“Plenty of time for that,” and he climbed up onto the redwood railing that enclosed the deck. He reached up and there was a rope, one end looped around a nail and the other end tied to a tree branch overhanging the canyon. He took the rope, pulled it off the nail, and said, “It’s a swing. You want to go?”
“I’m fine,” I said. I mentioned my bad ankle.
“It’s not dangerous,” he said. “It’s fun,” and with one foot on the redwood railing, he slipped his other foot into a loop at the end of the rope, his hands gripping a knot in the rope. “It’s totally safe,” he said, and then he kind of hopped into the air, cleared the railing, and swung out over the canyon. He yelled something, mid-swing, and then he swung back, landed on the railing, and steadied himself by holding on to the roof of the house. “This will blow your mind,” he said, and he stepped down off the railing and held the rope out to me.
I didn’t take the rope, not at first. And it’s possible I didn’t take it because of an old ankle injury, but it’s also, probably more possible, that I was comfortable where I was and being what I was, and although I didn’t necessarily like what I was, I didn’t want to have to be scared.
But Scott’s enthusiasm was infectious. Since it looked like a high-tech mountain-climbing rope, and since I was ostensibly engaged in participatory journalism, and since I wanted to get an idea of what his life was like, what it was like to be a Steve Martin look-alike, I took the rope. “I’m not going to jump,” I said. “I just want to get a sense, of. .” And he helped me up onto the railing.
As a launching pad it was slightly too narrow. I was having trouble balancing, so Scott held the shin of my left leg. “Put your foot in the loop,” he said, “as a safety precaution. In case you fall.” And I wanted to be safe, so I centered the ball of my right shoe into the rope’s loop. I was standing there, holding the rope, one foot on the two-by-four rail and one foot slightly raised, and because the side of the canyon was steep, I could see that if I swung I’d be swinging out several stories above the canyonside. I don’t know how many feet it was, but quite a few, and I pictured the rope breaking and me falling, and I turned to Scott, ready to abort the whole project, and that’s when he let go of my shin.
I thought I’d been standing on my own, balancing myself just fine, but when he released me, at first I wobbled a bit, and then, because of the weight of the rope, or my own weight, whatever it was, I started to tilt. I started to go, and once I started, I went. I swung out over the edge of the railing, down and out and over the canyon, which fell away below me. And I have to say it was great. The thrill, first of all, that was great, and the view was amazing, and the weightlessness. For a moment, at the top of the arc of my swing, I was absolutely weightless. The trees were below me and the emptiness was below me, and I was floating above them, untethered from everything I knew. And at the same time I was part of everything, and I could see every detail clearly. And the thing was, I seemed to stay up there, taking it all in, longer than normal. And then I swung back.
I swung down into the canyon and up toward the deck, but unlike Scott I didn’t manage to land on the railing, so I swung out again, and this time the view wasn’t as good. I was thinking about the deck, which seemed to be far away, and thinking about the sound of the rope rubbing against the tree, and when I swung back again Scott tried to grab my hand, but because of the way the rope was fastened to the tree, I started twirling around. I started rotating, like the earth rotating on its axis, swinging out over the canyon, catching glimpses of the deck as I rotated, then swinging back to the deck, back and forth like that, until Scott finally reached out to me with the handle of a broom. I was able to grab the end of the handle, and he pulled me back to the relative stability of the deck. It took a few seconds before the swinging in my head gradually subsided, until the rotating slowed and the spinning faded away, and then Scott looked at me.
“Do you feel it?”
I knew what he was talking about. “Yes,” I said, referring to the sense of freedom, and I looked at him, and I started remembering the feeling I’d had a few moments earlier.
“For a second there,” he said, “you almost had it.”
I’d seen the Life of Galileo in a theater not that far from the theater where the play was originally performed in 1947. Ingrid Bergman and Charlie Chaplin and Billy Wilder — along with Brecht, who wrote the play — were all there on opening night, and although reviews at the time were mixed, the play is now part of theater history. Charles Laughton, who worked with Brecht on the translation, played the role of Galileo, and what happened to the famous scientist was, in a way, happening to me.
Galileo had discovered a new way of thinking about the world (that the earth revolved around the sun). However, by proving it, he was seen as undermining the dominant authority (in his case the Catholic church). And that was a problem. In the beginning it wasn’t a huge problem because the pressure on him was to voluntarily change his mind. But Galileo was adamant in his belief, and vocal, and because he was unwilling to disbelieve the facts in front of his eyes, he was put on trial. An inquisition found him guilty of heresy and he was asked to recant. I say “asked,” but the choices they gave him were somewhat limited. Did he want to change his beliefs or did he want to be tortured? It was 1633, and torture hasn’t changed that much, and although he was certainly a great scientist and possibly a great man, he needed a little protection, and the only way he knew to get that protection was to renounce what he knew to be true.
In the play, Galileo is assisted by a young man named Andrea, a prize student who not only assists, but worships Galileo, in the way a son worships a father. When the authorities take Galileo away, Andrea is sure his mentor won’t submit. He’s young and idealistic, and he believes in the power of protest. He believes a person, if necessary, should die for a cause. The play makes it clear that although Galileo practices the austerity of a life of science, he also enjoys his comfort, and in one scene near the end of the play, Andrea visits Galileo in his comfortable cell. At this point, because Galileo has already recanted, Andrea is feeling betrayed. When he confronts his teacher, Galileo just stands there, hands in his pockets, unconcerned or unaware of what seems to Andrea like an unforgivable moral collapse.
“Why did you recant?”
“They showed me the instruments of torture,” Galileo says. For him, it’s not about idealism. It’s about pain. “I don’t like pain.”
And like any son, Andrea wants him to protest. He wants his hero to rage against blindness and dogma, and when he sees that there is no rage, that there’s only resignation in the watery eyes, he takes the love he feels and he tries to extinguish it. And that’s when Galileo gives Andrea the book. He’s been writing his theories in a secret book, called the Discorsi, and he gives the book to Andrea, who smuggles it out of Italy, and with it, alters the course of history.
When I left New York, I left not only the life I’d had, but the social entanglements, and although I didn’t want to replicate those entanglements in Los Angeles, I did want some human contact. So I called Jane, the ex-dancer. I wanted to get to know her better, and as a way to do that, I told her I was writing an article about her neighborhood. I asked if she would want to help, and she said she would, so the next day I drove to her house for an interview. The story was supposed to be about the changing demographic in Echo Park, where she lived, in a stucco house with a big black dog named Rex. She answered the door wearing sweat pants and a faded red T-shirt, and we shook hands. She set me up in her so-called recreation room, on a beanbag chair, looking out to the lemon trees in her backyard. We talked about photography and her camera, and she told me she wasn’t actually interested in cameras, that she’d just been pretending, and that if she wanted a photograph she used the camera in her phone.