Last night I dreamt I saw a man falling off a kind of ledge. In the dream, I think he is a cousin of mine. My wife and I rush outside. I dread to think of the sight I might see. But once I look down I see that he is up and working as if nothing had happened. I’m astonished.

I recently attended a sociology conference on International Political Anthropology at the Waterford Institute of Technology. One of the presentations, given by Tom Boland of WIT, was on the theme of falling. I was very taken by the talk. Afterwards, and again this morning after my dream, I couldn’t get that gorgeous music Falling, from the film Once, out of my mind.

I don’t have my notes from Tom’s lecture but, from memory and whatever my own mind might bring to the theme, I took from it how falling is often like a window from one state of being into another. It can be the metaphor for seeming good luck or bad luck. But in any event it instigates change. We fall in, or out, of love. We fall out with a friend. We fall headlong into something, in the metaphorical sense. We fall on our feet – succeed from the outset, get a good start. We fall apart. Yeats’ famous poem The Second Coming talks of things falling apart (the best lose all conviction etc.). An astonishing poem. A fall from grace. The Fall of Man. Or Alice falling through to a different world. Likewise too with The Wizard of Oz (I think!). We may ‘fall apart’ in a crisis.

Falling can be an opportunity, although it is often experienced as a threat. We move from one mode of being to another. We may fall on hard times. The dead of a war are called the Fallen. This metaphor of falling seems to be all around us. ‘Don’t fall!’ a mother implores her young child, and as the child grows older the mother may have the same aspiration but apply it to her growing or grown offspring making a success of life and being happy.

People do fall apart. Lives disintegrate. Eden is vulnerable and some people live and die and might hardly, or never, taste it. Losing our balance in life – integrating a healthy lifestyle, harmonious relationships, a fulfilling career, bodily and mental strength, a sense of meaning in one’s life – can take a tumble from time to time. We juggle many things and little wonder if sometimes the things we juggle with might fall to the floor.

We are but human, men and women. People of flesh and blood. In Freud’s terms, we are superego and id, ideals and passions. We may aspire to greatness but we always have the matter of dust in our essence, into which we will return. I’m reading Hemingway at the moment: For Whom the Bell Tolls. Gosh, what a book. And the clear and highly crafted way in which he shows us humanity at its worst but also at its essence. When man loses a recognition of the humanity of the other. When hatred stirs. And violence is done not only to people but to the humane values that make life bearable and of some dignity. Sartre wrote of Men without Shadows. And Golding’s Lord of the Flies shows the same thin covering of civilisation.

The aspiration that the First World War would be the war to end all wars proved, sadly, untrue. The cataclysm of the Second World War was yet to happen. And all of the wars since then and yet to come. At the Enlightenment, people felt that all ‘mess’ had been done away with. The French Revolution was to prove there was lots more mess to come. And the silly expectations during the economic boom of the early part of this century that growth would continue and continue, that prices could only go up and that we could all only get richer, well, the stock markets and the banks and the savings and wealth of many have, yes, fallen.