Sky-Spark As Liminal Medium of Departure

This seemed on the face of it so small a thing that from a certain angle it was hardly worth the telling. But it was there, if only for a moment.

And I was sitting on the sofa just two weeks ago, not late, a little before ten p.m., when a bright light flew silently past a window which, high in the wall and from where I sat, looked out over the neighborhood, at the sky just above the houses across the street. It was a very bright white ball, moving fast, though not shooting as a meteor would shoot, but slower than that, and it was low in the air, low to the ground, maybe one or two hundred feet above. It happens sometimes that I can see naval fighter jets that come flying over through this same window from that very spot, and they will cross at the same low altitude, but this was not that – this white light was soundless. Not quiet, but soundless. The jets, when they come for their practice runs at the simulated aircraft carrier flight deck nearby, are anything but. They’ll shake the nerves right out of your spine.

The window, at that angle, offers a very narrow view out, since I was some distance from it, and it is small and high up the wall above the stairs. That this bright, low light flew past that specific area, from right to left, just so that I could see it, struck me as not an accident, but as something that I was supposed to see. I ran to the window, jumped up the steps to look for more, but it was gone. I don’t remember being able to see much of the stars, whether it was clear or overcast or what – that didn’t seem to matter at the time, since I was certain it wasn’t a shooting star. Something in me came back to life then and I felt excited again, as if something wonderful were near, like this was an announcement of sorts, letting me know it was still around. It was very much like the light I saw shoot off over the freeway one night in Indiana, while driving cross-country. For all I know, it’s the same light. For all I know, it’s nothing.

Coming then, as this did, just before the regular drive I make inland to Utah at this time of year (and which I’m currently in the midst of), while making preparations and coming to grips with leaving the island home that I’ve only recently come to feel I’ve got real roots in, I imagine this as a signal of a similar crossing. I like to think that I have an ongoing relationship to something inexplicable, and that these teasing hints and subtle clues are perhaps just the surface, and that they in and of themselves have meaning. Yet I’ve been reluctant to write up this account, brief and peripheral as it is, on that possibility that I’ve only imagined such a relationship, while this flat and lifeless feeling creeps back over me, rendering everything meaningless.

Perhaps this isn’t a matter of choosing one thing over another – fantasy or reality, belief or disbelief. I’ll never prove anything to anyone, and not to myself either. For now, I’m driving over a flat earth, one that seems sometimes to glow in the gathering night from within, and it is spectral and strange, and I’m amazed that I can see at all, and I think of how I love the earth, and that the world is warm, even where it is blasted and dead and cold, and that in it there are stories still to be made and told, and that I am still this squirming thing that is alive and weird and staring, and exactly and always right here.

Shapes of Coming Things

This was a dream from a few nights ago. I include it here because it speaks to the subject of this site, in this case the literal intrusion from another level of being through and into this phenomenal world (or that, as portrayed in the dream). It arrives as a coda to a greater dream-narrative, in which I lived in a solar system that had several populated worlds. This was a science fiction dream.

I’d left one large and densely populated, earthlike planet to visit a much smaller and much more rural, unpopulated and less developed planetoid. There I’d inadvertently caused this smaller planet’s rotation to stop by opening the tip of a great glass tube –a fluorescent light tube several hundreds of feet high – unstoppering it by some electronic control panel within so the tube could gather the light of the sun. This had activated the tube and caused it to light up, but this then had the unexpected consequence of halting the planet’s rotation, which in turn had vast consequences over the planet’s ecosphere.

I’d left the planet for a year or more, returning to it after a segue in the dream narrative, and could then see what sort of consequences had followed. Oddly enough, one was that the planet’s surface which now permanently faced the sun, and where the tall fluorescent tube stood, to gather energy, to stay brightly lit, had become colder. In another spot, where now it was night (and though this didn’t occur to me in the dream itself, this would by logic be to the other side of the sphere) I stood in a yard amongst trees with a small group of familiar people, though I was slightly apart from them, and I was talking with an older man, a man in a hat, who was a sort of mentor figure to me. His fedora may have held a feather. As we spoke, we at some prompt looked up to see the black, starry sky get spilled over by a widening and deeper blackness, like a stain of ink spreading irregular across the night from above – as if the sky were a glass surface that we could see from below it, and the spill spread over that from some metaphysical ultra-place, blotting out the here-ness of distant normal space. But then in this deeper blackness we could see, moving through it, like unicellular ultra-creatures, these vast geometric shapes – hybrid rhomboids of spirals, boxes, circles, the like – all flat and darkly vivid, as if glowing in blacklight, in purples and deep, deep reds and magenta-maroon. These shapes were moving. They crawled hugely through the ink-dark, and worked through toward this world. This was yet another consequence of what I’d done by lighting the tall tube and the stopping of the small world.