"Learning To Fly"

"Learning to Fly" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: https://music.apple.com/us/song/learning-to-fly/1440821514, https://open.spotify.com/track/17S4XrLvF5jlGvGCJHgF51?si=e05518f3683e4607. 

Icarus and Daedalus. Fun Home. Tom Petty. All very clearly connected, right? Well…the first two at least. I listened to “Learning to Fly” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers a few weeks ago and I can’t stop noticing the connections to Fun Home. The connection helped me sort of elucidate the complex analogy of Icarus and Daedalus to Alison and Bruce, so maybe it will make sense to my favorite reader (that’s you). Or maybe you’ll just get a lot more confused. I found that both happened for me at the same time! I have the audio linked in case people want to listen to it on repeat while they read this blog post with a scrunched brow and squinted eyes. 

“Well I started out down a dirty road / Started out all alone.” Bruce started his exploration of his sexuality in an isolated small town, where few people were like him, and none were outwardly expressive of their sexuality. In this sense, Bruce “Started out all alone.” Emphasis on started, as we see later on in Fun Home that Bruce was kind of stuck between two communities that would have accepted him, had he made the jump. But either way, I see this road as being a “dirty” one: it led to isolation and self-hate.

“And the sun went down as I crossed the hill / And the town lit up, the world got still.” Alison’s journey was not begun “all alone,” in the same sense that Bruce’s was. A pivotal moment in Alison’s gender identity was affirmed perhaps before she could really articulate it. At the age of five, Alison and Bruce saw the woman in traditionally male clothing and short hair. In Alison’s eyes, the “town lit up, the world got still,” in a sense. Alison herself writes, “I recognized her with a surge of joy,” and later asserts, “the vision of the truck-driving bulldyke sustained me through the years.” Identifying with something you think is simply a unique experience makes you feel seen; something “lights up” for you, as it did for Alison in that moment.

“I’m learning to fly but I ain’t got wings / Coming down is the hardest thing.” From Bruce’s perspective, perhaps this is why he can’t “learn to fly.” He doesn’t have wings. Coming down is the hardest thing. These represent the excuses he fed himself throughout his life. 

“Well the good old days may not return / and the rocks might melt and the sea may burn.” Because of Bruce’s excuses and self-hate, he never had these “good old days” to look back on that he sees Alison experience. Bruce’s regret could have led to his death, whether intentional or apathetic (but not, I should say, if the death was completely unanticipated by Bruce).

Here’s where it gets interesting. “I’m learning to fly (learning to fly) but I ain’t got wings (learning to fly) / Coming down (learning to fly) is the hardest thing (learning to fly).” Alison is the one learning to fly (Icarus), but she doesn’t have wings, signifying the need for Bruce to create her wings for her (although, how well he does that is debatable--the point is that he’s there). This is exactly what Alison points out in the beginning passages of the book, introducing her father and herself as both Icarus and Daedalus. I find it interesting that Alison compares her father to Icarus saying, “It was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky.” Bruce’s turmoil stems from the fact that he never really jumped…so how could he have fallen? Is it possible that never jumping is a form of falling? Perhaps the floor eventually just crumbles under the growing weight of life, and to jump would be the superior option than to fall permanently and irrevocably (I mean death, here, as Alison alluded to when she described her father as plummeting from the sky). To add more layers, the echo of “(learning to fly)” throughout the chorus makes me imagine a sort of encouragement. I can imagine this from either perspective--Bruce, silently, but genuinely, cheering on his daughter for her openness, and Alison, silently and perhaps heartbreakingly hoping her dad can come to terms with who he is as she has. 

“Well some say life will beat you down / Break your heart, steal your crown.” This line, in a convoluted mess, and of no particular connection to the previous point I was making, reminds me of how Alison’s mother wanted her not to be Lesbian, because she believed, “There are dangers that your idealistic outlook seems not to have faced.”

“So I've started out for God knows where I guess I'll know when I get there.” Life may beat you down, but denying who you really are also beats you down. It’s a world of hurt, and Alison made her choice. She “started out for God knows where,” and made the leap Bruce never could.

“I'm learning to fly around the clouds / But what goes up (Learning to fly) / Must come down.” This is an ominous note to end on, and I admit I’m not sure how it fits in with the narrative I’ve been weaving. Does it mean that Alison’s flight must end? Or is this about Bruce now? About his death? “Coming down” instead of coming out? Alison is the one who took her wings and took flight, and Bruce is there to catch her when she falls, because he never left the ground (or perhaps fell even deeper, you know, with the whole ground crumbling beneath him thing I was rambling about. However far she falls, he will be there to catch her. That’s pretty strangely beautiful.) Or maybe it’s about Alison eventually falling to death, as her father did, as we all must. Maybe it signifies that nothing is subject to steadfastness apart from change itself (“nought may endure but mutability”? Eh?). Or maybe it’s just plain and simple physics. What goes up, must come down.