I would have
written it off as fantasy entirely if it weren’t for two things. The first was
that for every time I saw one, it seemed too much like silent but emphatic
punctuation, the night sky’s underscoring to whatever thought or event of the
moment, with its commentary to the effect of, “Yes, now pay attention,” or “It
is so, but not quite as you think,” or some such gnomic assurance, rather like
a cosmic Magic 8 Ball – but one that answers always in the affirmative, and
only when it wants to. I look up into the darkness just in time to notice as a
point of light at that moment drops straight down, and this happens again and
again. I’m driving, I’m waiting in line, when I used to smoke I’d be outside
smoking… It doesn’t shoot across the sky in a great arc, leaving a trail of
vapor, as would any self-respecting meteor, but simply moves in a steady
progression from point A to B, and always, from my perspective, directly down.
Between the years of 2006 and 2008 or 09, it was happening a lot, or I noticed
it a lot. And whenever I saw this, my mind would split and run off in opposing
directions.
The myth- or
mothmind, the one that has wings, would say that something somewhere has just
given me a message, to clue in to what I was thinking or doing at the time;
that it means something, that it’s telling me that something is right or
significant. It’s a sign. The other mind, the one that’s made of ice and rocks,
would tell me that I’ve just watched some ice or rocks fall through the
atmosphere and get themselves changed by friction into gas, and really there’s
nothing more to it than that. And then what’s more, it turns back onto the
mothmind and in that admonishing tone makes a point of it: There is nothing more to it than that. As if speaking to a child.
I have
internalized the entire debate.
The other
reason I’ve not entirely acceded to the bullying tendencies of the rock-headed
side is because the other possibility, the mothmind, has by happenstance or
synchronicity found a kind of validation in an unlikely context. I’d been
reading again, probably for the first time in well over a decade, Whitley
Strieber’s Communion, which is full
of the wonder and horror and uncertainty of some really rough treatment at the
hands of some really strange people. What makes Communion an unlikely context is that, amidst all of this extreme
circumstance, Whitley describes the smallest and most timorous thing: exactly
the same phenomenon of looking up at the sky, and finding, as if by answer to
his burning question, a single point of light drop straight down. The thing
that he’d been asking for at that moment was some confirmation from his
visitors that their interventions, which he’d only just become aware of, were
real. Needless to say, he is sharply disappointed by this display as any sort
of answer. He does not say – not in the text of the book – that he might have
only seen a meteor; he tacitly accepts it for what its image suggests, which is
an entirely unsatisfactory response, a lame answer to a difficult and important
question. What happens in this moment for me as I read this, is that my story,
my own myth, is now woven retroactively into the image-substance of Strieber’s
in a way that it hadn’t been already. The mothmind takes wing, circles about
the fire. It has been supplied with literary metaphor deeper than its own
imagining, touching now upon an idea shared. This does not make it a literal
fact or facet of visitor encounter, but it does make it something.
For
Strieber, this sign was soon thereafter followed by a contact experience, in
full consciousness, that was quite profound. No such thing has happened to me.
Not even close. Instead, I was dogged by dropping stars for nearly three years,
until, after some long time, I realized that I wasn’t seeing them any more. These
came often over Whidbey Island, and just as frequently over Rhinebeck, NY – at
opposite ends of the country, where I lived during the time.
One happened
as I waited in the ferry line, having just come from Seattle and the first
public screening of my film All My Love,
late in 2006, in a small theater to about twenty people, two of whom walked out
an hour into its 90 minutes (which I’m still convinced was because they’d
wandered into the wrong theater – easy enough to do at this venue, and as
frequently happens – and were too polite to leave any sooner). The audience, I
believe – though I have never met them or known their identities, nor had the
producer given me any warning that this would be the case – seemed to be made
up in part by benefactors of the film, the controllers of family foundations
and private donors, and judging from overheard comments, they may not have been
convinced their support (or perhaps only the reasons offered, though not by me,
for which their support had been solicited) was well-represented. Reactions
among the small audience were mixed: my friends and colleagues liked it, while
others left somewhat baffled. I went home with some profoundly ambivalent
feelings, but I knew at least that I had done something. I’d put a lot of work
into the film, and it was the best that I could make it at the time. Waiting in
the ferry queue for the next boat, I looked up toward my destination across the
water, and when I saw just then a pinprick spot of light descend from directly
overhead, it seemed as if it were a silent acknowledgement, telling me that
yes, something worthwhile had been accomplished, something toward the fulfillment
of my purpose on earth; the work itself, yes, but moreover that it had been seen.
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