"The soul burns out the eyes."

I'm no stranger to peculiar feelings. Lately, I've been feeling like I could jump and then soar out over the the streets and buildings. This feeling has kept me far from the edges of roofs and the railings on balconies; it's not that I want to jump, I just don't trust myself with the temptation to soar. This feeling of soaring has been around for a while, but has been amplified after I read an essay by Rebecca Solnit.

In her essay she writes about the artist Yves Klein, a man "...who was obsessed with flight, levitation, and immateriality as well as the sky and the color blue that signified it..." He was interested in judo because of how it teaches its students to fly through the air. But the image that keeps floating through my head is a description of one of his photographs where he is leaping upward, "as though he need not land, as though he was entering the weightless realm of space..." I feel like I am entering a weightless realm. The feeling circulates through my head like a catchy phrase; a schizophrenic feeling of movement, always on repeat.

In architecture school I had similar repeated feelings. One was getting punched in the face with a boxing glove. The image that played through my mind was in slow motion. I could smell and feel the texture of the leather as it slammed into the side of my mouth, bending my nose to the side. Another feeling I would have, usually as I was riding the bus, was one where I dangled from a trapeze by my ankles. Part of the imagery that came with this feeling was when I raised up trying and unfasten my ankles. Sometimes the unfastening would work and I could feel myself falling to the floor. But I never hit the ground, which I guess, was my first lesson in flight.