Panic attack disorder really messes with you. It stops you from doing the things you really want to do. It prevents you from enjoying life. And because—intellectually—you know the fear it generates is irrational, it not only steals life from you, but leaves you feeling guilty for letting it. “If only I could have been brave,” you think. If only you could have stared down the beast.
You never feel so much like an animal as when you are having a panic attack; the urge to escape is all-encompassing. Your heart is pumping blood faster than it ever has before. Every second is elongated. Whatever you didn’t smell before is suddenly suffocating you. Whatever you didn’t see before is suddenly ballooning across your visual field and, oh, was that color always so bright? Noises are all so loud, touch is all so much.
You must get away, your body tells you, your cells tell you, your bile tells you—get away or you’ll die! But where do you go? You start to disassociate. You sink into feelings of surreality. Is this you? Whose are these eyes you’re seeing out of? There’s an extra step between the thought and the movement of the hands. The part of your mind that is not ruled by the clump of cells that kept your distant ancestors safe from Things With Jaws is perfectly aware there is nothing to be afraid of. There are no jaws. There is no predator. There is no cause for fear. But there is still fear.
Gripping, penetrating, chemical, animal fear.
Against the wash of hormones, the cerebral cortex holds no power, it can only watch you, watch itself, detached and analytical. It realizes—quite quickly, really, and in parallel—two things. One: that the thing you need to escape from is yourself, and Two: that, therefore, there is no escape. Be reasonable, it asks you. But who can escape their own mind? No matter. The urge is still there, and it’s so hard to suppress. Now extrapolate the fear of having a panic attack to the enclosed cabin of an airplane at 35,000 ft.
You see the problem, I’m sure. And yet…
A year ago today, after a lifetime in fear of flying, I got on a plane for the very first time. How?
The Maker of Middle-earth exhibit came to New York.
I’d been drawn back into my Tolkien Obsession about four years before, digging deeper than I had in over a decade into notes and reference books. I was remembering what Middle-earth had meant to me—what it had given me—when I was a teen. In light of all that, could I miss what might be the only chance in my entire life to see some of these things in person?
But it was a long drive, I didn’t want to go alone, and we only had so many free days during my husband’s spring break. And it was New York! I’d never been to New York. Think of all the other things we could see while we were there! Did we want to spend that time driving instead? I tied myself in knots for days while ticket prices rose, until a scant week remained before we’d have to leave. Watching the turmoil practically radiate from me, my husband turned to me and said, “If you go, and you see it, will you cry?”
I didn’t even have to think: “Yes.”
He smiled, though he had already known the answer. “Then you should go. Do you want me to order the tickets now?”
I swallowed, then froze.
This was a trip about Tolkien, about my greatest love, the primary lease-holder of my brain.
So why am I peppering this with comic panels?
In 1976 Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Dave Cockrum decided to shake things up in a comic called The Uncanny X-Men. They wanted to add a cosmically powerful character, and they wanted this character to be a woman—a first for parent company, Marvel.
Marvel hadn’t had the most progressive run with their female leads. X-Men in particular had started out with only a single woman on the team: the kind telekinetic Jean Grey, whose primary characterization seemed to be her gender. She had experienced some changes in the 13 years since the first issue of X-Men was published, the revelation that she was also a telepath among them. We’d later learn that her powers developed too early when she telepathically linked, in desperation, with her best friend, Annie, as Annie lay dying, allowing Jean to feel what it was to die without dying herself, causing her to grow into the fundamentally compassionate human being we knew so well. But back in the mid 70s, compared to the more diverse and exciting cast that Len Wein had devised for Giant Sized X-men #1, Jean seemed perhaps rather dull, and when Claremont took over, her character decided to leave superhero life behind. Or so it seemed.
Pulled out of retirement on a space mission gone wrong, Jean finds herself trapped with her former teammates on a space shuttle. The shuttle is on a re-entry course, but must pass through a massive solar flare. Sealing her teammates, many against their will, in the shuttle’s only shielded chamber, Jean does the most quintessentially Jean thing: she decides to sacrifice herself for her friends. She telepathically absorbs the flight training of the only pilot on board, locks herself in the cockpit, and prays she can use her telekinetic shield to keep herself alive long enough to land the shuttle.
We do not get to see what happens to her, and nor do her friends, as the shuttle crashes into Jamaica Bay. But we know. This time Jean did die: either her flesh was burned to ash by the sun’s fury, or her body was crushed in the crash, or was she drowned in the depths of the bay. She is truly gone.
But Phoenix Rises in her place.
Claremont took the woman perceived as the weakest of the X-Men and made her Marvel’s first cosmic female hero, a being that has “the power to cut and re-grow any part of the universe, as well as destroy it entirely, which is part of the Phoenix’s purpose: ‘The Judgment of the Phoenix’, to burn away what doesn’t work.” The Phoenix Force is described as being “the embodiment of the very passion of Creation—the spark that gave life to the Universe, the flame that will ultimately consume it.” And the first thing she destroys and remakes is herself.
Not many issues hence, she’ll do the same for the whole of Creation. Claremont even goes so far with his purple prose to dip into Kabbalah. Phoenix becomes Tiphareth, the Sephiroth at the center of the Tree of Life, “the force that integrates the Sefira of Chesed (“compassion”) and Gevurah (“Strength, or Judgment (din)”). These two forces are, respectively, expansive (giving) and restrictive (receiving).”
If you search for info on Phoenix you’ll inevitably be inundated with articles about the span of Uncanny X-Men issues known as The Dark Phoenix Saga, and with good reason: The Dark Phoenix Saga—the events that follow Jean’s transformation and quest to save Creation—is still considered one of the greatest of all comics arcs. In it Jean-Phoenix—under the influence of a powerful, manipulative telepath who wants to use her limitless power—is twisted into something fundamentally without compassion, a threat to the whole of the universe. Understanding this, she chooses to die again, to save the world and the people she loves from what she has become.
The intricacies and implications of this transformation and the devolution that followed it are a post for another time. Suffice it to say that any human, even an incredibly compassionate one, struggles to adjust to godhood; the ability to care, empathetically, about all of life made the Jean-Phoenix capable of rebuilding a dying universe, but perhaps (just perhaps) it also made everything in that universe lose all meaning.
But Tolkien. This was about Tolkien. And airplanes. And New York. And the Feast of the Annunciation.
Before I knew Frodo I knew Jean; I knew the woman who died twice for those she loved–once to save them from the burning heat of re-entry and once to save them from herself–and in between looked the universe in the eye, and understood it was good, and gave it another chance. Before Tolkien codified in me a kind of personal mythology, gave me a vocabulary for my spiritual relationship to the world, I had Phoenix and her birth from the ashes of what had been Jean Grey.
Now, sitting there with my husband waiting for an answer, I opened up my iPad and pulled up flight dates and our potential flight path on Google (because I deal with fear through research). And I laughed. We’d be there on March 25th, and we’d have to pass over Jamaica Bay as we came in to land.
“Buy it,” I said.
And so I, a 38 year old woman, dyed my hair red, threaded my film reproduction One Ring onto a silver chain around my neck, and boarded a plane for the first time. Fortified by love, Xanax, and a personalized mythology, I saw clouds from the top side. Imagine how many tens of thousands of years humans existed when not one of them could have said that. I saw dinosaurs, I saw Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, I saw an amazing view for three nights from our hotel room.
And I saw Maker of Middle-earth.
Today is March 25th, The Feast of the Annunciation and, not coincidentally, the day the One Ring falls into the fires of Orodruin. It’s the day I flew over Jamaica Bay and burned away the part of me that didn’t work. It’s a day of promise. Of expectation. Of new life. The promise of redemption, and the power of compassion—and pity—to change the world.
And that is what stories can do. That is why we tell them. That is why we read them. That is how we live in times that are good and in times that are bad. That is why, when there were only stars in the night to give light, those stars became things with stories—people, animals, gods—and like lanterns they illuminated the dark of both the sky and the soul, mapping out meaning, obliterating the shadows where the Things With Jaws dwelt.
Notes
- Comic panels are taken from The Uncanny X-Men issues #100, #101, and #108.
- https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Phoenix_Force_(Earth-616
- https://www.comicbasics.com/jean-grey-to-the-dark-phoenix/
- “A new pattern forms—shaped like the mystic Tree of Life—with Xavier its lofty crown and Colossus its base. Each X-man has a place, each a purpose greater than himself or herself. And the heart of the Tree, the catalyst that binds these wayward souls together, is Phoenix, Tiphareth, Child of the Sun, Child of Life, the vision of the harmony of things.”
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiferet
- There is very little in the Marvel universe as intricate (and as prone to retcon) as Jean and Phoenix.
- The Ring is treacherous. As we were sitting down to dinner just before we left the Ring somehow caught on the underside of the table, broke the chain, and forced me to wear it on my finger for the rest of the trip.
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