if we do not hang together

A long time ago in a town called Cordoba there was a young music teacher named Abbas. Abbas was earnest, ambitious, well-known around town. Abbas was consumed with an obsession that nearly ended his life.

Abbas was utterly obsessed with the notion that, like the birds, he could fly.
Now, there are a lot of crags around Cordoba, and a lot of birds, so there was plenty for young Abbas to pay attention to. He had a keen eye and an inventor's zeal. He was certain that he would be the first human being to soar among the clouds, the very first to ascend to the heavens. He would leave behind this great crusher gravity, remove his feet from the earth, and dance up with the gulls and eagles. He would be gone from down here, from his prosaic music-teaching existence, and ascend past the height of poetry to somewhere newer, better, that none of his fellows could go. Like a falling angel's opposite number, he would blaze up toward Heaven.

Abbas watched the birds. He made sketches. He began to spend every waking moment nursing his idea, sleeping with it held close when he could sleep. Wood and cloth took shape by his workbench, changing every day with some new addition, some adjustment of the curves. He would collect feathers, and attach them to it wherever he could. And finally Abbas had a pair of wings, a great sail he could strap to himself and fly away with. So he made the announcement: everyone from far and wide should show up to the cliffs outside of town tomorrow afternoon, because for the first time in human history, a man would fly like a bird.

Now, in that day and age, there wasn't much to do around Cordoba that didn't involve hard work and sheep. And when the choice is your day's labor, or a spectating at a grandiose tragedy, most human beings don't have a difficult time choosing.

The hour came, and there was Abbas; some say on the roof of a tower, some say with his feet firmly planted on the cliff-top. His miraculous wings were strapped to his back. And, depending on who you listen to, he was naked, and had glued feathers all over his body. Abbas made his announcement. And then he made his leap.

Abbas and his wings soared, but they didn't get to Heaven. The man transfigured sailed in a straight line for the length of three football fields, by all accounts, over grass and trees and houses and an astonished crowd. And it was only then that Abbas realized, in a flash of insight, that he had forgotten one feature in his design, had passed over one function of a flying machine that ought be considered earlier than late into its maiden flight.
He hadn't thought to design it to land.

The music teacher came to Earth again with a sickening crunch, alive but broken in the wreckage of his miraculous wings. And in his long convalescence, Abbas had plenty of time to modify his design, to become obsessed with newer, better wings, wings that had a tail like a bird's attached, a mechanism for steering and slowing down so a flying man could safely return home to the ground. The trouble was, Abbas couldn't get a running start any more. He could barely walk. And there were, shockingly, no volunteers to test the new pinions, and they mouldered, unused.

Abbas ibn Firnas didn't get to Heaven. He did not make it, alone, to the dome of the blue sky, there to leave behind a normal life forever. But he did have another hobby, and a new obsession. Abbas couldn't get up to Heaven, but he could bring a piece of it down.

So he ground lenses. He built telescopes. And, immersed in study, surrounded by skeptics, Abbas began a new masterwork: an intricate planetarium, one that would bring the stars and the planets close enough for anyone to touch, not just one flying man with a broken dream. It had to be perfect. It had to mimic the wheeling of the constellations, the positions of the Sun and Moon, even the weather. He worked on it, day and night, with his back and legs aching from old disappointments.

Abbas wasn't a young man forever, but by the time he was an old man, there it was: a piece of the sky brought down for everyone to see, a bit of Heaven you could get close to with your feet still on the ground. And by all accounts, he died happy.

That planetarium is gone, but it can still instruct us. Too many of us think if we can leave our fellows behind, if we can just make our devices perfect, we can escape from our human contexts. We can get out of where and what we are, and get to our own Heaven, so long as we're willing to leave everyone else behind. We can make our one pair of wings and ascend. As it turns out, some of us even manage to fly a ways, to soar over houses and mud and gravity, over oppression and degradation, over our own histories. We manage for a little while to separate ourselves out and get close to what we want.
And then it all comes crashing down, and there's nobody there to catch us, there's nobody there willing to carry on our schemes for us, there's nobody who understands what we were trying to do. And it's our fault. We didn't include them from the first. We didn't explain it. We didn't want their help, or their contagion, or the embarrassment of association with them. We wanted to get ours, and get away, and buy that ticket to the skies.

There is another way. It means not getting everything we want, sometimes. It means tinkering with the dream, a little. It means giving up flying away from all the dirt and rock we stand on, and seeing what can be done down here. It means letting go the notion that, alone, we can leave behind others and escape context and history. It means working for each other, not just ourselves.

We can bring some of that Heaven to each other, instead of running for it alone. We can build it, right here where we stand, if only we can set aside the self-centered obsessions for a moment and take stock of what we have. We can sacrifice that lone flight into the wild blue in exchange for making a better world that all of us can share, one with joys for the folk who don't have the privilege of spending days and months building personal flying machines. We can look past the privilege of miraculous wings and devote ourselves to a greater, deeper, more long-lived miracle: creating edifices on the ground that elevate all people. Not everyone has the money and time and material to buy their own wings and workshops. Not everyone can climb a cliff to begin with, let alone wearing nothing but feathers and pride. Why do we keep thinking that it will work to abandon those around us and, by so doing, buy our way to the gates of Paradise? Why do so many of us forget how much we can all see if we just join hands, take up our tools, and dream together?

There are many of us with a half-finished pair of wings in the yard, a new design set aside for far too long, the wreckage of one that didn't work out, the broken bits of past disappointments and hurts. The one thing that can heal those wounds is community. It is solidarity. It is letting others in and joining with them to contribute to something larger than our own comfort and ambition. It is choosing to use what privilege we do have to give more people access to what, before, was far out of reach. Let others invent the hang glider and the airplane and the Tower of Babel. Let us instead turn our brilliance toward something that can be shared, and that, because of its collective strength and firm human foundation, is much harder to knock down.