Airborne

From whiskey river:

As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.

(Native American Indian saying)

Not from whiskey river:

Don Juan and don Genaro stood up and stretched their arms and arched their backs, as if sitting had made their bodies stiff. My heart began to pound fast. They made Pablito and me stand up.

“The twilight is the crack between the worlds,” don Juan said. “It is the door to the unknown.”

He pointed with a sweeping movement of his hand to the mesa where we were standing.

“This is the plateau in front of that door.”

He pointed then to the northern edge of the mesa.

“There is the door. Beyond, there is an abyss and beyond that abyss is the unknown.”

Don Juan and don Genaro then turned to Pablito and said good-by to him. Pablito’s eyes were dilated and fixed; tears were rolling down his cheeks.

I heard don Genaro’s voice saying good-by to me, but I did not hear don Juan’s.

Don Juan and don Genaro moved towards Pablito and whispered briefly in his ears. Then they came to me. But before they had whis­pered anything I already had that peculiar feeling of being split.

“We will now be like dust on the road,” don Genaro said. “Perhaps it will get in your eyes again, someday.”

Don Juan and don Genaro stepped back and seemed to merge with the darkness. Pablito held my forearm and we said good-by to each other. Then a strange urge, a force, made me run with him to the northern edge of the mesa. I felt his arm holding me as we jumped and then I was alone.

(Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power — the last words of the book. I always thought Castaneda’s entire “Don Juan” series would have ended perfectly at this point, but no: he went on to write numerous further books, none of which attained the convincing — and impeccable — power of the early ones.)

…and, finally — “Make the questions as big as you can, so you’re not limiting anybody” — we have the trailer for the film version of 2002′s 1 Giant Leap:

The image at the top of this post, of course, features just about everyone’s favorite demonstrator of the perils of standing on air. In fact, although I have no way of knowing or verifying this assertion, I presume he’s the specific reason why we even have Cartoon Law of Physics #1 (despite the name used in the example):

Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over.

Indeed, Wikipedia reports:

In a neologism contest held by New Scientist, a winning entry coined the term “coyotus interruptus” for this phenomenon — a pun on coitus interruptus and Wile E. Coyote, who fell to his doom this way particularly often.

Ah, those wacky new scientists…

Wikipedia further cites the rules which Warner Brothers animators supposedly followed at all times when working on the Road Runner/Coyote series:

1. Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “beep, beep”.
2. No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products.
3. The Coyote could stop anytime — IF he was not a fanatic. (Repeat: “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” —George Santayana).
4. No dialogue ever, except “beep, beep” and yowling in pain.
5. Road Runner must stay on the road — for no other reason than that he’s a roadrunner.
6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the southwest American desert.
7. All tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy.
9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
10. The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote.

Funny — I’ve never thought of Looney Tunes animators as particularly moral creatures. But that’s a pretty moral list.

Edit to add: Egad. How could I have forgotten Phillipe Halsman’s Jump Book — a collection of photos by the great photographer, of famous people leaping for his camera? At the right, for example, we have the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, quite happily mid-air.