After the aforementioned childhood
images, which could have been dreams – certainly they follow in part the logic
and the tone of dreams, though I have never remembered them in that context –
and the two very clear, upfront and personal sightings of things that were
obviously there, obviously in the sky and, moreover, were obviously not planes
or clouds or even the Goodyear blimp (yes, thank you, I do know the difference)
it seemed as if for a long time nothing else of this sort happened. Yet my years
as an undergraduate and as a young adult were perforated through by certain
images and irruptions of the stuff of meaning, of the supramundane. My mind and
my character were far from cohesive. I was dissolute. I drank heavily and
accomplished little, descended into a pervasive lassitude and depression. As a
result, though drinking like this kind of held me together at the time and made
life bearable, I now regret just about every moment of my lifetime between 18
and 22 – though less for my behavior while drunk than for the way the intensity
of need (only partially met by drink) and sheer, chronic horrible feeling
caused me to act towards others who were, for a short time, close to me.
During this period, there were a couple
of events that stood out as especially odd. Now that I think of it, they both
happened at the same rooming house where I lived for most of a year between
1988 and 1989. The house seemed to be haunted by a resentful ghost. The landlord,
a middle-aged woman whose father had died suddenly and violently while building
the house, had inherited it some twenty years previous to my living there. The
building, a dismal and dark spot within an apparently otherwise normal suburb,
had never been properly finished, though it had been inhabited for all this time
by a variety of marginal characters, some of us students, many quite shady,
most all of us desperate in one way or another.
On one late morning in the autumn – more likely
by then approaching early afternoon –I was simply too lazy to get out of bed. After
some hours of lying awake, I both felt and heard something explode inside of my
skull. It was like a small bomb physically in my head that literally exploded. That
did get me up; that got me out of bed
fast. I was scared, and I felt certain then that someone or something had
intervened, had set this thing off in me, as if to say, enough is enough. God only knows to what purpose. But it was time
to get up and do something, though to my perspective there seemed little point
to the day, and nothing worth the effort.
The next event from this period happened some
months later. I’d moved into another room in the house, above the cold garage,
to the expansive but unheated, uninsulated attic room where I spent the worst
and most difficult winter of my young life. The springtime would soon be full
of bad drama surrounding a downstairs neighbor, but that, I think, hadn’t
happened yet. The room beneath mine was then still empty. The angry ghost would
manifest at night, pounding on all four walls at once, or interrupting the
power in measured intervals of three (the possibility that mischievous people
might have been behind this certainly exists, but I couldn’t see why they would
bother with such coordinated effort, in such numbers as these pranks would on
occasion require). The event that followed may very well have been little or
nothing at all: it only seemed to be some kind of skywriting, seen through a
window. To see it, I would have been lying on the floor, looking out at the sky,
but that isn’t so unusual. What was unusual was the oddly glyphic form of vapor
arrangement that I saw. This was at least a decade before the issue of
chemtrails became part of the public dialogue, and the utterly bizarre
tic-tac-toe patters I’ve since seen photographed in the sky, as if daring those
below to notice. This could have been a precursor to that particular form of
jokesterism, whoever was behind it.
What I saw, made out of cloud, from my
perspective, was a long horizontal line, out of which, attached at the base,
was formed a small equilateral triangle, and in the very center of this was a
single dot. These were very precise shapes, only starting to untangle and waft
away, made out of, yes, clouds. I saw no aircraft make them, and I’d heard
nothing – or at least hadn’t noticed, though this design hung at fairly low
altitude. It’s hardly impossible that this wasn’t the work of somebody in a
small airplane just practicing their craft. It just seemed outright mental at
that level. But what did seem meaningful was that there was a communication of something
very strange going on – at least I felt it to be so – and this, like so much,
remains at the level of an uncertain liminality between the mundane and
transcendent, the banality of obvious, stupid fact and the mystery of possible,
deep otherness. These things, too,
may be expressed by people and their activities. Perhaps what I speak of is
less an external event than it is my own frustration with the seeming limits of
first, myself, and secondarily, normality. I felt that quality of otherness to
be expressed in the fact of communication through these unlikely shapes, though
they, like much else, could very well have found their source in my own longing
that it be so.
