Inspired by Richard Bach

Richard David Bach (b. June 23, 1936, Oak Park, Illinois) is an American writer. He is widely known as the author of the hugely popular 1970s best-sellers Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions: The Adventures Of A Reluctant Messiah, and others. His books espouse his philosophy that our apparent physical limits and mortality are merely appearance. He claims to be a direct descendant of Johann Sebastian Bach. He is noted for his love of flying and for his books related to air flight and flying in a metaphorical context. Most of his books have been semi-autobiographical, using actual or fictionalized events from his life to illustrate his philosophy.

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In Out of My Mind , the narrator enters a parallel universe where beings from an earlier era of aviation give him solutions for how to fix some problems with his small Cub plane. Is this something out of your own experience?

"I've been trying to write fiction for years, and I can't seem to pull it off! These events that happened [to the narrator] with needing some small fixes happened to me. The problem door latch was a typical example of saying, "I don't have any earthly idea how this thing is going to work out," and the next morning waking up and there it is! The solution! And then politely, "Oh, that's nice. Thank you, subconscious, I appreciate that." Next, the question crossed my mind: where did that solution come from? I knew it wasn't me thinking, "Well, now let's see, if we attach this to this to this...." It was just a sudden lightning flash of intuition. Somebody, I thought, had to know what it was, before they handed it to me! Of course, I'm always interested in the more dramatic way to discover, instead of saying, "Well, it's a process you don't know about." So the next time an idea came, sure enough, here was this lovely messenger's face all of a sudden looking up at me startled. I was perched like a vulture right near, waiting for my answer."

So how did you make it possible for this vision to appear to you?

"It's nothing strange. It's called a relaxation response. I relax my body completely, relax my mind completely, and then imagine myself at a level where anything can happen. I decided to drift back to see if I could find what was going on, who this messenger was, where this information was coming from. Then I saw the scene that's in the book, this huge hangar. It looked awfully real. I was startled that it could be so crisp, so clear. When I came back into this world, I realized that the hangar had a British sense about it, so I went on the Internet and I began casting around. I said, "Find me something about England and hangars and antique airplanes." It came up with a number of sites, one of them Duxford Aerodrome, with photographs. It felt like ice cubes down my back, because all at once I was looking at the hangar that I had seen in my mind! Even now I can go on the Internet, click on Duxford, and see it again. So of course I went back in my mind and met these people from the aerodrome, who to me are real people. I know they're imaginary characters, but imaginary characters can bring us workable, practical, everyday truth and knowledge with which we can change our lives right here and now."

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Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river.

The current of the river swept silently over them all - young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.

Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks at the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth.

But one creature said at last, 'I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.'

The other creatures laughed and said, 'Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you shall die quicker than boredom!'

But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.

Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.

And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, 'See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!'

And the one carried in the current said, 'I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.'

But they cried the more, 'Saviour!' all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Saviour.

"It's exciting, at first. You think at first that you're different, that you have something special to offer, and that can even be true. Then you remember you're the same person you've always been; the only change is that suddenly your picture is every where and columns are being written about who you are and what you've said and where you're going next and people are stopping to look at you. And you're a celebrity. More accurately, you're a curiosity. And you say to yourself, I don't deserve all this attention!"

She thought carefully. "It isn't you that matters to people when they turn you into a celebrity. It's something else. It's what you stand for, to them."

There's a ripple of excitement when a conversation turns valuable to us, the feel of new powers growing fast. Listen care fully, Richard, she's right!

"Other people think they know what you are: glamour, sex, money, power, love. It may be a press agent's dream which has nothing to do with you, maybe it's something you don't even like, but that's what they think you are. People rush at you from all sides, they think they're going to get these things if they touch you. It's scary, so you build walls around yourself, thick glass walls while you're trying to think, trying to catch your breath. You know who you are inside, but people outside see something different. You can choose to become the image, and let go of who you are, or continue as you are and feel phony when you play the image.

"Or you can quit. I thought if being a moviestar is so won derful, why are there so many drunks and addicts and divorces and suicides in Celebrityville?" She looked at me, unguarded, unprotected. "I decided it wasn't worth it. I've mostly quit."

I wanted to pick her up and hug her for being so honest with me.

"You're the Famous Author," she said. "Does it feel that way to you: does this make sense to you?"

"A lot of sense. There's so much I need to know about this stuff. In the newspapers, have they done this to you? Print things you've never said?"

She laughed, "Things you've not only never said, but never thought, never believed, wouldn't think of doing. A story pub lished about you, with quotes, word for word, made-up. Fiction. You've never seen the reporter . . . not even a phone call, and there you are in print! You pray readers won't believe what they see in some of those papers."

"I'm new at this, but I have a theory."

"What's your theory?" she said.

I told her about celebrities being examples that the rest of us watch while the world puts tests to them. It didn't sound as clear as what she had said.

She tilted her head up to me and smiled. When the sun went down, I noticed, her eyes changed color, to sea-and-moon-light.

"That's a nice theory, examples," she said. "But every body's an example, aren't they? Isn't everybody a picture of what they think, of all the decisions they've made so far?"

"True. I don't know everybody, though: they don't matter to me unless I've met them in person or read about them or seen them on some screen. There was a thing on television a while ago, a scientist researching what it is that makes a violin sound the way it does, I thought what does the world need with that? Millions of people starving, who needs violin research?

"Then I thought no. The world needs models, people living interesting lives, learning things, changing the music of our time. What do people do with their lives who are not struck down with poverty, crime, war? We need to know people who have made choices that we can make, too, to turn us into human beings. Otherwise, we can have all the food in the world, and so what? Models! We love 'em! Don't you think?"

"I suppose," she said. "But I don't like that word, model."

"Why not?" I said, and knew the answer at once. "Were you a model?"

"In New York," she said, as though it were a shameful se cret.

"What's wrong with that? A model is a public example of special beauty!"

"That's what's wrong with it. It's hard to live up to. It frightens Mary Moviestar."

"Why? What's she afraid of?"

"Mary got to be an actress because the studio thought she was so pretty, and she's been afraid ever since that the world is going to find out she isn't that pretty and she never was. Being a model was bad enough. When you call her a public example of being beautiful, it makes it worse for her."

"But Leslie, you are beautiful!" I blushed. "I mean, there's certainly no question that you're extremely appealing...."

"Thank you, but it doesn't matter what you say. No matter what you tell her, Mary thinks beauty is an image someone else created for her. And she's a prisoner of the image. Even when she goes to the grocery store, she should be all done up, just so. If not, somebody is sure to recognize her and they'll say to their friends, 'You ought to see her in person! She's not half as pretty as she's supposed to be!' and Mary's disappointed them." She smiled again, a little sad. "Every actress in Hollywood, every beautiful woman I know is pretending to be beautiful, she's afraid the world will find out the truth about her sooner or later. Me, too,"

I shook my head. "Crazy. You're all crazy."

"The world's crazy, when it comes to beauty."

"I think you're beautiful."

"I think you're crazy."

We laughed, but she wasn't kidding.

"Is it true," I asked her, "that beautiful women lead tragic lives?" It was what I had concluded from my Perfect Woman, with her many bodies. Perhaps not quite tragic, but difficult. Unenviable. Painful.

She considered that. "If they think their beauty is them,' she said, "they're asking for an empty life. When everything depends on looks, you get lost gazing in mirrors and you never find yourself."