A little while ago I posted a paragraph on LinkedIn. It was part of a weekly series I’ve been doing this year, using photos that I’ve taken in the Place des Vosges to illustrate the symbolic dimensions of life, with a little metaphysics and some humor thrown into the mix.

A friendly connection on LinkedIn reached out to me. He was puzzled by my post. “What does all of this refer to, Pedro?”

Ah. Yes. Right.

Thanks to my friendly connection, I got thinking about the nature of communication, about ways of seeing the world and ways of talking about it, about potentially incomprehensible things that—that, well, we don’t comprehend and that leave us baffled, puzzled, or worse.

Here’s the photo that illustrates my post.

And here’s my original post.

52 Mondays #31: August 2, Levitation

We can fly. Perhaps not very high and not for very long, but we leave the ground and we move up and away. We fly! No planes needed, no air traffic controllers, no airports, no duty free; just legs and life. Some of us get really good at it—Cristiano Ronaldo, for instance, can fly more than seven meters aboveground and hover for as long as five minutes. And some of us get so good, but so good at it that we fly to the moon and back, at the speed of light, without leaving our armchairs. This technique, which is called “esplodere in testa,” was developed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1519, building on Dante’s “elicottero dell'anima” from around 1321. Ultimately, it’s very simple: sit, close your eyes, and fly, fly, fly!

Your feet literally leave the ground when you run, jump, or skip. It’s what my photo shows: a boy running, his feet not touching the ground. The boy isn’t flying the same way that a Boeing 787 flies from Charles de Gaulle to JFK. But, look! His feet aren’t touching the ground! So, he’s kinda flying, just a little bit, don’t you see! I’m using my snapshot to trigger a sort of head trip. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could fly without wings, with the power of our feet and legs and mind . . .”

The post starts with a brief affirmative statement: We can fly. Sure: using planes, gliders, helicopters, rockets, maybe a jetpack, a parachute, a trampoline. Or by jumping from a burning building to a safe net provided by the firemen below. There are many actual technical ways for humans to fly. My affirmative statement, however, risks creating confusion, because I’m not talking primarily about physical flight. I’m talking about the feeling of flying that we get from dreams, or from surprising experiences in daily life when the excitement of a discovery (or a breakthrough, or some good news, or the solution to a longstanding problem) gives you a high. If you’re high, you’re symbolically flying!

I have a deep dislike of airport duty-free shops. I consider them toxic and perverse. Airport design forces you to walk through the shops and breathe in the allergy-inducing odors of perfume. Shady billionaires who stay out of public view profit mightily from their grip on duty-free shopping. In my post I made a passing reference to duty free as a way of saying that “ideal flying” is different from “habitual flying.” Ideally, you’d “fly free” instead of “duty free.” In this context, duty free becomes a representation of all that’s wrong with commercialism, greed, tobacco pushers, profiteers, tax cheaters, and—“Pedro, calm down. Fly free instead of duty free. We get it!”

Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese soccer player, is one of the greatest athletes of all time. Among other things, he can jump quite high. On YouTube his jumps are often depicted in slow motion, and then it looks as if he's jumping super-high and staying aloft for a long time: he’s flying! In my LinkedIn post I take his ability and exaggerate it: seven meters high, five minutes long, wow. Exaggeration is a lie, but the lie hints at the symbolic truth of perception, imagination, and possibility. Subsequently I took one of Ronaldo’s jumping goals and created a little remix, with my own soundtrack. Now we have exaggeration and distortion in a multimedia setting, at the service of metaphysics. The soundtrack hypnotizes you, the images beguile you, and you become a true believer: “Human flying, with no jetpack, no nothing! I’ve seen it with these very eyes!”

Cristiano Ronaldo is a brilliant innate talent, and he works extremely hard at maintaining and improving his athletic skills. In his own way, he flies admirably. But what about us, average men and women with the character defect of being disembodied introverted intellectuals, unfit and lazy and—hey, we can fly too! Because the kind of flying we’re talking about is an activity of the imagination. And the imagination is the most powerful of all human attributes. We imagine problems (we’re really good at it!) and we imagine solutions (we’re pretty decent at it!). We imagine fears, situations, conversations, relationships, theories, friends, enemies, gods, and devils; we imagine a whole universe. And if we imagine our own flight, up we go: to the moon and back, at the speed of light.

The Leonardo and Dante remarks are jokes that also play the role of “labyrinth entry points.” Leonardo was supremely creative. And a creative spark sometimes feels like an explosion in your head. I Google-translated the expression “explode in the head” into Italian, and "esplodere in testa" was born. I added the date of Leonardo’s death, 1521, which possibly is another joke—maybe Leonardo died from his exploding testa. Or maybe he was already dead when he invented this remarkable creative technique.

Leonardo worked as a military engineer for one of his patrons. It appears that he also designed a sort of pioneering theoretical helicopter, which centuries later would inspire aspects of modern aeronautics. Through a process of free association, the expression "helicopter of the soul" came to my mind while I was day-dreaming about Leonardo. I Google-translated it, and now we have the famous “elicottero dell'anima,” which didn’t exist until I imagined it.

But I decided to assign this invention not to the Leonardo of my imagination, but to the Dante of my imagination. Dante’s La Divina Commedia leads the reader through the passage or ascent from hell to heaven, perhaps the ultimate flight. As with my Leonardo joke, I chose to refer to the year of Dante’s death, 1321. Thanks to it a metaphysically inclined person might get thinking about death, eternity, and all that. Also, isn’t 1321 a lovely number in itself? Say it out loud: one-three-two-ONE! Numerology. Gematria. The Kabbalah. Numbers are wonderful triggers of symbolic speculation, or “labyrinth entry points.” You know . . . the labyrinth of the imagination. The Labyrinth of Life.

Incidentally, I know very little about Leonardo and Dante (or the Kabbalah or gematria). My jokes don’t demonstrate that I’m erudite; they demonstrate that I’m silly. But Wikipedia is there for you to visit and explore. All you need is a first step: “Dante,” for instance. His Wikipedia page has dozens of hyperlinks to other pages, each of which has dozens of hyperlinks to other pages, each of which . . . You’ll esplodere in testa, mamma mia! You can also attempt to read Divina Commedia, in the original or in translation. Life is short, though Dante is eternal. “La vita è breve, ma Dante è eterno.”

I concluded my LinkedIn paragraph with a brief statement. Paraphrasing and plagiarizing George Bernard Shaw, let me quote myself, to spice up the conversation: “Ultimately, it’s very simple: sit, close your eyes, and fly, fly, fly!” This is an abbreviated affirmation of the power of the imagination.

My original paragraph has less than 150 words. My explanation of what I tried to pack into it is ten times longer. The German word for “poet” is Dichter, which comes from Dichte, “density.” The poet condenses language and makes a few words say a lot of things. The language of the symbolic dimension, of metaphor and metaphysics, is necessarily distinct from the language of the material world, of technique and physical facts.

A helicopter manual reads very differently from La Divina Commedia.

To the materially inclined, metaphor seems incomprehensible (and probably reprehensible too). But We The Imaginatively Inclined, we need, we need—we need!—exaggeration, distortion, lies, jokes, allusions, ambiguity, neologisms, fake erudition, uncredited paraphrases, free association, non sequiturs, ad hoc, pro bono, and lies. And jokes. It’s our attempt at grasping the ungraspable, which according to Dante “è la cosa più importante nella vita.”