In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

AIRPLANES 5
the expert hands of Casey Jones, noted for his feats of daring. The only
other passenger was Wade Morton, driver of racing cars, who finished
fourth in the last 500-mile classic at Indianapolis." [see Automobiles]
Thus, not only does Tunney break a record even before the weighing-in
ceremony ("For the first time in the history of heavyweight championships,
the challenger flew forth to the field of battle"); even more impressively,
"not content with the prospect of facing Dempsey and destiny,
[he] had to defy death, too." Since flying is associated with the risk of
death, it imparts an aura of transcendence to those actions and events
with which it becomes connected. Upon his arrival in Philadelphia,
Tunney, the "Fighting Marine," gives one of his notorious "philosophical
explanations." "If I crash, it won't matter," declares the challenger
to the crowd of journalists awaiting him at a Navy airfield. "After all,
the longest life is very short. Of course, it's [promoter] Rickard's show,
but it's my life, don't forget it." [see Action = Impotence (Tragedy),
Immanence = Transcendence (Death)] The stage directions for Jean Cocteau's
tragedy Orphee seem to invert this association between airplanes
and dying. Since the myth of Orpheus deals with death, Cocteau wants
the interior of Orpheus' house to remind the spectators of airplanes:
"The decor will evoke the airplanes or ships in the trompe-l'oeil pictures
taken by photographers at county fairs" (Cocteau, 17).
Every flight is a contest with death, and pilots may lose this contest
even if they do not crash. According to the French magazine Man Cine,
Rudolph Valentino dies of endocarditis and septicemia in a New York
hospital on Monday, August 23, at 12:10 P.M. (exactly one month before
the Dempsey-Tunney fight) because an airplane fails to arrive in time
with life-saving medicine: bad weather forces it to land in Boston on its
way from Detroit to New York. In Ernst Jiinger's Feuer und Biut, airplanes
are a recurrent element in the most extreme existential situations
of the Great War. The first-person narrator sees, "on the summit of a
small hill in the distance, the somber silhouette of a wrecked aircraft and
a ruined house" (142), and his life is constantly being threatened by
enemy planes that control the battlefield from above: "Aircraft hunt
above us; one of them plummets to the ground, enveloped in flames. It
is consumed by huge jets of fire" (156-157). Whenever the flying machines
are German, the ambiguous blend of danger and beauty turns into
the more homogeneous impression of a dramatic landscape: "Night is
falling. The sun has already disappeared in the west behind blood-red