Captain Elmo Jayawardena’s recent essay, ‘Changing Places with Jonathan’ based on the seagull of long ago, and his confession, “Yes, Richard Bach created the unforgettable seagull, and I plagiarized and named my Pelican friend the same,” made me return to that most read, inspirational fable of the last century. ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’ seemed to provide much needed inspiration and rejuvenation in the current background of eternal worry and fear.
As many critics say, books come in all shapes and sizes, and more often than not they grow proportionally to how much their authors have to say and share with the world. There are, however, certain books that are different. Such a book is Richard Bach‘s ‘Jonathan,’ where an immense world of ideas is communicated through a very short and concise story. This means that, while the book itself can easily be finished in a single session, it is nevertheless recognized around the world as being one of the more unique and inspiring works of writing ever published, and has continued to have a profound effect on its readers ever since its publication decades ago.
As critic Larry Slawson writes, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is tired of living a life of routine and nothingness that is espoused by the flock of seagulls that surround him daily. He desires to rise above this type of lifestyle with the pursuit of knowledge and experimentation through flying. By acting like all of the other seagulls, Jonathan was incapable of having a purpose within his life. By going against the traditional norms upheld by his flock, however, Jonathan is capable of pursuing his dream and discovers a newfound purpose in life. His constant pursuit of knowledge leads him to become a creature of “excellence and intelligence and skill.” By following his dream of flying, Jonathan is able to achieve true happiness.
Bach writes: Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight—how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly…. This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one’s self popular with other birds.”
Yet, it is not as if Jonathan does not want to belong to his flock. He tries to behave like other gulls, “…screeching and fighting with the flock around the piers and fishing boats, diving on scraps of fish and bread.” Doing so, he realizes his resolve not to pursue what he loves and to act like the rest of his species has some benefits:”He felt better for his decision to be just another one of the flock. There would be no ties now to the force that had driven him to learn there would be no more challenge and no more failure.”
But his sense of belonging is short-lived. He finds the mundane life of the average gull meaningless and goes back to his flying, trying to perfect his technique, sometimes failing, sometimes experiencing great success.
One day, after breaking the speed record of a seagull in flight, he tells his flock of the freedom he has experienced, “Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there’s a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!” However, instead of sharing his enthusiasm, the flock shuns and banishes him, saying, “we are put into this world to eat, to stay alive as long as we possibly can.”
Thus, Jonathan flies into exile, regretting only the blindness of his fellows. He realizes that “boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short.” As he is flying one day, two unusually beautiful and skilled seagulls join him and tell him that they have come to take him “home” to begin a new kind of learning. In his new home, he finds like-minded seagulls who experience the freedom of flight.
Jonathan’s wish to fly high comes as no surprise given the fact that Bach himself has always been ‘a creature of the sky.’ He sees flying as “that primal wish in all of us not to be tied by gravity,to be that curious soul above it all.”
Bach says he was a struggling aviation-writer when a “voice” spoke to him, saying the name “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” Inspired by the voice and two subsequent “cinematic visions” that occurred years apart, he eventually finished a 30-page novella about a seagull who goes off on his own and dedicates his life to flying artfully rather than just pragmatically. The feathery parable of ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’, soon became one of the top-grossing novels ever written.
Not surprisingly, should one ask Richard Bach about his writing technique one will hear the kind of reply only he could give. “I don’t have any special techniques that other writers don’t have; it comes from the idea itself,” he explains. “Irving Stone, for instance, did enormous amounts of research, just boxes and boxes of index cards and he wrote the most beautiful books from that. I am exactly the opposite; I use almost no notes, no research other than my life. My life is my research, and I obviously draw upon my own experience in my stories, but that’s it. I have just a hazy, foggy notion of where this thing might be going. When I was writing “Running from Safety” I had no idea until something like page 342, who one of the characters was. There was this other person hiding behind the character.”
Astounding though this may seem Bach also believes the ironic thing about writing is that it’s an intellectual pursuit but to get there you have to be stupid. The mantra, according to Bach is “to get networked into “Don’t care.” If we think that we must be erudite, intellectual, and must never be seen as foolish, you’ve really started out on the wrong foot as a writer. Most new writers do just that. It takes a lot of experience to learn that the gift I have to give is my foolishness. It’s the craziness of my ideas that make them interesting, make them worthwhile. Once we learn to relax and not worry about how the reader, the editor, or the publisher think of us. Then we can get down to the interesting writing.”
There is no doubt that this theory works. How else would Bach have written ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’ – the iconic phenomenal best-seller that speaks to people who follow their hearts and make their own rules...people who get special pleasure out of doing something well...people who know there is more to living than what meets the eye.
This then, is a book that gives profound life lessons. There is nothing to prevent you from seeking a higher purpose in life, even if your flock, tribe or neighbourhood finds your ambition threatening (at one point our beloved gull is even banished from his flock). By not compromising his higher vision, Jonathan learns the meaning of love and kindness and gets the ultimate payoff – transcendence. Along with the dreamy illustrations by Russell Munson “Jonathan” provides just the right reading material at a time when the life we have always known has turned upside down.
Perhaps this is the time to fly high; to follow our own path in life and so fulfill our true potential.
As Bach says, “Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.”
Add new comment