WEEKLY WRITER’S PATH #22
My Superman obsession began last month at the public library where I found Christopher Reeve’s autobiography, Still Me in the book-stop where they sell used paperbacks for a dollar, hardcovers for two.
One slightly blurry photo, a moment frozen in time, shows him sitting straight and tall on his horse, Buck, at a riding competition only six hours before he was paralyzed for life. I borrowed two dollars from Asher and brought the book home.
Strange coincidences began. A song would be playing in my head, in the background. When I brought it to the foreground, it was, “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind,” (Jim Croce); or, “I am, I am, I am Superman. And I can do anything,” (REM); or "Kryptonite!" (3 Doors Down).
As you know, I’ve been cleaning out my shed to turn it into a studio, and one evening I was looking through my high school yearbook from 1978. Under the grainy photo of a group of teenagers in downtown LaGrange, the caption read, “Lining up for the premiere of Superman.”
I met a nurse for a paraplegic with the same injury as Reeve: the broken neck of a hanged man. I mentioned this to her and she said that her patient had actually met Christopher Reeve, when he had come through Australia after his accident.
I saw an ad from JC Penney with a father and son wearing Superman t-shirts. I stopped at our newspaper recycling rack and just stared.
And more coincidences came to me as I read books, or listened to the radio, or talked to friends. Images about hidden identity, wheelchair-bound heroes, flying through the sky.
Did I mention I have a fear of falling? The fear is that I will suddenly lose control and throw myself off of the edge of where I am standing, or plummet to earth in a plane crash. I can feel the reckless tension in the pit of my stomach. What would happen if I gave into it? The fear is that there is a part of me that actually wants to do it. In 2003, I had a vivid dream of an astronaut falling from the sky, beaten and battered on his way down. That morning we watched the news about the Columbia space shuttle breaking apart on reentry.
Why were all these images coming to me? Driving in the car, I described synchronicity to Asher. It’s not just when two things happen at the same time, I told him, like thunder and lightning, but when two things that are not related to each other keep happening in a pattern. That’s what defines synchronicity.
Then, in last Sunday’s newspaper magazine there was an article on the new Superman movie. I was stunned. I honestly didn’t know there was a new movie coming out. Perhaps this explained my participation in this series of related events—I was tapping into a collective unconscious and our need for a hero in a cape with a very human visage.
So we rented the old Superman, the first movie, the one that made Reeve a Hollywood star. I had never seen it before. It was amazing to watch this man walking and talking, like a resurrection. The sexuality and easy openness as Lois interviews him, the freedom she enjoys flying above the city at night, the loss and the rage Superman feels when she dies—all impacted me strongly. It was like I was grieving for him years after the grieving process was over.
Yesterday I met with my writing coach, Sarah. We discussed work, creativity, writing projects. In two hours I caught her up on every important thing going on in my life except for this Superman synchronicity. I had brought Still Me and it sat on the table until the drops of rain began coming down through the latticework of the outdoor café. We had touched on the sparseness and beauty that screenplay plots require, and I brought her a page from The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyalaman. She recommended his next movie called Unbreakable.
As I sat down to watch my “homework,” the plot unfolded, image by image, the story of a superhero—unknown by his family, but fighting for good, with a cape and an awful understanding of his one flaw, his kryptonite.
There are moments when you can tell you are on the outside edge of a movement, when the universe keeps putting things in your path until you have to admit, OK, I hear you. I’m listening.
