Tuesday

The Boy Has Maybe Got His Boundary Issues?


One year ago to the day as I write this is when the following took place. In and of itself – the original journal entry – it is a dry thing, expressed in a dry language, but what it points to is rich, verdant, confusing, a jungle in liminal twilight. What makes it into something worth telling is the context; otherwise it truly is just a nuts + bolts description, which is of little interest. Part of the wider context is an emotional recurrence of my state of one year ago. I don’t understand the significance of this yearly cycle – I mean, yes, of course, anniversaries are not an alien concept, but it seems important that I find myself returning emotionally to the conditions of that time, almost exactly and to the date, though circumstances now are different – exactly, or maybe just slightly different – still, they don’t seem to add up so that I can say this caused that and so I feel such-and-such about it. The emotive conditions are fundamental, and apparently cyclic, and the circumstances constellating around them appear almost as accidents. Or maybe I make them happen. Or maybe they don’t relate at all.

I’d set up an appointment that afternoon for a session at a later date by phone with Anya Briggs, a psychic whom I’d heard interviewed on Mike Clelland’s Hidden Experience podcast (and have subsequently heard on several others) and felt immediately drawn toward. Circumstances of my life at that time last summer had become again sufficiently confounding that a session of some sort with somebody had come to seem appropriate, and I’d been sitting on the fence for a while regarding her ­– mostly because I felt slightly intimidated about meeting someone I’d come to regard as whip-smart and walking some wild edge of the weird. The same things that drew me to her were what frightened me as well, but I’d wanted, apart from her intuitive consult, very much to understand something of the experiences she’d described of being unwillingly involved in covert operations, particularly the labyrinthine twists and counter-twists of mind control and psychic fragmentation, things which by their nature defy an objective viewpoint and stories so utterly bizarre on the face of them, but that she spoke of with the palpable sincerity of somebody in possession of a suitable compass by which to find her way and maintain her own equilibrium. The subject of military or covert human involvement in the UFO phenomenon was (and is) something that had opened in me some few years previous a wellspring of imaginative associations, dark, dizzying – and without making any particular claims for its veracity as literal fact (though I don’t doubt that it occurs as fact, whatever a ‘fact’ exactly is), it is the subject and incidental setting of the novel I’m currently writing – that is, currently re-writing from the draft I was working on at the time – The Anonymity of the Solid Ocean. I’d hoped to osmose, by association perhaps, some understanding, less of the particulars than of the difficult and complex emotional states involved, which for reasons I’ve never quite been able to put my finger to, I felt that I’d somehow and in some measure shared, in some way already knew.

So having at last found the guts to approach her (I’m such a chickenshit at heart when it comes to interpersonal stuff, however willing I am to stand at the edge of the Abyss when it comes to my safety and sanity), there was kind of a lot roiling around in my own intra-psychic headspace in anticipation of our phone conversation, scheduled for some days later. When, that evening after dark, I stood out on my back deck which overlooks the water and saw some blinking lights approach from the north, from the direction of the naval air base some twenty miles off, it didn’t at first strike me as anything so unusual – just a jet airplane with some running lights, albeit running lights in an unusual configuration, starting at the nose of the craft and flashing in sequence out, symmetrically, along the length of the wings, first center, then tip; nose, center-wing, tip, etc. A little unusual, it caught my eye. Then I realized that it was not nearly so far away, nor as high in the sky as it seemed – I’d judged it higher, assuming it to be larger and further away, when in fact it was perhaps less than three miles off when I’d first noticed it, and now seemed to be coming, from an altitude less than a thousand feet, directly at me. Again, this is not in itself so unusual, as the house where I live is along the flight path of a practice landing strip used by jet fighter pilots in training, and they will typically fly over my house at a few hundred feet – one crucial difference being that these aircraft make so much noise as to entirely pulverize a human nervous system, whereas this thing – as it approached, its boxy, nose-forward cockpit stood out sharply in vivid red, interior light, defying my astigmatic-blurred distance vision with its sharp clarity – this craft was completely silent. It flew low and slowly, and it didn’t make a sound, and as it passed directly overhead, it revealed a dark, triangle shape with no surface detail visible to it at all. The only sound was of a small, single-engine aircraft passing nearby in the transverse direction, not visible, but by its engine noise moving from east to west, while the triangle went north to south, although both sounds converged directly over my head (which struck me as curious, and still does).

I did not at the time think that I’d seen anything all that exotic, or beyond human origin. What this struck me as was something military, only that it was a little in advance of anything I’d ever seen before. It’s overall size and what I could see of its shape suggested a B2 stealth bomber, except that I have seen those up close and in the air, and while relatively quiet, they make real noise. This thing, to characterize it, to give it a sense of intention – and I am perfectly aware that these are connections that I am making, that may exist no further than my own skull-space – seemed to make a point of the fact that it was silent. It also seemed to want to cast doubt in my mind, using the small-aircraft engine sound (coming from another direction) to confuse the issue of its silence. But most of all what I thought, what I imagined, was that this aerial somebody was telling me they had noticed now and their eye on me. This seemed like something straight out of Anya’s story, not mine.