Birds of Paradise, Night Flight edition

In the apologia for the LAPD’s helicopter program, The Responder alludes to a certain irreducibly experiential or first-personal dimension of flight that is critical for understanding the purpose of LAPD’s Air Support Division. Our goal in this and in other occasions of this “birds of paradise” series is to attempt to make out what this might be.

The Responder mentions in particular The Fly-Along as a privileged means for discovering the rationale for a fleet of helicopters flying, 60% of the time, for purposes having nothing to do with public safety, and, for the other 40% of the time, attempting but failing to improve public safety.

What is the nature of The Fly-Along such that it should reveal the need for such willfully tragic endeavor? Call the content of such an experience The Encounter. What does The Encounter reveal to the passenger? What is its mode of presentation?

These are our questions.

Night Flight

There are at least two advantages to reading Night Flight for our purposes.

The first is that there is significantly less (which, perhaps, is not to say no) mystique attached to planes and to flying today than there was when Night Flight was published in 1931. In the 1930s, about 0.5–.1% of the world’s population flew on planes; today that figure has increased a hundredfold. So, as readers, we are less likely to be moved by the passions surrounding flight exhibited by Night Flight’s characters and narrator; less likely to be distracted, as it were, from our mission.

At the same time, precisely because flight enjoys the sort of mystique it does around the time that Saint-Exupéry wrote Night Flight, the book offers, without shame or embarrassment, a perspective on the magic of The Encounter that The Responder alludes to—an experience that is wholly unlike any experience we might have on the ground; an experience that reveals new perspectives, new realities; an experience that calls us to be in certain new ways.

For these reasons, perhaps Night Flight will serve as a surrogate for discerning, in a clear way, the nature of The Encounter to us (a cheap surrogate, no doubt; presumably there is no substitute for The Encounter itself, or The Responder would have revealed as much to us in The Response).

Reading Night Flight

Now, for all that, Night Flight is about delivering the mail. Saint-Exupéry’s poetically told novel about the professional, personal, moral, and emotional challenges of delivering the mail across the Andes was wildly successful when it was released—but it is about delivering the mail.

I think it’s important to remember this about every half-page or so, because the narrator seems to have, not only a different relation to flight, but a different relation to the mail, and it’s easy to get lost in our own conceits. At one point, for example, a wife admires her husband’s (a pilot’s) arms for the reason that those very arms would “decide the fortune of the Europe mail” (46)—and I don’t think we’re supposed to laugh at this, much as it is pretty difficult not to. I think we’re supposed to be moved.

Maybe this is our first lesson. Preparing yourself for Night Flight may be perhaps analogous to some ritual preparation for The Fly-Along that The Responder ellides: We have to steel ourselves against the temptation to be distracted by simple-minded ideas about the wanton violence and destruction the LAPD doles out in the name of public safety, or about the relative insignificance of the mail. We can’t let ourselves be distracted by the fact that being in a plane is like being on earth, only you’re a few hundred or thousand feet up.

Of course the mail is important, by the way (maybe so important you shouldn’t send it into harm’s way), but the goal of the protagonists of Night Flight is not to deliver the mail, but to deliver the mail on time, come what may (including, for example, a cyclone, which kills a pilot in Night Flight). It is significant that at one point the protagonist wonders whether getting mail delivered on time is worth a pilot’s life (kind of a silly question here for him; he has effectively already answered ‘yes’; one of his pilots is dead . . . for the mail; also all that mail is gone), and, rather than constructing anything like a good answer, he muses that you can’t just live for love; that’s for earth people, “the people of the little towns” that they fly over, who enjoy a pathetic “form of happiness” he regards as like “shackles” (65–6). So, yeah, goes the conclusion: Kill a pilot if you have to; then, I guess, at least you win your other-kind-of-happiness badge or whatever; then you’re not one of those little people in the little towns.

This bizarre attitude might be exactly the right one to adopt, or to attempt to adopt, in order to appreciate Night Flight as capturing the nature of The Encounter. For example, it is important not to allow ourselves to reflect that, from the ground, it is the pilots who appear to be very small (in fact, who are usually invisible) in their little planes in the sky. The right attitude is to feel that only people in the towns below, here on Earth, are small. The pilots are big. Perhaps an important part of The Encounter is simply (although this would be silly, so it couldn’t be it, right?) the illusion of being so big while everyone else is so small; the sort of illusion only a child could truly sustain for any meaningful interval.

Although maybe that is precisely what The Encounter is: an experience of flight through the eyes of a child. If only Mejia (the LA City Controller) had done The Fly-Along with the mindset of a toddler. Then he would know why the city spends millions of dollars flying helicopters around without any research-based justification.

Alienation, transcendence, and conquest

A few complementary motifs recur in Night Flight’s descriptions of the experience of flight:

• Alienation: The pilot experiences himself (obviously we’re only talking men in Night Flight) as apart from other human beings.
• Transcendence: The pilot himself is super-human or un-human.
• Conquest: The pilot conquers those he flies over.

Note, for example, in this early description, how “man” is referred to third-personally, as if the pilot himself were not of man; and see also how the pilot is described (and not only here) as a conqueror:

All that endeared his life to man was looming to meet him; men’s houses, friendly little cafés, trees under which they walk. He was like some conqueror who, in the aftermath of victory, bends down upon his territories and now perceives the humble happiness of men. (10)

I had the experience the other day of imagining a book very like Night Flight. It told just about the exact same story: Rivière manages an air mail fleet; there is a cyclone; the pilots Pellerin and Fabian fly in it; Fabian dies; their wives provide perspective and domestic contrasts; Robineau, the inspector, and a handful of clerks serve as Rivère’s conscience, or its sounding board; everything, in other words, is the same.

But the difference, in this version of Night Flight, is you remove all mention of anything having to do with the self-image as conqueror. Instead, you add one scene, as absolutely close to the end as possible, in which any of the male characters, perhaps a little sauced, angry-cries to his wife, and, speaking of Fabian (now dead), utters: “Damn it all, Ruthie, he was a conqueror.” You reveal the silliness of the pilot’s self-image but you’ve so packaged it in the pathos of the moment that your reader receives it amicably, generously. You sell it.

Night Flight is not that book. It is calling pilots “conquerors” two pages in. There is no selling. The metaphor persists; it is never meant in any way but earnestly; Night Flight is not joking about it. Of course, Night Flight was wildly successful, so audiences were prepared in 1931 to accept it (perhaps they still are? The Responder would likely be happy to know).

But perhaps that success depended precisely on the alienation that audience and writer experience with respect to each other in this instance. As he contemplates the lowly status of non-mail-deliverers, at one point, Rivière thinks: “Tonight, with my two air mails on their way, I am responsible for all the sky. That star up there is a sign that is looking for me amongst this crowd—and finds me” (37). Perhaps readers are thrilled that such superhumans, who converse with stars, “with [their] two air mails on the way” and everything, walk among them. But how are we to sympathize with their superhuman experience?

Flight and feeling

I think one of the key background ideas, which lurks as it were beneath the conquering surface, is an emotional turmoil—one that the pilots feel most obviously, and that Rivière, the director of the Patagonia mail service, experiences less obviously at the beginning of the book, and more obviously when one of his pilots is in peril.

Some of that turmoil, or a quotient of the pilot’s condition for undergoing it, is perhaps expressed in descriptions of the pilot-plane relation. Saint-Exupéry writes that “the pilot in full flight experienced neither giddiness nor any thrill; only the mystery of metal turned to living flesh” (12). Perhaps one dimension of the anguish of pilot-being is the transformation of not only occupying these beasts of “living flesh,” but becoming hybrid creatures of man and steel, extending themselves into the sky as if with wings of metal. Surely that would not be without its affective expenses.

In another instance, when Pellerin wants to tell others about his flight, he exclaims: “If only you knew . . . !” which to his mind “summed it up” (18). What was it he ellided? What could he not tell the others? A tangle of hard emotion, for one thing. He’s “sad” in recalling it, but in the experience of the flight it had been “anger,” “oozing from the stones, sweating from the snow” beneath him (19). There “an inexplicable anguish gripped his heart”: “Something he did not understand was on its way and he tautened his muscles, like a beast about to spring.” What else could Pellerin not tell the others?

Perhaps that, for all that anguish, “as far as eye could see, all was peace. Peaceful, yes, but tense with some potency” (ibid.). Then a storm—an actual storm of things, in this case, a cyclone—hits him. Perhaps what Pellerin could not tell them, what they could not know, was how the turmoil of his emotions and the calm of the atmosphere were different.

Similarly, in the climax of the novel, a pilot climbs above the clouds of a storm, and there “the pilot found a peace that passed his understanding” (71). Calm drives a pilot to anguish; storm moves a pilot to calm. The turmoils of pilot-emotion seem to be opposite the attitudes of their surroundings. Perhaps the world from above is not only smaller but affectively inverted.

Below, Los Angeles is a town of quiet hovels and small minds. Above, superhuman pilots squirm in angst. Below, Los Angeles is a hellscape. Above, the LAPD are at peace.

This state of inversion feeds, of course, on the alienation of pilot-being. Such is Rivière’s alienation from us earth-bound folk, who are so obsessed with our bandstands, for example, that he forgets we have, you know, feelings, too.

It came to him [Rivière] that the little people of these little towns, strolling around their bandstands, might seem to lead a placid life and yet it had its tragedies; illness, love, bereavements, and that perhaps—His own trouble was teaching him many things, “opening windows,” as he put it to himself. (36–7)

Love and duty

In a sense, the real story of Night Flight isn’t about flight (inevitably); it’s about duty, duty other than the usual duty for the bandstand folk; a form of communal obligation that is extreme, but neither religious nor political (nor moral, I think). Like war, flight seems to wrap people together in the brace of danger, and the particular sort of binds Rivière encourages, mirror-like, are uncompromising ones. In that way, whereas the pilots represent the husk of the operation (delivering the mail), Robineau, the inspector, represents the kernel.

To the extent that “love” is used throughout as a principle of contrast to the world of air mail, the narrator’s odd observation that inspectors “are not made for love and such delights, only for drawing up reports” (23) situates Robineau at the affective core of the operation. Robineau has no sense of measure when it comes to rules. He feels “a thrill of pride” when Rivière issues a particularly hardnosed rule encouraging pilots to leave on time, even if conditions are bad (24).

But Rivière—perhaps unlike the loveless Robineau—doesn’t simply have a fetish for rules and orders. He thinks constantly about their rationale. He lives as it were in both worlds.

The orders, thought Rivière, are like the rites of a religion; they may look absurd but they shape men in their mold. It was no concern to Rivière whether he seemed just or unjust. Perhaps the words were meaningless to him. The little townsfolk of the little towns promenade each evening round a bandstand and Rivière thought: It’s nonsense to talk of being just or unjust toward them; they don’t exist. (25)

These are potent lines to consider in reference to The Responder’s call. Perhaps one thing we “little townsfolk” miss, who “don’t exist” but also “promenade each evening round a bandstand,” is that justice and injustice present differently in the sky, or in the sky-life generally. (Rivière himself does not fly in Night Flight, but his life is sky-adjacent.)

(Although, I wonder, maybe too simplistically: Is Rivière’s life not any more sky-adjacent than yours or mine? living as we all do . . . on the ground, which is just next to the sky? Actually, isn’t the sky the very thing we all move and breathe in, so that, in actual fact, we all live in the sky but just next to the ground? But the pilots fly very far up. Then perhaps it’s not a matter of an opposition between us and the pilots. Perhaps they experience all that we do, too, only at a certain intensity. Perhaps it is this intensity of being at such a distance from the ground that The Fly-Along reveals.)

Later Rivière reflects:

Am I just or unjust? I’ve no idea. All I know is that when I hit hard there are fewer accidents. It isn’t the individual that’s responsible but a sort of hidden force and I can’t get at it without—getting at every one! If I were merely just, every night flight would mean a risk of death. (41–2)

Here note that it isn’t simply justice turned up a few notches that Rivière imposes. And it isn’t a reduction of harm that is at the other side of “hit[ting] hard”; it’s fewer accidents. It is something else (everything in this world is something else), something other than justice; a sort of severity-first principle. Perhaps the need for austere, morally neutral, efficiency-forward principles is part of the revelation of The Encounter. Perhaps this is what The Fly-Along would teach us. If only there were five billion dollars for all Angelenos to receive this wisdom. Alas . . . .

Two peoples separated by nothing at all

Night Flight itself might be seen as an effort—intentional, unintentional, doesn’t matter—to collapse the very separation between the world of the pilot from that of the bandstand. As Rivière muses: “We must do away with mystery. Men who have gone down into the pit of darkness must come up and say—there’s nothing in it!” (51). Night Flight itself is not particularly rich with the sort of technical details typical of the they’re-just-like-us genre, but it spends every dime it has on making the pilot’s experience translucent to the reader.

Among the tensions that comprise that experience is a tension at the heart of how land is conceptualized. From the comforts of safe flight, the land is a thing that is conquered (merely by passing over it, apparently). On the land roam odd beings who walk in circles around bandshells performing strange Saturday night rituals. But when Fabien, the doomed pilot, is in trouble, suddenly the land is a beacon of safety, a redeemer, a home. In describing this moment, Saint-Exupéry seems desperate to squeeze every last bit of juice he can out of a metaphor of light—light being the surface of the land, of course—before, damn it all, he relents: “Fabien pictured the dawn as a beach of golden sand,” writes Saint Exupéry, “where a man might get a foothold after this hard night. Beneath him”—not the sun but—“the plains, like friendly shores, would spread their safety. The quiet land would bear its sleeping farms and flocks and hills. And all the flotsam swirling in the shadows would lose its menace” (56; my emphases). The pilots must come down to earth, of course, if they are to continue to be pilots. Earth-life is a condition of sky-life. However much they pass their time in the sky, they live and sleep and love here on earth. Perhaps this is the tragic fact that drives The Responder and his or her ilk to the helicoptering life: It is escape, but only for a while.

Toward the end of the book, the earthly reality of a dead pilot (his plane descending offstage, as it were), and now the earthly mourning of his widow, begin not only to eclipse but to swallow the putatively other world of flight. Rivière, somehow, heroically cultivates sympathy for Fabien’s wife.

This woman, too, was championing a self-coherent world with its own rights and duties, that world where a lamp shines at nightfall on the table, flesh calls to mated flesh, a homely world of love and hopes and memories. She stood up for her happiness, and she was right. And Rivière, too, was right, yet he found no words to set against this woman. He was discovering the truth within him, his own inhuman and unutterable truth, by an humble light, the lamp light of a little home! (64)

Finally, in a provocative description, Saint-Exupéry describes the wife of the dead pilot “fallen, or so it seemed to [Rivière], almost at his feet” (ibid.; my emphasis). Here the pretension of other worlds, other ways of being, vanishes, even for the narrator, who has all along entertained the pilots’ conqueror-illusion. Here at last the conqueror’s reality is revealed merely as a mode of appearance of, or of imagination about, the reality we all know—in which partners weep for each other to the point of falling to the ground—tuned to the ridiculous self-conception of the pilot as a god.

A woman cascades to the floor in desperate grief. Rivière sees a supplicant, hears a begging moan. Pretty weird.

Of course, the pilot’s ideal, as it were, might seem to be a landless existence, and failing an eternal such existence (but gods can dream too), a death in the clouds. It’s interesting in the end, however, that Fabien, just before he dies (offstage, without description, perhaps resisting description), loses the distinction of land and sky: “[F]or the masses of sky and land outside were not to be distinguished, lost both alike in a welter as of worlds in the making” (68). When the pilot goes, so too does the distinction.

Conclusions

What have we learned?

Let’s assume Saint-Exupéry’s description of pilot-being is apt for the helicopter-people of the LAPD. We know then that they must be unlike us, perhaps like gods. We know that they must struggle with this difference, feeling on occasions of weakness and suffering that it might approach similarity or identity, as if they were just humans, just ‘bandstanders’ like the rest of us.

We know they see themselves as our conquerors—notably, however, lacking the customary benevolence of conquerors; enjoying sympathy only at the cost of immense intellectual strain.

We know the ordeal of flight is emotionally challenging, a turmoil; that these emotional challenges are the inverse of conditions here on earth. Perhaps it is as explorers of these alien dimensions of affection that LAPD’s helicopter-people sally forth into the sky—sally up, rather. Perhaps their purpose is scientific.

We know the flight-to-ground network (the helipad perhaps is a liminal space, a ground-for-flight, just as the ground crews of LAPD’s Air Support Division are messengers come to the ground from the sky) lives by a code that is not stringently moral but stringent in ways that exceed recognizably moral frameworks. The Network is first of all The Rules, and only secondly the people, or demi-people, as the case may be.

Conceiving of such things stretches the imagination, to be sure. This may be simply a consequence of the limitations of the ‘bandstander’ way of life that is admittedly my own. In any event, I’m not prepared to say I have fully grasped the nature of The Encounter with Night Flight as my guide. There is much to consider here, but much remains beyond my reach.

Text

Night Flight was translated by none other than Stuart Gilbert for Mariner Books Classics in 1974. Here it is.