Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
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The following assortment of notes,
musings, proposals for future consideration, lists, and quotations is by
design doubly open: exposed to the reader, but also subject to revision,
expansion, excision in a way that a traditional written journal (or even
a blog) is not.
The White Diamond 
Werner Herzog's
film about Graham Dorrington's quest to build a highly maneuverable miniature airship for exploring the rain forest canopy made a one-night visit to the Jacob Burns Film Center near here, and I jumped at the chance to see it. I wasn't disappointed. For the first few minutes I wasn't sure. Compared to Timothy Treadwell, the subject of
Grizzly Man, the last Herzog film we saw, Dorrington is a bit of a stiff. A little odd, to be sure, but nowhere near as bonkers or as telegenic as Treadwell. And there were a few minutes of familiar archival footage about man's quest to master the skies, etc. But once the film moved to Guyana, where Dorrington hoped to launch his airship near the magnificent Kaieteur Falls, the film took off. And so did the balloon, after a few mishaps. Some favorite bits: the airship touching gently down on a slow-moving river, then spinning gracefully in circles on the surface, a moment Herzog made even more special by shifting the camera's eye from the ship to its reflection in the waters, making it appear to be some kind of whirling white submarine; the prodigious flocks of swifts, returning by the thousands to their concealed and inaccessible roost behind the great waterfall (“the secret kingdom of the swifts,” as Herzog calls it); and every second that featured the sublime Mark Anthony Yhap, a Guyanese hired hand whose imperturbability, good humor, and down-to-earth eloquence (and affection for his pet rooster) attracted the filmmaker's attention as much as any of the aeronautic goings-on that were the film's ostensible subject. The White Diamond made even this aerophobe feel a bit of a longing to be aloft. The film evokes what a lighter-than-air flight must feel like in a scene in which Dorrington, newly returned to earth from soaring a few feet above the trees, breathlessly reports that he can still feel himself flying. Airship travel can lead to disaster, of course — an earlier project of Dorrington's led to the death of a cinematographer — but somehow the idea of being carried gently aloft by a globe of helium seems less disturbing than being propelled through the skies in a heavier-than-air plane. As the archival footage reminds us, zeppelins were once considered better suited to passenger travel than airplanes. The Hindenburg ended that, of course, but the flaw there was the flammable hydrogen, not the principle of buoyant flight itself, which, at least to my nervous mind, has definite advantages. (Project for some other day: airships and balloons in literature, from Jules Verne to Guy Davenport's “A Field of Snow on the Slopes of the Rosenberg” to Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. And don't forget the airship postage stamps painted by Donald Evans for the mythical nation of Achterdijk.) December 3, 2005
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