[In the following essay, Kirschten analyzes the significance of the stewardess in Dickey's "Falling."]

A quarter of a century ago, well before many current intellectual trends became mainstream, James Dickey reaffirmed the multicultural brotherhood of his own poetic vision with Native Americans, when, in Self-Interviews, he lamented

the loss of a sense of intimacy with the natural process. I think you would be very hard-put … to find a more harmonious relationship to an environment than the American Indians had. We can't return to a primitive society … but there is a property of mind which, if encouraged, could have this personally animistic relationship to things…. It's what gives us a personal relationship to the sun and the moon, the flow of rivers, the growth and decay of natural forms, and the cycles of death and rebirth.

An exhilarating celebration of just those harmonious cycles, "Falling" is one of Dickey's best known and most spectacular poems. The lyric runs more than six full pages in page-wide lines with minimal punctuation to interrupt its accelerating whirlwind of energy while depicting the fatal fall of a twenty-nine-year-old stewardess from a commercial airplane over Kansas. Although this woman starts off as the victim of a tragic accident, her fall is exhilarating because she ends up as someone significantly different.

Critics have offered clues to this transformation. Joyce Carol Oates claims that the stewardess is "a kind of mortal goddess, given as much immortality … as poetry is capable of giving its subjects." Monroe Spears notes that she "becomes a goddess, embodiment of a myth." Joyce Pair, editor of The James Dickey Newsletter, observes that the stewardess is "a modern incarnation of the goddess of crops and fertility." Even Dickey himself says that the stewardess has a "goddess-like invulnerability." While these clues identify the stewardess as a goddess, there are few extended discussions of the poem that develop this premise. My own seven-page analysis, written in 1983 as part of a chapter on sacrificial victims in a book-length study of Dickey's poetry, concurs with these opinions to some degree, suggesting that "we may best read 'Falling' … as a ritual reenactment of the primitive practice of killing a god of vegetation to ensure both the perpetuation of crops and the continuation of the human species itself." However, after more extensive reading in mythological literatures, I believe that my initial assessment undervalues the power and character of this woman and that a more detailed reading is in order. To say that the stewardess is merely a "sacrificial victim"—a term derived from Kenneth Burke and René Girard—renders her passive in a way that does not reflect her true dynamic and dramatic character. We need thus to trace more fully the process of empowerment (the "plot" or "form" of the poem) that the stewardess undergoes by looking at the kind of mythological activity (the "genre") this process resembles. By offering three analogies with goddesses from Native American, Asian, and Mesoamerican myths, we may best see "Falling" as an animistic, matriarchal, creation myth—in many ways, the emotional and cultural opposite of the patriarchal narrative in Genesis—whose particular rendering in Dickey's hands reveals further insights into his conceptions of women and nature. My claim is that "Falling" is Dickey's remarkable transformation of an airline employee into an analogue of one of the Great Goddesses of primitive seed-planting cultures, more specifically, Mother Earth, who, in the process of falling and dying, gives birth to herself and the earth.

First Analogy: Bird Woman (or Lady of the Animals) and The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

After the stewardess falls out of the plane, she panics at first, then experiments with her fall. Dickey says, "[S]he develops interest she turns in her maneuverable body // To watch it." Not only does she begin to enjoy her fall, but she takes on the first in a series of new kinds of power, namely, the power of animals. At line 30, she changes from someone merely performing "endless gymnastics" into what I will call her role as "Bird Woman," for she now can "slant slide / Off tumbling into the emblem of a bird with its wings half-spread." Whether in "Reincarnation II," where we find "There is a wing-growing motion / Half-alive in every creature," or in "Eagles," where the poet says "My feathers were not / Of feather-make, but broke from a desire to drink / The rain before it falls," the empowerment of human beings through magical contact with animals is a long-standing commonplace in Dickey's work. This topic recalls two of Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann's observations when he discusses animals symbolic of ancient goddesses: first, that the "birdlike character of woman points primarily to her correlation with the heavens," and second, that in Creto-Aegean culture "The Great Mother as a nature goddess … was mistress of the mountains and of wild animals" and that "birds … symbolized her presence."

In "Falling," Dickey's stewardess-goddess has "Time to live / In superhuman health" by so taking on the properties of bird flight and vision that she becomes a variation of what is called in Pali Buddhism "The great woman rich in creatures":

      Arms out  she slow-rolls over steadies out waits for something great
      To take control of her  trembles near feathers planes head-down
      The quick movements of bird-necks turning her head  gold eyes the insight-
      eyesight of owls blazing into the hencoops  a taste for chicken overwhelming
      Her  the long-range vision of hawks enlarging all human lights of cars
      Freight trains  looped bridges  enlarging the moon racing slowly
      Through all the curves of a river  all the darks of the midwest blazing
      From above.

By acquiring the "insight- / eyesight of owls" and "The long-range vision of hawks," the stewardess is not only rich in creatures but reenacts the role of a prehistoric goddess known as "The Lady of the Animals" who often appears in the form of a bird. Citing Marija Gimbutas's The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, Carol Christ tells us that Gimbutas found a

pre-Bronze Age culture that was "matrifocal" … presided over by a Goddess as Source and Giver of All. Originally the Goddess did not appear with animals but herself had animal characteristics. One of her earliest forms was as the Snake and Bird Goddess, associated with water, and represented as a snake, a water bird, a duck, goose, crane, diver bird, or owl, or as a woman with a bird head or birdlike posture. She was the Goddess Creatress, the giver of Life.

Known in classical mythology as "Aphrodite with her dove, Athene with her owl, [and] Artemis with her deer," the image of the Lady of Animals, Christ notes, goes back in history beyond Homer to the Neolithic and Paleolithic eras. In the Homeric Hymns (c. 800-400 BC), "The Lady of the Animals is cosmic power; she is mother of all; the animals of Earth, sea, and air are hers; the wildest and most fearsome of animals…. [She] is also earth: she is the firm foundation undergirding all life."

In "Falling," Dickey's Lady of the Animals not only possesses the vision of hawks and owls but also their "fearsome" power over prey and, most importantly, their powers and instruments of flight. With "a taste for chicken overwhelming / Her" and "The air beast-crooning to her warbling," the stewardess arranges her skirt "Like a diagram of a bat" and thus "has this flying-skin / Made of garments." These diverse animal traits dramatically enable her to change both her activity and her character. Her fall becomes purposive, no longer the formless result of an unintended accident, but instead "a long stoop a hurtling a fall / That is controlled that plummets as it wills." As the velocity of her fall accelerates, an effect conveyed brilliantly by Dickey's spectacular visual imagery, so too the stewardess' plummeting will-to-power increases. At one point, she alters the very laws of nature as she "Turns gravity / Into a new condition, showing its other side like a moon shining / New Powers." And shortly thereafter, she begins to become fully active by determining her own fate; that is, she will not "just fall just tumble screaming all that time." She will "use / It" (italics in original).

While magically connected to animals, yet still in her human form, Dickey's stewardess also resembles a goddess who experiences a similar fall in an Iroquois creation myth called "The Woman Who Fell from the Sky." From J. B. N. Hewitt's "Iroquois Cosmology" (as abridged and recast in Campbell's World Mythology) we learn that in "regions above," where "[s]orrow and death were unknown …," a

tree had been uprooted [so that] … a hole was left … opened to the world below…. [A] woman-being … fell into the hole and kept on falling through its darkness, and after a while passed through its length. And when she had passed quite through onto this other world, she … looked in all directions and saw on all sides about her that everything was blue…. [S]he was now looking upon a great expanse … of water…. On the surface of the water … were all sorts and forms of waterfowl…. [One of them] noticed her…. [T]hey sent up to her a flight of numerous ducks of various kinds, which in a very compact body elevated themselves to meet her on high. And on their backs, thereupon, her body did indeed alight. So then slowly they descended, bearing on their backs her body.

Though the birds and animals in Dickey's poem do not bear the stewardess on their backs, they form an entourage of accompanying support that shapes the very contour of her fall. Her alignment with hawks, owls, and bats changes her fall from a "Tumble" to a fall like that of "sky-divers on TV," which, at least, hypothetically, offers her the hope that, "like a diver," she may "plunge" into "water like a needle to come out healthily dripping / And be handed a Coca-Cola." In addition to her birdlike motion, the Iroquois woman-being, like the stewardess, shares a similar creative relationship with the earth. When the Iroquois woman falls, there is no land below her, only water. To safeguard her from drowning, the ducks place her on the back of the Great Turtle. Beaver and Otter try to bring up mud from the bottom to fashion earth for her, but they die in the process. So does Muskrat. As he surfaces, however, mud is found in his paws, and this the animals place around the carapace of the turtle. When the woman awakes, she finds the mud, like Dickey's "enlarging" earth, transformed:

[T]he earth whereupon she sat had become in size enlarged…. [S]he … saw that willows along the edge of the water had grown to be bushes…. [S]he saw … growing shrubs of the rose willow along the edge of the water…. [S]he saw take up its course a little rivulet. In that way, in their turn things came to pass. The earth rapidly was increasing in size. She … saw all kinds of herbs and grasses spring from the earth and grow … toward maturity.

Later in this legend, the woman-being gives birth to a daughter who in turn gives birth to a set of twins. The first twin, Sapling, tosses the sun and the moon into the sky and forms the race of mankind. The Woman Who Fell from the Sky is thus a kind of mother responsible for the creation of the cosmos, the earth, and humanity.

In "Falling" the stewardess gives birth to a special kind of "enlarging earth." After she determines to "use" her fall, the American landscape "enlarges" not only because she falls closer to ground; it becomes animated—animistic—and a tremendous source of revelation and energy for her. Dickey's earth is, in fact, created out of animated elements similar to those in Chinese and Babylonian creation myths in which reality is said to emerge out of original "chaos" when "all was darkness and water." When the stewardess falls out of a layer of clouds, she beholds a new world likewise issuing out of "chaos" and "darkness and water": "New darks new progressions of headlights along dirt roads from chaos // And night a gradual warming a new-made, inevitable world of one's own / Country" with "its waiting waters." These "waiting waters," like those toward which the Iroquois woman falls, also come magically alive as the source of all life for Dickey's goddess. Even though, on a literal level, the stewardess stands little chance of diving safely into water, imagery of "The waters / Of life" is so pervasive that it constitutes a major element in the vast scenic receptacle of natural movement in the "new-made … world" that receives her. As she heads "Toward the blazing-bare lake," this world of water is "new-made" and life-giving because of its tremendous potential for burgeoning energy. Like a life-saving rope that cannot aid her, "The moon [is] packed and coiled in a reservoir," and in the agricultural and sexual worlds of fecundity that she will never know, "farmers sleepwalk … a walk like falling toward the far waters / Of life in moon-light … [t]oward the flowering of the harvest in their hands." As nourisher and transformer, water is the vessel of life in the womb; its nutrients make it a medium for growth, and, of course, the sea is the source of life, but also, tragically, the destroyer. Water thus unites heaven and earth in the "Great Round" of life and death. By entering so fully into this perpetual cycle, Dickey's stewardess is the great Egyptian heaven goddess Nut, who is, Neumann reminds us,

water above and below, vault above and below, life and death, east and west, generating and killing, in one…. The Great Goddess is the flowing unity of subterranean and celestial primordial water, the sea of heaven on which sail the barks of the gods of light, the circular life-generating ocean above and below the earth. To her belong all waters, streams, fountains, ponds, and springs, as well as the rain. She is the ocean of life with its life- and death-bringing seasons….

This realm is not the world of discursive consciousness. It is, rather, what Neumann calls "The primordial darkness" of "The Dark Mother," "The Nocturnal Mother," or more specifically, "The matriarchal world of the beginning" of the creative unconscious, which "the patriarchal world strives to deny." And with its "moon-crazed inner eye of midwest imprisoned / Water," Dickey's night-world is far less the real Kansas than it is D. H. Lawrence's Etruscan universe in which "all was alive…. The whole thing was alive, and had a great soul, or anima."

Dickey's animistic conception of nature radically opposes that of the machine-world of the airliner with which the poem begins. In considering Dickey's animism, which reveals much about his main character, it is useful to recall Carol Christ's statement: "To the Old Europeans the Lady of the Animals was not a power transcending earth, but rather the power that creates, sustains, and is manifest in the infinite variant of life forms on earth. Old Europe did not celebrate humanity's uniqueness and separation from nature but rather humanity's participation in and connection to nature's cycles of birth, death, and renewal." Speaking in a similar vein about natural "connection" in Self-Interviews, Dickey paraphrases Lawrence's statement to the effect that "as a result of our science and industrialization, we have lost the cosmos. The parts of the universe we can investigate by means of machinery and scientific empirical techniques we may understand better than our predecessors did, but we no longer know the universe emotionally." Dickey's poetic answer to technological alienation characterized by "The vast, sluggish forces of habit, mechanization and mental torpor" is to build a universe populated not only by what he has called, in an article so titled, "The Energized Man," but, in this poem, what we may call the "Energized Woman." She is, among other things, a poetic adversary of contemporary commercialism. The Energized Woman is someone whose mind is "not used simply to sell neckties or industrial machines or to make cocktail conversation, but to serve as the vital center of a moving and changing, perceiving and evaluating world which … is that world of delivery from drift and inconsequence." She does not dwell in an earth filled with the deadening rhetoric of advertising; Dickey even parodies advertising slogans: when "opening the natural wings of [her] jacket / By Don Loper," the stewardess shifts in the same poetic line from the world of fashion to the primitive world of movement "like a hunting owl toward the glitter of water" (italics in original). Rather, the Energized Woman lives in a world filled with the dynamic energy of "mana," which is, in Jane Harrison's description, "a world of unseen power lying behind the visible universe, a world which is the sphere … of magical activity and the medium of mysticism."

Commenting on the Iroquois myth, Joseph Campbell sheds further light on Dickey's energized "Sky Woman" and this magical, mystical power she possesses. The Woman Who Fell from the Sky is, Campbell says, "a North American example of … a universally recognized, early planting-culture mythology, wherein by analogy with the seeded earth, the creative and motivating force (sakti) of the world illusion (maya) was envisioned, and in fact experienced, as female (devï)." The Sky Woman is an "avatar from the Sky World to this earth, bearing in her womb the gift of a race of human beings, heavenly endowed to join in mutual regard the supportive animal population already present." She is also a Neolithic great moon goddess or moon-messenger. Gimbutas notes that the moon goddess was "essentially a Goddess of Regeneration,… product of a … matrilinear community…. [She] was giver of life and all that promotes fertility…." Lamenting the fact that "[t]here's no moon goddess now," Dickey once stated that, from a scientific point of view, the moon is "simply a dead stone, a great ruined stone in the sky." And so it is, at the opening of "Falling," that "[t]he states" are "drawing moonlight out of the great / One-sided stone hung off the starboard wingtip." As the stewardess acquires momentum, however, the ancient mythological connection between the moon and water comes magically alive, for the moon is transformed into "The harvest moon," "racing slowly / Through all the curves of a river" and into "a great stone of light in waiting waters." This all takes place beneath and above a moon-bride who falls from "The heavenly rapture of experienced non-duality…. [T]he woman's fall is at once a death (to the sky) and a birth (to this earth)."

Second Analogy: Mistress of All Desires and Joys; Or, Goddess Unchained

The role of the stewardess as Sky Woman continues throughout her fall, but at line 94, her "shining / New Powers" take on an even greater scope. Dickey provides a clue to this stage of change in Self-Interviews when he says that he tried "To think of the mystical possibility there might be for farmers in that vicinity." Not only farmers, we might add, but all who feel the influence of the moon goddess are drawn, as

                   under her   under chenille bedspreads
      The farm girls are feeling the goddess in them struggle and rise brooding
      On the scratch-shining posts of the bed   dreaming of female signs
      Of the moon   male blood like iron   of what is really said by the moan
      Of airliners passing over them at dead of midwest midnight   passing
      Over brush fires   burning out in silence on little hills   and will wake
      To see the woman they should be   struggling on the rooftree to become
      Stars

At this passage, the stewardess acquires a pervasive sexual power that animates sexual instinct in all those, women and men, who fall within her range. This power accelerates in the following lines when, defiantly, "To die / Beyond explanation," the stewardess rids herself of the restrictive trappings of her airline uniform, "The girdle required by regulations," and "The long windsocks of her stockings." She is now Goddess unchained, and her flight is "superhuman" because her mystical, sexual power is even more comprehensive. She is

                 desired by every sleeper in his dream:
     Boys finding for the first time their loins filled with heart's blood
     Widowed farmers whose hands float under light covers to find themselves
     Arisen at sunrise   the splendid position of blood unearthly drawn
     Toward clouds   all feel something   pass over them as she passes
     Her palms over her long legs   her small breasts and deeply between
     Her thighs
     (italics in original)

From lines 94 to 141 (just before she enters the ground and becomes the earth's creative force), the stewardess's procreative powers lead to a stage of empowerment at which we may call her the "Mistress of All Desires and Joys" or the "Great Maya." Speaking of the Buddhist "mother-goddess or earth-mother" who "signifies the triumph of the feminine principle over the masculine," Heinrich Zimmer says,

The goddess, who "consists of all the beings and worlds" is herself the pregnant salt womb of the life sea, holding all forms of life in her embrace and nourishing them; she herself casts them adrift in the sea and gives them over to decay, and in all innocence rebuilds them into forms forever new….

She is the agreeable side of the hideous Indian goddess Kali, who after she drinks blood, changes faces and becomes "The world mother"; she bestows "existence upon new living forms in a process of unceasing procreation." In "Hinduism," Zimmer says, "The male looks upon all womanhood … as the self-revelation of the goddess in the world of appearances." And "in the secret orgiastic ritual of the Tantras, reserved to the initiate, the erotic sacrament of the sexes stands above the enjoyment of meat and drink as the supreme intoxicant by which men can attain redemption in their lifetime." She has a "magic power, which fulfills and hallows, is embodied in everything feminine…. [A]ll [women] have a shimmer of superhuman dignity, as vessel and symbol of the supreme natural force (sakti) of the mother-goddess, to whom all things owe their existence."

Terms such as "The supreme intoxicant" and "orgiastic ritual" lead to further considerations about the erotic aspect of Dickey's poetic method. This method centers on an intoxicating, dreamlike ecstasy signaled early in the poem as the stewardess falls "with the delaying, dumfounding ease / Of a dream of being drawn / like endless moonlight to the harvest soil / Of a central state of one's country." Both nightmare and adrenaline rush, these dream-states run throughout "Falling," suggesting [Friedrich] Nietzsche's Dionysian and Apollonian forces upon which art depends, "as procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual conflicts with only periodically intervening reconciliations." Insofar as Monroe Spears notes in Dionysus and the City that Dickey's poetry is at its best when "basic Dionysian preoccupations … operate in proper balance with the Apollonian elements," we would do well to take a moment to see how these two Nietzschean opposites—in "balance" and "perpetual conflict"—operate in "Falling."

The Apollonian or dream component of the poem can be found in the fantastic stream of explosive celestial images that flow about the stewardess as she falls and in the Olympian point of view from which she has a godlike scope of vision. Nietzsche claims that such dreamstates conduce to extraordinary modes of holistic consciousness, a philosophic topic that runs throughout Dickey's poetry and is incorporated in two oxymorons at the end of the elegiac "The Eagle's Mile," where we find Justice William O. Douglas's "death drawing life / From growth / from flow" so that, in the poem's last line, he may "Splinter uncontrollably whole." Of this kind of ecstatic dream vision, Nietzsche says:

In dreams, according to the conception of Lucretius, the glorious divine figures first appeared to the souls of men, in dreams the great shaper beheld the charming corporeal structure of superhuman beings…. [F]or Apollo, as the god of all shaping energies, is also the sooth saying god…. The higher truth, the perfection of [the inner world of fantasies] … in contrast to the only partially intelligible everyday world, ay, the deep consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dream, is at the same time the symbolical analogue of the faculty of soothsaying and, in general, of the arts, through which life is made possible and worth living.

In Dickey's poem, what is prophetic (and "healing") about the stewardess's visioning powers is not that she attains a truth that can be put in the form of an oracle or conceptual proposition but, rather, that the panoramic faculty of her eye and its streaming "openness"—that of Apollo, Nietzsche's "sculptor-god"—resultin her "accessibility" to the Dionysian powers of the "more than human," to "metamorphosis and transfiguration." That is, though she faces certain death, the energy from her Apollonian rush of consciousness and its Dionysian content "prophesizes" (i.e., foretells and foreshadows) an ecstatic, life-affirming reversal of her fate; for, not only are "Her eyes opened wide by wind" so that she sees the earth approaching, but also she is "lying in one after another of all the positions for love / Making dancing" in a vibrant Dionysian ecstasy.

The result of yet another of Dickey's monstrous combinations of poetic "good / And evil," the stewardess's drama explodes in power by representing her Nietzschean opposites in a "perpetual conflict" that produces a stunning kind of frenzy (or ecstasy). The dramatic method involved here is, as Nietzsche says, "The Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian perceptions and influences," which produces "enchantment" as a kind of reverse irony. Instead of the audience distancing itself from the central action by knowing more than the performing character, the end of this ironic frenzy is

to see one's self transformed before one's self and then to act as if one had really entered into another body, into another character…. [H]ere we actually have a surrender of the individual by his entering into another nature…. In this enchantment the Dionysian reveller sees himself as a satyr, and as satyr he in turn beholds the god…. [In] his transformation he sees a new vision outside him as the Apollonian consummation of his state. With this new vision the drama is complete.

The stewardess becomes a goddess—as does the reader, participating emotionally with her—precisely through this Dionysian state of intoxicating new vision, itself a delirious peripety. Her frenzy is a "rapturous transport," a "narcotic potion," which, like certain varieties of mysticism, erases "all sense of individuality in self-forgetfulness," or, we might add, like a mystical transport that produces movement transfiguring the vulnerable self into a greater power, when, for example, one feels the sensation of being intoxicated by speed:

    She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape   watching it lose
    And gain   get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up
    Its local lights   single homes   lamps on barn roofs   if she fell
    Into water she might live   like a diver   cleaving perfect   plunge
    Into another   heavy silver   unbreathable slowing   saving
    Element….

Dickey's technical virtuosity in "Falling," as seen in the long, Whitmanesque lines punctuated by caesura, his terraces of spectacularly ascending rhythm, his striking image groups conveying the impression of a free fall, produce in the reader the sensation that his Dionysian deity of motion, like Nietzsche's, is "on the point of taking a dancing flight into the air." Nietzsche continues: "His gestures bespeak enchantment…. [S]omething supernatural sounds forth from him: he feels himself a god." Of such frenzy, the German philosopher writes:

The essential thing in all intoxication is the feeling of heightened power and fullness. With this feeling one … compels [things] to receive what one has to give….

One enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever one wills, is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. The individual in this state transforms things until they mirror his power—until they are reflections of his perfection.

The frenzy in "Falling" is not simple escapism; it is entrance into an archetypal mode of motion that features the cycle of desire and death (Eros and Thanatos) but transcends death by participating fully in this eternal cycle. Whereas Dickey's stewardess-goddess fills boys' "loins with heart's blood," she will also soon become part of "The loam where extinction slumbers in corn tassels thickly." This concept of life-in-death fits Nietzsche's conception of the "orgiastic," which underscores the fabulous life-affirming impulse of the stewardess even in the face of her own death:

[T]he orgiastic [is] an overflowing feeling of life and strength, where even pain still has the effect of a stimulus…. Tragedy is … [the] repudiation and counter-instance [of pessimism]. Saying Yes to life, even in its strangest and hardest problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian…. [One does not experience tragedy] to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge—Aristotle understood it that way—but in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming,… that joy which included even joy in destroying…. Herewith I again stand on the soil out of which my intention … grows—I, the teacher of eternal recurrence.

In "Falling," this Yea-saying Dionysian power features a matriarchal component that is reflected in Nietzsche's own metaphor; he claims that this is a world in which "nature speaks to us with its true undissembled voice: 'Be as I am! Amidst the ceaseless change of phenomena the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to existence, self-satisfying eternally with this change of phenomena!'"

This orgiastic power is not the power of domination or control. Rather, it is what Herbert Marcuse calls an erotic stance that reconciles Eros and Thanatos in "a world that is not to be mastered and controlled but to be liberated." In such a realm, the "opposition between man and nature, subject and object, is overcome. Being is experienced as gratification." The stewardess's shedding of her clothes is, thus, an enabling ritual or dance, designed to affirm a social "order without repression" and to amplify her basic bodily powers, as Dickey says, in a "last superhuman act" that defies the death of the body and expresses what Marcuse calls "a non-repressive erotic attitude toward reality." Instead of the functionary of a commercial airline, the stewardess is, in Marcusian terms, "[n]o longer used as a full-time instrument of labor," for her body is "resexualized" such that "Eros, freed from surplus-repression, would be strengthened" and "[d]eath would cease to be an instinctual goal." This transforming dance and ecstatic vision of sexuality are not limited to gender. Dionysian rapture as a sexual mode of holistic motion transcending death also attracted Theodore Roethke, who reveals this account in his notebooks:

… I got into this real strange state. I got in the woods and started a circular kind of dance…. I kept going around and just shedding clothes. Sounds Freudian as hell, but in the end, I had a sort of circle—as if, I think, I understood intuitively what the frenzy is. That is, you go way beyond yourself, and … this is not sheer exhaustion but this strange sort of a … not illumination … but a sense of being again a part of the whole universe. I mean, anything but quiet. I mean, in a sense everything is symbolical…. [I]t was one of the deepest and [most] profound experiences I ever had. And accompanying it was a real sexual excitement also … and this tremendous feeling of actual power….

The real point is that this business of the dance accompanies exaltation of the highest, the human thing, and it also goes into the Dionysian frenzy, which in modern life hardly anyone even speaks of anymore…. [W]hen Vaughan says, "When felt through all my fleshy dress, / Ripe shoots of everlastingness," well, that's the feeling. You feel … that you are eternal, or immortal…. [F]urthermore, death becomes … an absurdity, of no consequence.

That Dickey should feature this kind of movement in "Falling" comes as no surprise, for the "Delphic trance" and "world of perpetual genesis" are aspects of Roethke's poetic vision that Dickey has long admired.

Third Analogy: Maize Stalk Drinking Blood

It is precisely these Nietzschean opposites in orgiastic combination—joy and destruction, tragedy and inexhaustibility, power and pain—in "Falling" that lead to our third analogy. The stewardess's flight ends abruptly when she enters the earth with a tremendous impact, which Dickey does not show, but represents symbolically with pronouns, "This is it THIS," and which is all the more powerful and tragic for that indirect symbolization. At first glance, this moment exhibits a cataclysmic reversal of the life-force of her flight, for immediately after she lands, she is, terrifyingly

                                               impressed
     In the soft loam   gone down   driven well into the image of her body
     The furrows for miles flowing in upon her where she lies very deep
     In her mortal outline   in the earth as it is in cloud

She continues to live for a time after the impact; at the end of the poem, some thirty lines later, her last words are given in capitals: "AH, GOD—." Though she dies, this final poetic space, approximately one-sixth of the entire lyric, exhibits her full goddesslike nature and power in a way more compelling even than her fall. It bears repeating that Dickey does not dwell here on a mutilated woman. It is not her death that is his focus but a circle (or cycle) much wider in scope. In addition to our natural compassion for her death, our feeling for her issues from a deeper recognition of the universal in Dickey's dramatization of the intermingling forces of life and death. For those who find her, the poet says,

                                        can tell nothing
      But that she is there   inexplicable   unquestionable   and remember
      That something broke in them as well   and began to live and die more
      When they walked for no reason into their fields to where the whole earth
      Caught her

At this point, this contemporary airline stewardess bears comparison to the great Mesoamerican mother of the gods, Maize Stalk Drinking Blood. In a painting from the Codex Borgia, Mexico (c. AD 1500), called "The Tree of the Middle Place," these striking images occur:

Rising from the body of an earth goddess recumbent on the spines of the … alligator … of the abyss, the Tree, encircled by the World Sea, is surmounted by a quetzal bird of bright plummage. Two streams of blood pour into the goddess, and from her body rise two ears of maize, a yellow and a red…. Personifying the fertile earth, this goddess of life out of death is normally identified by a skull or skeletal jaw…. She is known as the Maize Stalk Drinking Blood…. As noticed by Jill Leslie Furst, treating this goddess in a monograph entitled The Skull as Fertility Symbol: "The … skeletal remains were … regarded as the seat of the essential life force and the metaphorical seed from which the individual, whether human, animal, or plant, is reborn…."

This voracious image of death points to a different aspect of the stewardess and of Great Goddesses in many cultures, namely, their terrible power of destruction. As Erich Neumann says,

The Great Mother as Terrible Goddess of the earth and of death is herself the earth, in which things rot. The Earth Goddess is "The devourer of the dead bodies of mankind" and the "mistress and lady of the tomb." Like Gaea, the Greek Earth Mother, she is mistress of the vessel and at the same time the great underworld vessel itself, into which dead souls enter, and out of which they fly up again.

The power of this goddess, also called the "Terrible Mother," is double-edged, suggesting not only death and destruction but also new life, for out of the body of Maize Stalk grow two ears of corn, signs of regeneration and rebirth. Discussing the story of Demeter and Persephone in the Greek festival Thesmophoria, Joseph Campbell emphasizes this redemptive power in the Great Goddess when he notes that in certain primitive Indonesian cycles

goddesses [are] identified with the local food plants,… the underworld, and the moon, whose rites insure both a growth of the plants and a passage of the soul to the land of the dead. In both the marriage of the maiden goddess … is equivalent to her death, which is imaged as a descent into the earth and is followed, after a time, by her metamorphosis into food….

These redemptive and sexual powers constitute one phase of the cycle of life and death through which humankind passes. Dickey's Goddess is Mother Earth giving birth and death to herself, for the goddess of sex is the goddess of death. Campbell notes that "The death god, Ghede, of the Haitian Voodoo tradition, is also the sex god. The Egyptian god Osiris was the judge and lord of the dead, and the lord of the regeneration of life." And, commenting on the "primitive-village mythology" of certain New Guinea tribes that include the "death-feast" of a "divine maiden" who died by sinking "into the earth among the roots of a tree" to rise later in the sky as the moon, he discusses this dialectical pairing of sex and death:

[T]he plants on which man lives derive from this death. The world lives on death…. Reproduction without death would be a calamity, as would death without reproduction…. [T]he interdependence of death and sex, their import as the complementary aspects of a single state of being, and the necessity of … killing and eating …—this deeply moving, emotionally disturbing glimpse of death as the life of the living is the fundamental motivation supporting the rites around which the social structure of the early planting villages was composed.

A considerably less violent figure than the goddess in "The Tree of the Middle Place" or the New Guinean moon-maiden, Dickey's stewardess nonetheless enters the earth in a way suggesting that she gives birth to a similar cycle of generation and decay and that her death is not, merely, the termination of a single, discontinuous individual:

       All the known air above her is not giving up quite one
     Breath  it is all gone  and yet not dead  not anywhere else
     Quite  lying still in the field on her back  sensing the smells
     Of incessant growth try to lift her

By accretions of these cyclic moments of death-in-life, Dickey often builds his poems out of magical circles, poetic "mandalas" (Sanskrit for "circle"); "Falling" also suggests the transference (and continuance) of the stewardess's fertile powers in the comic totems of "her clothes" which, magically, are "beginning / To come down all over Kansas": "her blouse on a lightning rod" and "her girdle coming down fantastically / On a clothesline, where it belongs." Further proof that her "all-sustaining, all-nourishing" sexual power continues is that it is felt sympathetically in the lives and in the fields of local farmers who perpetuate and participate in her extraordinary energy when the erotic dream sequence impels them to

                                  sleepwalk without
     Their women from houses  a walk like falling toward the far waters
     Of life  in moonlight  toward the dreamed eternal meaning of their farms
     Toward the flowering of the harvest in their hands

When "Falling" is read aloud, the poem's cumulative energy is so overwhelming by the end of the performance that—although the death of the stewardess is a necessary, realistic outcome of her accident—her death has in it the feeling of a beginning. This beginning resembles the tremendous burgeoning that Kenneth Burke sees as the "frantic urgency of growth" in Theodore Roethke's "greenhouse poems," where "Nothing would give up life: / Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath." What truly animates Dickey's earth is the stewardess's cyclone of energy that is magically transferred to the ground she enters. Rather than a death, her impregnation of the land is the beginning of a new cycle of growth and decay. At poem's end, this cycle has been put in full motion by the poet. The reader's or listener's poetic experience of the stewardess's death is not a sense of cessation but of transformation. Just as the form of the poem is the reversal of the journalistic narrative that begins the action by announcing the airplane accident, the stewardess is never more alive than when she dies into her new life. Yet one more variation on Dickey's favorite topic of poetic motion, the stewardess's death is, as Campbell notes about ritual love-death, a "fresh enactment, here and now" of a "god's own sacrifice … through which … she … became incarnate in the world process"; she is a constant reminder to us that "sudden, monstrous death" is a "revelation of the … inhumanity of the order of the universe." Yet we are also reminded, as Zimmer says of the plague goddesses of southern India, that "[t]o see the twofold, embracing and devouring, nature of the goddess, to see repose in catastrophe, security in decay, is to know her and be saved."

Social and Political Ends of "Falling"

Because it involves an erotic component and the death of a woman, "Falling" has received a considerable amount of negative commentary. By way of completing an inquiry into the form, genre, and value of this poem, we may use the preceding analysis to address a number of statements about this poem and Dickey himself. Some of these statements assess not only "Falling" negatively but also Dickey's work in general.

First, there are the charges of sexual perversion and insensitivity to women. In Thinking About Women, Mary Ellmann states that Dickey's depiction of women is "unnerving":

James Dickey's poem "Falling" expresses an extraordinary concern with the underwear of a woman who has fallen out of an airplane. While this woman, a stewardess, was in the airplane, her girdle obscured, to the observation of even the most alert passenger, her mesial groove. The effect was, as the poem recalls, "monobuttocked." As the woman falls, however, she undresses and "passes her palms" over her legs, her breasts, and "deeply between her thighs." Beneath her, "widowed farmers" are soon to wake with futile (and irrelevant?) erections. She lands on her back in a field, naked, and dies. The sensation of the poem is necrophilic: it mourns a vagina rather than a person crashing to the ground.

Ellmann's charge that Dickey is victimizing women requires some time to sort out. With regard to her claim that Dickey shows an "extraordinary concern with the underwear of a woman," there is little "concern" about underwear that is "extraordinary" at all in "Falling." The stewardess's under-wear, mentioned only twice in a poem of more than 175 lines and even then quite briefly, with no detailed description of the garments or lingering preoccupation whatsoever, emphasizes the transformation of a rigidly and commercially clothed woman who is nonetheless a goddess. In the first instance where "The underwear of a woman" appears, it is mentioned briefly in four lines and is part of the stream of clothes shed by the stewardess not to titillate men but to animate the earth sexually as part of her ritual defiance of mortality so that she may "die / Beyond explanation." When the underwear is mentioned, it is treated comically: "absurd / Brassiere" and "The girdle required by regulations." In the poem's second reference to underwear, it appears in one line only and, once again, in a comic context, with the stewardess's girdle described as "coming down fantastically / On a clothesline, where it belongs."

Second, Ellmann's claim that the stewardess is "monobuttocked" misses the point. The passenger's view of her "monobuttocked" condition is never mentioned in the poem. We scarcely see the stewardess in the plane; she falls out at line 7, and there is not the slightest hint of her being "monobuttocked" until 118 lines later, when the girdle is "squirming / Off her." Rather than stressing the girdle's "obscur[ing], to the observation of even the most alert passenger, her mesial groove," the poem emphasizes the stewardess's act of removing the girdle and revealing herself as goddess. The poem says that the stewardess is "no longer monobuttocked" (italics mine). The poem does not "recall" the view that Ellmann derides; instead, the poem describes the stewardess's liberation from the unnaturally confining, "monobuttocked" condition.

Third, Ellmann offers a brief comment on the stewardess's running her hands over her naked body (while farmers below her have "futile" and "irrelevant" erections) then dying in a field when she lands. Based on this excerpted narrative, Ellmann makes the most astounding claim that "[t]he sensation of the poem is necrophilic; it mourns a vagina rather than a person crashing to the ground." As reductive an example of critical paraphrase as one is likely to find, Ellmann's summary, which most certainly does not conform to Dickey's poem, is the only evidence for her bizarre charge. Ellmann's rewriting of Dickey turns "Falling" into a narrative of punitive reparation for the stewardess's sexuality, independence, and strength, a narrative whose tendency runs totally opposite to the poem's true course; her paraphrase does not admit of the tremendous energy of the poem or the fabulous series of powers that the stewardess acquires. The key point Ellmann misses is, as noted earlier, that Dickey's poem reverses the tragic journalistic narrative (which begins the poem) by converting a mortal stewardess into an earth goddess who lives and dies in the perpetual, natural alternation of generation and decay. Ellmann's omission of the poem's subtext that reverses the "journalistic" text is a disastrous misreading that turns a goddess into an inanimate corpse. To say that the poem "mourns a vagina"—only one four-word phrase in the work, "deeply between her thighs," even remotely mentions this anatomical area—is perverse and preposterous.

Instead of mourning a dynamic woman unfairly reduced to a body part, we do better to conclude with questions centering on the social and political values of Dickey's poem and to address these issues with the ideas of four strong, intelligent women. Does "Falling" challenge our traditional conceptions of divinity as masculine, inherited from a Judeo-Christian religious history? What implications does the metamorphosis of a woman into an earth goddess such as one finds described in so-called "primitive" cultures have for a contemporary Western audience? What does the poem, as an enabling, matriarchal, creation myth with its distinctive conception of nature, say politically to both women and men? And, finally, does Dickey's mythological conception of woman impose any limit on feminine power?

First, with regard to conceptions of divinity as masculine, Carol Christ thinks that the idea of goddesses is revolutionary. Goddesses "are about female power…. This power is so threatening to the status quo that the word Goddess still remains unspeakable even to many of the most radical Christian and Jewish theologians." Joseph Campbell has a similar notion about this traditional image of female power: "There can be no doubt that in the very earliest ages of human history the magical force and wonder of the female was no less a marvel than the universe itself; and this gave to woman a prodigious power, which it has been one of the chief concerns of the masculine part of the population to break, control, and employ to its own ends." That Dickey's matriarchal creation myth in "Falling" is literally a revolution—a reversal or turning around—of our Western biblical tradition of Genesis and its concept of woman can be buttressed by further testimony from Campbell's comments on the Iroquois tale of the Woman Who Fell from the Sky:

The … episode … of the flight of ducks ascending to ease the woman's fall; the earth divers in willing sacrifice of their lives preparing hastily a place upon which to receive her; Great Turtle becoming, also willingly, the supporting ground of a new earth, upon which … a new arrival from the sphere of Air, would rest … while the new earth took form around her … represents a point of view with respect to the relationship of man to nature, and of the creatures of nature to man, that is in striking contrast to that defined in Genesis 3:14-19, where man is cursed, woman is cursed, the serpent is cursed, and the earth is cursed to "bring forth thorns and thistles."… [T]he basic and sustaining sense of the relationship to mankind of the natural world and its creatures in this Native American origin myth, is of compassion, harmony, and cooperation.

Using language from Christine Froula's article "When Eve Reads Milton," we may say that Dickey's goddess is the opposite of Adam's God, "who is a perfected image of Adam: an all-powerful male creator who soothes Adam's fears of female power by Himself claiming credit for the original creation of the world."

The second question centers on current implications of the stewardess's divinity. Summarizing Rita Gross's article "Hindu Female Deities as a Resource for the Contemporary Rediscovery of the Goddess," Christ indicates five lessons that "The symbol of the Goddess" from "ancient mythologies" can "Teach modern Westerners." Analogues to these points can be found in our analysis of "Falling":

First, the Goddess's obvious strength, capability, and transcendence validate the power of women as women that has been denied in Western religion and culture. Second, Goddess symbolism involves the coincidence of opposites—of death and life, destruction and creativity—that reminds humans of the finitude of life and points to its transcendent ground. Third, Goddess religion values motherhood as symbolic of divine creativity, but without limiting female power to biological destiny. Fourth, Goddess symbolism also associates women with a wide range of culturally valued phenomena, including wealth, prosperity, culture, artful living, and spiritual teaching. Fifth, the Goddess requires the explicit reintroduction of sexuality as a religious metaphor in a symbol system where God is imaged as both male and female.

Also addressing the meaning of a primitive goddess for a Western audience, Christ lists four reasons "Why Women Need the Goddess" (one of her chapters is so titled) that may serve us as descriptions of the social ends effected by the enabling, mythic drama in "Falling":

First, the Goddess is symbol of the legitimacy and beneficence of female power in contrast to the image of female power as anomalous or evil in biblical religion. Second, the Goddess validates women's bodily experiences, including menstruation, birth, lactation, and menopause, and validates the human connection to finitude, which has been denigrated in Western religions. Third, the Goddess symbol in the context of feminist goddess worship values the female will, which has been viewed as the origin of evil in biblical mythology. Fourth, the goddess points to the valuing of woman-to-woman bonds[,]… which is celebrated in the story of Demeter and Persephone…. The symbol of Goddess … legitimates and undergirds the moods and motivations inspired by feminism just as the symbol of God has legitimated patriarchal attitudes for several thousand years.

Third, speaking of "The ritual poem in feminist spiritual circles," Alicia Ostriker offers a suggestive conception of "ritual" that articulates the kind of potential political effects we sense in Dickey's ritualized form:

For poet and reader-participant alike, ritual poetry implies the possibility of healing alternatives to dominance-submission scenarios. It suggests nonoppressive models of the conjunction between religion and politics, usually by re-imaging the sacred as immanent rather than transcendent, by defining its audience as members of a potentially strong community rather than as helplessly lonely individual victims, and by turning to nature (seen as sacred and female) as a source of power rather than passivity.

Finally, to those who argue that Dickey's treatment of the Great Goddess confines female power to maternity, we counterargue by offering a summarizing definition of the stewardess in terms of the active powers she employs. Ranging from emotional to athletic to perceptual, these capacities far exceed nourishing or bearing only. Her dramatic character may be briefly outlined in a series of gerunds that disclose the plot of her transformation from that of victim to Energized Woman: falling out of the plane; blacking out; screaming; despairing; developing interest in her fall; dreaming; slanting; tumbling; diving; flying, seeing, and tasting like a bird; controlling her fall; arranging her skirt like a bat and thus changing the shape of her fall; energizing and watching the earth magically grow below; being born out of "chaos"; planing superhumanly; using her fall; feeling the Goddess in her and other women emerge; affirming her fate; shedding her clothes "To die / Beyond explanation"; sexually animating herself and those below; landing; living into her dying; breathing "at last fully / … AH, GOD—"; and, finally, dying into a new round of living. In "Falling" Dickey's Energized Woman, like his "Energized Man," acquires, in his own words about the power of poetry, "an enormous increase in perceptiveness, an increased ability to understand and interpret the order of one's experience … bringing only the best of oneself: one's sharpest perceptions, one's best mind, one's most hilarious and delighted and tragic senses." Exchanging electrifying traits of goddesses from a plurality of cultures and religious traditions, "Falling" is James Dickey's exhilarating, mythopoeic celebration of tragedy transformed into delight and ecstasy, with a woman at the center of creation.