Rehosting "Envying the dead: SkyKing in memoriam"

Repost from August 12, 2018

Yesterday a man named Richard Russel hijacked a plane, went for a joyride, and crashed to his death. On the face of it, that doesn’t sound like a man thousands of people he had never met would mourn.

Many more than he had ever expected to care, I’m sure. Possibly more people than he had ever met. He certainly wouldn’t have suspected that they would dub him “SkyKing”.

I heard about it in the morning, local time. I ended up not doing anything but think about it all day. It took me a couple of hours to realise that I was actually mourning him. Felt like a big black clot in my chest. Tried talked to different people to figure it all out, but nothing really helped.

It made me think about a song, so I edited a quick effigy from the available footage, thinking I’d cash in on the New Thing on Twitter, and get some dopamine. Then I spent the rest of the day periodically re-watching it, over and over again.

Then I listened to the entire album.

Around 3 P.M., I laid down on the floor and just didn’t get up for about an hour.

At midnight, I told someone a story about my grandfather, and started to cry a little bit. But not about my grandad.

What in the world could inspire such misery?

The Man

Some already claim him as a martyr. The entire event feels biblical, so it’s no surprise. Listening to him speak in his last moments, one cannot ignore the mythical significance. Some comparisons are obvious, mostly Icarus. But something is off. It doesn’t quite fit.

Many of the audio clips making the rounds make his statements sound like a monologue. It is not. He is talking to a series of different people. It’s a dialogue, and that is important to understanding it. That’s what it’s all about. Rich’s last words were not crazy soliloquy. He was having a conversation, and it was entirely understandable.

“I’ve played video games before, so, uh, you know, I know what I’m doing a little bit.”

Taken out of context, people use this to paint the picture of a madman. Listen to the pitch of his voice as he’s saying it. It’s a joke. He’s being massively ironic. Morbidly so. He’s playing on the meme of “video games makes people bad”.

“Sorry, my mic came off, I threw up a little bit”

Typical grossout humor. Puking is the punchline.

“Ah, minum wage, we’ll chalk it up to that. Maybe that’ll grease the gears a little bit with the higher ups”

Again, I cannot stress this enough. Listen to the recordings. The transcripts do not tell the whole story. His voice is cracking, but not in a fashion that sounds like madness. It’s irony and despair. I’d be laughing if I wasn’t crying.

“Hey, I want the coordinates of that Orca; you know, the mama orca with the baby. I want to see that guy. “

Everything Rich does is reaching out. He is daring the people who are trying to “talk him down” to drop the charade and show some humanity. He is not just nonsensically joking and fooling around, he is referencing memes; shared cultural phenomena. He’s daring them to be human.

Punctured by moments of genuine compassion seeping through the cracks;

“I’m sorry about this, I hope this doesn’t ruin your day.”

Bluntly honest. Honesty to a degree most people are too professional to fully comprehend.

“I don’t want to hurt no one. I just want you to whisper sweet nothings into my ear.”

Mixture of both joking and sincerity. He is expressing something honest, but at this point is meeting with such a level of misunderstanding that he says it ironically; knowing that to his listener, his honesty is invisible, indistinguishable from irony. This is a moment of lost faith, and simultaneously a moment of making fun of his own lost faith.

“I’ve got a lot of people that care about me. It’s going to disappoint them to hear that I did this. I would like to apologize to each and every one of them. Just a broken guy, got a few screws loose I guess. Never really knew it, until now.”

What I’ve mostly seen people take away from this is the apology, the Canadian stereotype; “oh I’m sorry”, humble and apologetic to the point of parody. It looks like that, in text. But it doesn’t quite sound like that. The sentence stands out. It rings through your mind. It stays with you.

But not because it’s true. It’s because he’s lying.

This is the point where he gives up. Completely and utterly. Up until this point, landing the plane was an option.

He does not believe he is crazy. Not really. He just feels bad for the people he is talking to, feels bad that he is unable to explain anything in a way that they understand. Unable to get through to them.

He’s patronizing them. And it’s miserable. He accepts that he is truly alone. This is the moment he dies — the plane crash is a formality.

He’s placating them, essentially going “its too complicated for me to explain it to you, in a way you could understand”. It’s sad, and it’s lonely. But there is also a certain power in that; and this is where you bask in this sense of liberation from the whole thing.

He no longer has to explain himself. He is autonomous. Lonelines and liberty must constantly be weighed in a man’s life, and for Rich, this is the moment he experiences ultimate liberty. The plane is not what gives him his moment of weightlessness, it was just a tool to get him to this conversation.

He patronizes them the way he has been patronized by society, by telling benevolent lies. That is tasting power, and he finds that the taste of freedom is bitter.

There is no great victory in it; he is no bully, he’s not rubbing anyone’s noses in it. He is an honorable victor who doesn’t humiliate the loser, a conqueror who doesn’t pillage the town as has sieged.

He is a King, who, after a resounding military victory, goes to pray for the souls and mourn the loss of both his own subjects and the enemy soldiers.

He’s sad about it. Hes mourning the death of language, this barrier between them — that even here, at the breaking point, on the edge of everything — he still cant break through to them.

Tattoo this on my god damn forehead

When he admits to being crazy, he’s lying. The reason that resonates with you, is because that’s what you do too, when you tell someone you’re crazy.

It’s all a big, glaring exposure of just how much of the mental health industry is a cover up.

If Rich was mentally ill, then I am Spartacus.

The Myth

Rich’s story has a mythological structure to it. In a way he embodies some Christ-like patterns. He forgives [the people trying to talk him down] for not understanding him. He is benevolent, and goes out of his way not to hurt anyone in his act of self-destruction.

If Rich was a terrorist, his only target was himself. In his self-destruction, he took no one with him, and he was careful not to do so.

Icarus doesn’t quite fit. Christ doesn’t quite fit. But there is something there, some aesthetic quality that speaks to ones taste for the Good. And it is very difficult to speak about, for fear of endorsing something you do not want to endorse.

I don’t believe for a second that Rich was “insane”. If he was depressed? Depression is the rational minds answer to the experience of existence. Everyone is depressed. Depression is half the parts of sentience.

So what is he?

Rich is Spartacus. He was the spirit of adventure. The lust for freedom. What made him “crack” wasn’t any kind of “internal” problem, some sickness or disease — there was nothing wrong with Richard Russel. He was too honest a man to be able to continue suffering the indignity of modern life, and claimed most striking metaphor humanity has ever thought up for the experience of autonomy, flight.

“Free as a bird.”

When I call him Spartacus, I do so not to explain him as much as to explain you, and what it is about the story, that instinctually makes you love him.

There has been much talk about how Rich must have had such a wonderful moment of serenity, above it all, freed from all. I think this is a mistake. Take his word for it. Listen to him; it’s pretty up here, but he is obviously not happy. He is not serene. He is just lucid.

Liberty and loneliness.

I think the drive to imagine him as serene is born from envy. As Rich revolted against modern life and struck for the stars, experiencing liberty — this, one envies. It is easy to conflate this sensation of envy for liberty with envy for the act itself. I suspect many will, despite what I say or do. These strange acts of non-violence on the border of sanity will only increase in frequency as mankind further strangles itself into the spiritlessness of technology.

If Rich is a martyr, he is a martyr for sentience itself, against the onslaught of technological advancement, the atomization of the individual, and the linguistic apocalypse of Mass- and Social Media.

The Meme

The Barrel Roll did what his attempted dialogue with the poor air control people could not.

From the first moment a recording surfaced. The way in which it spread was exactly what you can hear him craving in his voice, when you listen to the recordings.

There’s thousands of different takes on exactly how and why, but what is shared is a pre-linguistic sense of understanding. Any attempt to explain it comes out feeling “off” and insufficient, like it is note quite enough to fully contain what you are trying to express about him; what he was expressing.

Because the mechanics of the spread of a meme is that it is the simplest, most concise and most effective way of expressing an idea.

You cannot explain Richard Russel. His actions themselves are a better way of saying it, than you could ever find words to. It is beyond words. Explaining Rich, the person, is easy. Banal, even. But that’s not really what anyone wants to do; what you want is to understand the communal Gesamtkunstwerk that has arisen in his memory.

There is a great danger in all of this, and it seems to be on the tip of the tongue on many — few even spit out.

The confliction emotions I felt all day yesterday, was in great part coming to terms with a sense of envy. It’s so overwhelming that it’s almost tactile. I envy his liberation. I envy him as I laugh along with him on the recording. I think to myself; “I get him”.

“If only I could have talked to him, and told him he wasn’t alone.”

Sharing my own deep sense of displacement, of disgruntled indignity. For all of my compassion for him, and rage against a world that is continually falling under darkness, more than anything — I envied a dead man for having tasted dignity.

The story I told someone about my Grandad

My grandad was a cop. He had been a soldier first. He worked in a small village and surrounding farming community, for more than forty years. He was an outdoorsman and a hunter. He grew old to be blind on one eye, deaf on one ear, and wrecked by illness. When he could no longer legally hunt, he still went on long hikes with a packed lunch.

One time, I visited him when he was in hospital. It had been a hot summer, and he had fainted from dehydration, and hurt himself. He was all right. Nothing major. He was just humiliated. And he wouldn’t be allowed to leave until he had been through a series of further humiliations.

He wasn’t a particularly proud man, my grandad. All throughout my childhood, I had only known him to be all stiff-upper-lip about any and all adversity. Grandad never told war stories, and he never, ever told work stories.

We went for a walk, birdwatching. The hospital was on the outskirts of one of the minor cities that he had been working in all his life. It was late fall. The sky was red.

We came to a lake. Out of nowhere, he starts telling me about this one time they found a 10 year old boy, just behind that ridge, over there — just one day too late. His voice didn’t falter. It didn’t crack. It was still his old, commanding voice. But a weakness washed over him, a weight on his old bones, straining his body in shame that he still wanted to do more, but was too old, too tired. He looked away from me.

“People can be so cruel to one another.”

Not a question. Not a wish. Just a statement of fact.

In that moment, he looked like the most pitiful man in the world and the greatest man in the world, all at once.

That’s how I feel about Richard Russel.

One way to reclaim dignity for the living is by showing reverence for the dead.

RIP Skyking.

A big coincidence. Probably no significance to the cross shapes at all huh