing by the means of strong, steely wires ended with fierce looking hooks which grasp at Matter like sharp, precise claws.