Flying feels like making music! And note the forced hard work of digging deep, it’s not enough to just practice the fun simple bits a couple times. “Fahre fort, übe nicht allein die Kunst, sondern dringe auch in ihr Inneres; sie verdient es, denn nur die Kunst und die Wissenschaft erhöhen den Menschen bis zur Gottheit.” Beethoven in letter to Emilie, July 17, 1812. Quoted in Musical news, Vol. 3 (1892), p. 627.
Gesamtkunstwerk: a German word (did you guess?!) means ‘total work of art’ or ‘synthesis of the arts’. Wagner’s artistic credo translates for us as smoothly integrating stick, rudder, thrust, gravity, wind, weather, crew, everything— into a flying whole. . (Original airshow photo by Gabriel Gusmao on Unsplash)
I’ll drink to that!
How to tell if you have a feel for your airplane, by Budd Davisson in EAA’s Sport Aviation magazine, September 2017 (paywall): Do you see the air? Or do you just push FMS buttons?
This is what great pilots share with artists, and monks and mystics. The heightened perception, the fascination with flight, eventually turns into an aeronautical superpower. The great pilot sees things and corrects before the average pilot ever knows anything is amiss. The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look. Within a summoned and hybrid awareness, the inner reaches out to transform the outer, and the outer reaches back to transform the one who sees. Catherine of Sienna wrote in … Continue reading Changing not the world
