Salto mortale
I’ve been thinking about writing a blog for a long time. But it’s never the right time. It certainly isn’t the right time now: I have job applications to send out, a new city to move to, a podcast episode to edit. If I can’t find the right time, then the wrong time will have to do.
Seth Godin talks about the phrase salto mortale in this talk of his¹. The leap of faith that is integral and characteristic to making art. “You have to jump off the cliff and grow wings on the way down,” he says, citing Kurt Vonnegut². Or as Jason Mraz says (quoting John Burroughs) in Make It Mine, “Leap, and the net will appear.”
But what goes unsaid is that growing wings while falling isn’t incidental. Falling might in fact be the only way to grow wings. Like that scene in The Dark Knight Rises, where Bruce Wayne has to “make the climb” without a rope in order to get out of the pit.
So. Here goes…something.
He randomly trashes plumbers in the middle. Bizarre.
He says it was said by Kurt Vonnegut, but from what I understand, it should be attributed to Ray Bradbury. There’s a whole article on Quote Investigator about it.
