tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69193907978174533392024-03-13T11:14:11.483-07:00numinous intrusionsa first-person report of encounters with the liminalBrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.comBlogger39125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-74244553896243354282015-06-08T11:06:00.000-07:002015-06-08T16:39:43.830-07:00Iceland as Thing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">’d </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">come to stay on the southern coast of Iceland, near the town of </span><span style="color: #252525; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Kirkjubæjarklaustur,</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and after a few days there spent mostly hiding from the wind, I finally set out in my tiny rental car toward </span><span style="color: #323333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Skaftafellsjökull</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, a nearby glacier, and Skaftafell national park. But this was no better than any previous attempt to leave my room. The further out I went, the harder the winds seemed to blow, until finally, while crossing a flat expanse of volcanic dust at the glacier’s mouth, a sandstorm frightened me enough to give it up and turn back around. Feeling completely defeated – though at the same time more than a little awed by the beauty and force of this natural violence – I headed back toward the guesthouse. As I drove the two lane highway around another out-jut of cliffside, I was struck again by something I’d noticed on the trip in. Beyond the cliff, surrounded by flats of moss-covered lava, stood a large rock, like some kind of weird beacon. I made a mental note to return there later, if the wind ever let up.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">It was only the next day that the wind stopped almost completely – after blowing fiercely for the entire week that I’d been in the country so far, no matter where I went. So I got back into the little Yaris and this time crossed the black ash flats that had been so treacherous the day before, but only after passing again this strange, beaming rock that I’d already managed to forget about in the interim. It was visually striking, for certain, but there seemed something more about it than that. There was a kind of magnetism to it. It was as if the thing spoke to me somehow. This time I would for certain stop – the lack of the punishing winds would by now let me – but on my way back. For now I was determined to reach the glacier first.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">I was already mourning the damage that my camera had sustained to its sensor the day before – caused less through the extreme weather conditions than by simple, dumb mishandling. This damage had rendered my intention of getting as much useful footage of the landscape as I could moot, but also, in a way, freed me from any sense of obligation to do so. In the time I’d spent in the country – not knowing what exactly I was looking for, but certain all the while that I hadn’t found it, and cursing myself for putting myself into such financial disarray to get this far – I’d grown increasingly depressed and defeated. Naturally. Putting so much importance onto a landscape was</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">no better than putting it onto a person – there is no one and nothing that can satisfy the heart’s longings when you’re a hungry ghost. But with the dying of the winds I’d also relaxed a little. It didn’t matter; nothing did. I was just here. Alone and without purpose, maybe, but here.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">I pulled the car over as close to the large, strange rock as I could get and walked back toward a stepladder that crossed over a wire fence. A footpath lead through the moss toward the rock, nearing a slow, quiet stream that ran alongside. Forking and converging, the stream flowed with utterly clear, cold water, winding toward the rock, and beyond it some distance, spilling out into the Atlantic further on. Since arriving in Reykjavik about a week before, I’d scarcely thought about the </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">fae</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> at all, putting all these ideas off to only more groundless and unrealistic longing on my part. But as I walked this short distance, I thought, </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">If these people are anywhere, they’re here</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">. Though, to be honest, I couldn’t take this seriously either. I knew was turning to fantasy to fill in the holes in my heart. This was useless. But the land here </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">was</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> beautiful, and with my sensor-damaged camera, I started clicking off pictures, framing the smaller piles of lava stone against the larger formation behind them, and against the sky.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">I began to feel, with an inner, mounting anxiety, the sense that, even with the footpaths and the inviting stepladder over the fence, I was being watched, and for the time being, </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">allowed</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> through this place. This sense of presence wasn’t a voice, not exactly, though my own inner voice began telling me that I would be </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">allowed</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> passage for only a short while. It was necessary to be respectful. This landscape was too important to disturb. The sense of presence, and with it my anxiety, only grew, the closer I came to the stone. After a short distance, I couldn’t take it any more. Clearly, it was time to get out of there. But wasn’t I engaging </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">respectfully</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">? Wasn’t I honoring the spirit in the stone? No… no, I was trespassing now, and it was time to leave. The thought occurred to me that if I allowed myself to get too close to the flowing stream, the </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">fae</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> would push me into it. These critters would be happy to make a fool out of me. I knew also from experience that I could only too easily make a fool out of myself, that I didn’t need any disembodied help to do it. But now that the thought had found expression, I also needed to </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">go nearer to the stream</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">. Didn’t I? </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">Didn’t I?</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> I could get more lovely photos, if I just </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">went closer to the stream</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">. Against my own better judgement, I took a fork in the footpath that led near to the water. I stopped at its edge. I shot a few, uninteresting photos, nervously waiting for a shove from out of nowhere. </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">There. Okay. Leave me alone now, I’m going.</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> I put the cap back onto my camera’s lens.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">The cap – like it has never once done before – popped straight off with a </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">ping</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> and dropped into the water.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">The perfect, clear water.</span></div>
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<i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">Assholes</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">Now what would I do? I could live without a lens cap, but the water… it was pure and perfect. I could hardly just leave the thing there, littered at the bottom of the stream. But wait – it hadn’t gone to the bottom of the stream at all. The current had taken it. But the current hadn’t taken it away. No, the slow, clear current had lifted the lens cap up, had carried it near the clear surface where it twisted, where it turned and tumbled, in seeming slow-motion, waiting where it hung now, just within reach…</span></div>
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<i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">Okay</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">, I said, </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">okay</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">. And, </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">You can take your shot at me, I guess</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">. I knelt down at the water’s edge, balanced on the bank, and reached… out… toward the plastic cap, reaching just short of the cuff of my jacket’s woolen arm. The cap spun and tumbled, waiting for me, right there. I clenched my hand and grasped it, pulled it from the water, held it tight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">There. Wasting no time, I quick-stepped back from the water, back up the footpath to the fence, holding the wet lens cap in my dripping hand, avoiding the many piles of dried sheep dung that lay everywhere along the way. And the further from the rock I got, the more my anxiety lessened. I’d escaped my fate in the stream, but I knew, it was only because I’d been </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">allowed</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> to. Perhaps because I’d shown respect; perhaps because it had seemed more amusing if I should stay dry. Obligingly, they’d even handed my cap straight back to me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">The next night, in stillness, and for all the next day, April snows fell and covered everything.</span></div>
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BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-66928262160284836152015-06-01T20:24:00.002-07:002015-06-08T16:42:45.018-07:00Iceland As Idea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">T</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">he travel and tourism industry of Iceland is happy to advertise how more than half of its country’s inhabitants carry a sincere belief in elves, faeries, lake monsters, and other mythical, if normally invisible, types of life. I’ve since seen this statistic thrown into question, the chief argument being how the polling was skewed into meaninglessness. But it hasn’t mattered. The idea – though not the only contributing factor – was part of the imaginative web or growing root structure that quickly became my obsession with the region. And I do mean <i>obsession</i>. Granted, it wasn’t the only thing, but it fit somehow so perfectly into this compelling idea of place that I’d come to form. It became part of the silent history of this geography of the imagination.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">I think the process got its real start some years ago when a former colleague, a cinematographer, posted some offhand comment on Facebook about traveling to Iceland on a job. I was filled with envy for my acquaintance’s peripatetic lifestyle, more than having any specific ideas yet about the region. When some time later I read in an issue of music magazine </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">The Wire</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> about Australian composer <a href="https://soundcloud.com/benfrost/ben-frost-venter" target="_blank">Ben Frost’s</a> having relocated to Reykjavik to help found the <a href="http://www.bedroomcommunity.net/" target="_blank">Bedroom Community</a> record label there, the place itself became more apparent, and more specific. Apparent, that is, and specific as an idea. I knew nothing at the time of Frost, but his comments during the interview set up a curious resonance with me, and I soon became acquainted with his harsh, post-industrial, post-punk noise and orchestral music, and was deeply affected. But aside from this, it was the fact that he’d chosen Iceland, of all places, to live.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">Why Iceland?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">While I have no insight into Frost’s reasons for his move, the thought became a seed in my own mind. Soon, I couldn’t stop thinking about the place. People pick up and move – or at least one person moves – to Iceland. There is something there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">I began to think of the movie industry, and again of my cinematographer acquaintance. Iceland is frequently chosen as a prime location for its unique and varied landscape. </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">Batman Begins</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">. Alright. </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">Game of Thrones</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">. Certainly. The recent Aronofsky film </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">Noah</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">. Nice, very.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">But none of this adds up to the sheer, obsessive force of what had grown in my imagination. Iceland as a mythic place, Iceland as idea. I knew that I had to go there. I thought about going and never coming back – knowing all the while and full well that an idea about a thing is not the same as the actual thing. I had to go and compare the two and sort it out for myself, if only to dispel this obsession, since it simply wouldn’t leave me alone. It was in the midst of my research that I came across the above-mentioned statistic: more than half of Icelanders quite sincerely believe in faeries. This is often presented, at least in the touristic materials, in an </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">Aren’t we simply so quaint? Don’t you love how silly we can be?</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> sort of tone. But I’d had <a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/09/faery-talk.html" target="_blank">my own relation</a> to the </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">fae</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> – and while I don’t characterize my relation as belief, exactly, I had given the matter an amount of serious thought. To my reckoning, these critters were delightful, insightful, sometimes helpful (maybe even lifesaving), but just as likely to be capricious, dangerous and <a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2014/04/this-killing-winter-part-one.html" target="_blank">downright treacherous</a>. They can turn on you in an eyeblink, and you may not know the reasons why you’ve pissed them off – or if what you’ve done is any part of the equation. They do what they like. They have their reasons. They don’t make sense to us.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">Thing or idea? But ideas </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">are</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"> things.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">And this is the level at which I chose to work – that at which an idea, or an image, or a dream, is a </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">thing</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">. Not a thing like a rock or a landscape, or money (or wait – money actually is an idea, just one that everyone agrees upon), but a thing within its own context of thoughtspace. This is a place where things as ideas can and do have a life of their own. As a novelist, I cultivate this space carefully and work to observe its contents in their development, seeing as how they are both a part of myself and potentially quite something else. Characters take on their own lives. Situations develop spontaneously and surprisingly. Worlds are built, cohere for a time, and then crumble away. Content such as faeries, or UFOs and their attendant intelligence, while perhaps of themselves transcending this realm alone, do inhabit here very well, at least part of the time. The question of the so-called objective reality of these forms is secondary to the work of observation, but the fact that their behavior may oftentimes spill over from one realm to the next, from thoughtspace into objectivity (and back) is, I’ve found, both extraordinary and common; in a word, paradoxical.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;">As part of this magical spillover of thought and concretized thing, between the mythic and the literal, Iceland – now as faeryland – became a symbol, a constellation of longing. I bought my tickets early, while they were still cheap. I made my plans. I was inwardly terrified, perhaps because I knew that no single place could possibly match up to what my needs were for it, once such longing had crystallized; there is likely nothing that can satisfy that. But I was still going, knowing that on some level the venture would have to be a failure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 18px;"><a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2015/06/iceland-as-thing.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(To be continued.)</span></a></span></div>
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BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-29862036919913860412014-11-11T20:17:00.000-08:002014-11-16T14:07:36.927-08:00Outsiders<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was a few days ago that I was in a session with the counsellor I go to sometimes – another experiencer of transpersonal sorts of phenomena, and open to taking such as what they are (whatever they are) without trying to explain them off – and I was describing the sense I had of being different from the moment I entered kindergarten, even sooner; it was, and is, a familiar thought. Not an original one. One I’ve had before, and I’ve heard expressed from others, and for me, it went like this:</span></div>
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As soon as I was first dropped into the pen with other children, at a very early age, I pretty well knew already I wasn’t like them. They all seemed to understand something I didn’t. They all took to this shared experience or expectation what being human and socialized and otherwise in on the same trip was about, while I was explicitly aware of being outside it. “They all took to the social imprint,” I told Dr. Tom. “They might not have been very good at it, but they got it, while I just never did, and I understood that from day one.” I never took it as a sense of elitism, or puffing myself up to be somehow better than the others. It was just a lonely feeling, a certainty that I did not belong.</div>
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The thing about this wasn’t just that I was expressing something that I knew I’d articulated before – and so had others – but that I felt that I was following an established pattern, both in feeling that sense of alienation, and specifically in expressing it. I don’t know if I can explain this. Talking about the feeling, as much as having the feeling, were both expressing some necessity. The pattern seemed, whether innate or externally imposed, something that in a subtle way I’d been rutted into, a fixed groove, though the sentiment now was, as was my early experience of it, entirely genuine.</div>
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I often worry that I’m following in stereotypical lines somehow, or just saying the expected thing in a given situation, and so I may have dismissed this thought as maybe trying to conform to some expected pattern, except that the next day, I heard an interview with an experiencer of a mass abduction describe exactly the same feeling on air. It struck me: he also has to talk about this. He had the very same feeling, but he also needs to tell it. He pretty much expressed this straight out of the gate, in the interview.*</div>
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What does this mean? Or, what is this juxtaposition saying to me, if anything?</div>
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That he and I are alike? Certainly we are, in that we share that same experience. But are we also in other ways alike? “Sam” (the interviewee) professes memories of abduction. I have no such memories, but have contacts of other sort described in detail throughout this site. Among the topics Dr. Tom and I discussed were the possibility of “abduction” or other visitor involvement at an early age. Certain early memories invoke the involvement of uncommon orders of reality, if they don’t present the more typically-reported images of contact. At least they seem as though they might, to me.</div>
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I’ve long considered my experiences as a form of “contact lite” – nothing like the sort of heavy involvement that many people speak or write books about. Many of my remembrances are of things half-seen and easily mistaken, things just as likely to be the suppositions of an overactive imagination as anything else. Yet through these self-doubts something remains, a core of knowing, some handful of images that I’ve never had doubt over, though I may have, for a time, dismissed them. I’ve also often wondered if looking for deeper memories of contact would be a useful pursuit, worried that I might invent what I’d hoped to find, seeking some narrative or cause for my seemingly groundless wounded condition.</div>
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* Dreamland podcast posted 11/07/14, host Whitley Strieber. I’d downloaded this the same day as my session, and listened to it the next. “Sam” is a contactee who was abducted among others en mass from a resort hotel in Coronado, CA in the summer of 1994. Coincidentally, I paid a brief visit to this same hotel <a href="http://www.briancshortauthor.com/blog/2014/11/12/coronado-1995" target="_blank">the following summer</a> while staying on the island, though I lived in Washington State at the time, and knew nothing of these abductions.<br />
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</span>BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-42147852841551302962014-05-25T21:21:00.000-07:002014-05-25T21:21:08.978-07:00This Killing Winter: Conclusion<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2014/05/this-killing-winter-part-four.html" target="_blank">Continued from previous post.</a>]</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I fully expected to find Pete on the sofa, at the tv, either asleep or just sitting there, as usual, as if nothing had happened. But when I got home a little before ten that night, the place was – or seemed – empty; I couldn’t tell. The television was on, and that was fairly normal. Pete always left the tv on, but the thing was blaring loud. I turned it down, but not off. Pete’s little blue car was parked directly outside in the lot, his keys on the coffee table, his leather jacket draped over the back of a wooden chair. His bedroom door was closed. That struck me as strange. Was he in his room? Pete was never in his room. Unless his ex had come over to care for his emotional wounds, he was always on the couch, day or night. My bedroom door was left open, and that was unusual: I habitually shut it whenever I went out. But then I remembered the police had been called and they’d been through the place – Pete’s wife had told me as much in her frantic voicemail – and no doubt they would’ve checked my room. That didn’t bother me; I saw that nothing had been disturbed.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was already pretty sure by then he wasn’t coming back, though I didn’t quite believe it. In fact, Pete was dead – as I found out later, he’d walked off into a nearby field and shot himself in the brain that afternoon, while I was at the movies. He’d sent a suicide text to his wife and to a friend, and this was why the police had been called. But I’d not heard any of this yet, and I wouldn’t until I came into work that next morning. And because I’d been through some version of this drama often enough over the past weeks, if only in my own mind – only to find him on the sofa later, as if nothing were going on – I still at the time thought that he might just be sulking in his room, and that I was likely overdramatizing the whole thing.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On the kitchen counter I found an open tub of salsa. He’d come in with bags and bags of tortilla chips bought at Wal-Mart that morning, which had struck me for some vague reason as disturbing. But then everything about him had seemed disturbing over these past few days. I threw the plastic tub and its contents away, aware of some dim sense of insult in doing so. Asshole, I thought, you asshole. You have to go and do this, and it’s the only way I can finally get a night’s peace. It occurred me then that I might never find out what happened. I would leave Utah in a couple of days, and I still might not know if he were dead or not, or just what had happened. With the place for the moment apparently to myself, I tried to wind down as best I could and get ready for bed. There was still work the next day. But, despite the much-needed quiet, I slept little.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the morning, everyone in the resort’s kitchen had heard the news, except for me. Word had travelled fast the night before and spread like wildfire through employee housing. I wondered why people, many of whom I only knew casually, were looking at me with such sympathy and concern, although at the same time I really did understand. It was hardly the mystery it may have seemed. It was from my colleague in the bakery, the same woman who’d first suggested my dreams may be from the faeries, that I heard what was by now so widely known. And I found out soon enough that many of those people regarding me so strangely thought I was probably the one who’d found Pete’s body and called it all in. Small wonder they looked at me like that. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I won’t eulogize Pete because I’m still angry with him. Yes, he was fundamentally a good guy, pulled under by a sickness in his heart. But he took everyone near him prisoner with his unappeasable need, and his death comes – and was meant, at least in part – as a final insult: None of you did enough for me. His suicide note reflects this attitude, I’m told, though I’ve not seen it. “If you care, you’ll find my body…” He required for others to satisfy his core hurt, and of course everyone failed him, no matter how much they tried. The Hungry Ghost cannot, by its nature, be fed. To fail in this regard was not something anyone could ever help but do, and his was a deeply parasitic orientation. And though I do have compassion, of a sort, for how trapped he felt by his pain, I’m also quite sure he could have found his way out of it, eventually, with a small shift of this attitude. I say this, I hope, not with curt flippancy, nor with the arrogant oversimplification that comes all too easily, but from experience: I once felt exactly the way that he did. That was why I could see it. When no one else would or could step forward to make me feel solid enough, when my own terrible neediness drove everyone else off, and after a lot of hard disappointments, I eventually stopped believing that anyone should take care of me; that it was, by default, up to me alone. Resignation, and ultimately, acceptance changed my attitude. I don’t know why I got this and Pete didn’t, but this is why I’m alive now and he is not. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After everything that led up to this, I may’ve easily felt myself reeling, knocked a bit too hard by the Fates and traumatized for it – but instead I felt only deep, deep calm, and I continued for some weeks to feel that calm. I started out for home late the next day with steady hands on the wheel, and I drove and drove and drove. The wreckage of my ransacked Washington home has since been cleaned up, the things that were stolen are things I can do without, mostly. Insurance will cover some of it. My car runs well and I’m unharmed. I don’t honestly know if I’m really any stronger, or maybe much colder, than I thought, or if I’m simply not facing the requisite pain yet, but it has taken no effort of will to reach this place of detachment. It seems rather I’ve been set up for it. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’ve got scars now, of a sort, it’s true: I’m less trusting of the people around me on this formerly safe and peaceful-seeming island where I live; I’m hyperaware of the sudden violence that can happen at any time on the highway; and I carry a residue of that dismal apartment – too much of what I see and think refers back to that place as ground zero, and to Pete also, and the unbearable pressure that was there. But at the same time I find – and this mystifies me – that the long-ingrained tendency to feel sorry for myself, to be anxious for the future, and hurt over this or that disappointment, either current or past, seems for the moment to be gone. I simply do not feel it, as if it has been blown away by the same bullet that blew Pete’s head to pulp. Maybe it’ll be back – maybe it’s coming back now – but for the time being, none of that is in the picture. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If any of this hard, murderous winter was orchestrated by faeries, I can’t say for sure. I don’t really believe that to be the case. Of course it strikes me as kind of stupid to say as much, but that’s because I don’t know what faeries, or elementals, really are. Something sent me warnings in the form of vivid half-dreams, and something seemed to guide me toward a specific place where this would happen; something sent blow after blow and shocked me awake enough to withstand what was coming, and now that part of it is over. I can’t help but sense an architecture to this, one drawn up somewhere, one that must seem sinister, or at least very hard. But it is, I think, ultimately beneficial. I only hope I can pick up what I need to, and survive whatever comes next. It might even kind of fun now, or at any rate easier. In any event, I’m still here.</span></div>
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BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-86951851775216701192014-05-17T12:59:00.000-07:002014-05-17T12:59:04.777-07:00This Killing Winter: Part Four<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2014/05/this-killing-winter-part-three.html" target="_blank">Continued from previous post.</a>]</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">T</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">owards the end of March, I found three messages on my phone one night, just before going to bed – one from my nephew, one from my sister, and one from my mother. They all said the same thing: my house had been broken into and ransacked. Thieves had smashed through the glass of the back door and stolen everything they thought worth carrying away. My nephew, who’d discovered the break-in, even had video of the wreckage. Superstitious as it may have been, I thought of the fae – or whoever these elemental critters were I’d been trying to talk to. Hadn’t they been guarding the house? (This was what the psychic had specifically told me, unbidden.) Hadn’t they, or someone, been sending me these significant “dreams” – messages which, albeit, had only seemed to bode of invasion, in one form or another. Had I somehow pissed them off? Because they did seem, after all, a bit touchy… After more than twenty years without a burglary in my very safe neighborhood, it was as if they’d painted a big target on the place, out of spite. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meanwhile, the atmosphere in Pete’s apartment where I now was living was as thick as ever. His ex-wife was often over, and I was thankful for that. When she came, the two of them made their own world together and I felt that I could get on with my own. I kept to my books, I put my headphones on, I wrote in my journal, I went to the gym. In short, I dug in and tried to wait this whole thing out. Whatever may happen, the season would not last for much longer. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">About a week after the news of the break-in, I was in a wreck on my way to work. It all happened so very fast, but with utter clarity. I saw brake lights flash on the cars and trucks ahead of me as they all started fishtailing wildly. I tried to slow also and started drifting out of control. I saw I was heading for the concrete siding of the bridge and there was nothing I could do to stop or avoid it. When I hit, my Jeep spun violently around on the shoulder until it eventually stopped. I was giddy with the shock. My hands shook as I fumbled for my phone, not at all clear on who I was supposed to call. So many times I’d driven this mountain grade, oftentimes in white-out conditions, often with a white-knuckle grip on the wheel but never with any real problem, and now in the clear and relative warmth of early spring… The same thing had happened to a forest ranger ahead of me, and though she’d spun out up the hill a bit, beyond the bridge’s railings, she’d almost gone down an embankment and into a river, stopping just at the edge of the precipice. We got out and looked across the distance at each other as the rest of the gathering traffic rushed past. Neither of us was hurt, but my car would need repairs to be drivable again, and I was starting to feel like I might be cursed. Paying heed to my dreams, and following the indicated, significant paths as had opened – at least so far as I could see – everything was going entirely wrong. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tensions at home were only getting worse. Pete wasn’t talking to me, and frankly, I didn’t want him to. I just wanted to find some space to myself. His wife complained to me that he’d become so needy, she couldn’t take any more of him. She’d wanted to remain his friend, but this sort of smothering need was what had driven her off in the first place. Since we all three worked in the same place, there was a sense of community, but also a lot of talk and few secrets. My colleagues often asked me what was going on, and I felt like the worst sort of gossip if I told them any of it, but damned to a personal hell if I couldn’t say anything. I tried to be judicious in what I did say, but I couldn’t keep my anxiety to myself.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I came home to Pete – always there, as ever, the blaring television as well, always on – arguing over the telephone with someone. I knew it could only be her, his wife. I felt badly for her, but I’d stopped feeling sorry for Pete. If he could simply let go of all this, he’d be fine and so would everyone else. Desperate and depressed as he may be, he was making his problems for himself. After hanging up, he curled up on the couch and fell fast asleep, though it was barely seven in the evening yet. His telephone rang and rang, but he would not respond. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At work the next day his wife told me she’d been asking around the kitchen for my phone number that evening before; she’d wanted me to check on Pete and see if he was okay. I gave it to her then, a little late to do much good, but told her to call me any time. And when I got home again, Pete, wired on energy drinks, started grilling me the moment I walked through the door: “Did my wife ask for your number? Why would she do that? Did she say she was worried about me? I don’t want her to talk to other people about me. It’s embarrassing, it’s humiliating…” I was starting to feel genuinely frightened, both for his wife and myself. I resented his intrusive questions, and he’d crossed a line. Pete could go to hell for all I cared – I needed to take care of myself.</span></div>
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W<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ith less than a week left on the schedule, I had a day off. This was a Tuesday. Out running errands in the morning, I thought to go back home for a rest, but as I drove up to the turn-off, I saw an image of the apartment in my mind’s eye – of my room, of those four walls and the furniture inside them – and neutral as it may have been in itself, the feeling-tone was so oppressive and intolerable, this was the last place I wanted to be. It was vivid and intense. A shudder went through me like some kind of allergic reaction, and I knew I had to avoid home at all costs. I ran more errands, I went to a movie, I walked around the grounds of a shopping mall just to kill the time. In the evening I went to a company party at my boss’s house. He, aware of my situation, offered me a spare room to stay in, if I needed it. He also told me that my last two days on the schedule they could manage without me, if I had to get out of town. I told him I would take him up on both accounts. Pete’s wife had left me a frantic message, which I’d gotten only after the movie. Something was wrong, she said, the police had gone to the apartment and couldn’t find him. The details were murky, but clearly things had escalated again. She’d left no number – my phone had been turned off at the time – and I couldn’t return her call. But I would need to go back that place, if only to pack my things and get out again.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And I had to admit I felt a detached, maybe sick, curiosity – I needed to find out what had happened.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[To be continued.]</span></div>
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BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-43895476235333282092014-05-09T19:44:00.002-07:002014-05-17T13:00:15.758-07:00This Killing Winter: Part Three<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2014/05/this-killing-winter-part-two.html" target="_blank">Continued from previous post.</a>]</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The next day was miserable. My home was open to any random asshole the company assigned me, and though this was normal enough and, I supposed, my lot as a low-paid kitchen worker in need of cheap, temporary housing, I also knew it wasn’t something I could live with. Whoever this new roommate was, it was clear he had no idea what basic consideration of others amounted to. I was ready to walk off the job, if this was what I had to look forward to. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I thought often and puzzled over these two “dreams” that I’d had, and what they might indicate. I’d entertained any number of theories, one being that something – these elemental spirits? – had been trying to protect my sovereign space. It seemed childish, perhaps; especially now in light of the fact that my home was anything but protected. Maybe these were warnings, delivered in a neutral tone: they were showing me what would happen, and that was as much intervention as they could or cared to manage. But whatever the motivation, I couldn’t help but feel that something was communicating with me, something outside of myself, delivering messages of import. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This was in February, but let me back up a little. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At Christmas time, the resort’s kitchen was shocked by the rumors that Pete, the sous chef of daytime operations, had attempted suicide. This was one of many factors that left many of us thinking that this was turning out to be a particularly hard winter. I’d already had one friend back in Seattle – another cook (an executive chef, in fact) – die suddenly for unknown reasons. The news about Pete travelled fast through the kitchen, and people had a hard time accepting it. I’d known Pete since my first season at the resort, and had at first been able to talk with him, though as the seasons rolled past, he became more and more distant, and we interacted less – finally, hardly at all. The suicide attempt had been unsuccessful, but it was serious. This was no mere cry for attention. What seemed in some ways even more shocking was that within a couple of weeks, Pete was back at work, carrying on as if nothing had happened, and if one could tell from his demeanor, expecting others to do the same. Unable to simply ask him about it, the rest of us were baffled. Had the rumors been exaggerated? Finally, I figured, what else was he supposed to do? He needed to work, right? Things carried on, though I often wondered if there was something that I could or should do to reach out to him, as if I had some responsibility. We’d sort of, at least some time ago, been friends. One day, meeting up with him on the loading dock where people went to smoke, I asked him about martial arts, something I knew he’d taught once and was passionate about. We made tentative arrangements for me to take instruction with him; it was something I’d often, in earlier times, thought about doing anyhow. He seemed genuinely interested. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When, a week later, I was in my throes over my housing situation and complained to a friend that I was ready to quit because of it, Pete was in earshot and asked me if I’d like to move in with him. He worked year-round at the resort and had his own apartment, not far from where I’d been living. Since his wife had recently left him, and her eldest son moved out as well, he had a spare bedroom and would charge the same rent as what I now paid – way below fair share of the apartment’s cost. He just wanted somebody around, he said. Although I knew this was an unstable environment, I couldn’t help but feel that I was being led toward something. This might allow me to keep with my job, and maybe I could provide some modicum of support to someone who really needed it. I’m no crisis counsellor – I had no illusions about that – but if Pete just needed someone friendly around, I could at least, or so I thought, manage that. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pete was a burly guy, covered with Japanese-influenced tattoos, and as a former professional cage-fighter, no doubt something of a badass, but underneath that a basically gentle soul in a great deal of pain. Moving into his apartment, I didn’t know what to expect at first, but it seemed, on the surface, a great improvement. He could at the very least respect the fact that another person lived under the same roof. We were, in the beginning, able to compare our strange experiences: he was, for instance, a witness to the Phoenix lights of 1997, and this was something I never would have guessed. He’d had many other encounters as well, and we could swap stories about things of this nature: UFOs, the shamanic, the paranormal. It seemed he was an old hand, and had, like me, long felt something calling him that marked him and left him feeling slightly outside the scope of mainstream human affairs. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the severity of his depression was hardly a thing of the past and over with. He drank heavily, nearly constantly, sometimes on the job, and when at home, he seldom left the couch. Since the sofa was right beside my bedroom door, night after night of his passing out in front of the tv began to make me a little squirrelly; he was always just right there. What’s more, his over-large personality seemed to take up all the air in the room, whether I had my door shut or not. Living at the apartment, I began to feel like a piece of set-dressing, another prop or background actor in someone else’s movie. This was a familiar feeling to me, something I’m entirely too sensitive to perhaps, and one of the reasons I value solitude so highly. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also, I worried about the real likelihood of coming home to a dead body. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In time, I found navigating around the atmosphere of the apartment to be more exhausting than working on my feet all day. For what little he told me about what was going on with him, it was clear there was a great deal more that he wasn’t saying. If I was there to be of any support, it wasn’t working, and I could only resent the pressure that I felt I was under. Still, the sense that I’d been navigated into this position by something beyond myself persisted. It seemed even unavoidable; the events that had brought me here were like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, all fitting too neatly together. There was a sense that I had a job I needed to do; I just couldn’t see what that job was, or that I was doing it. But the winter ski season is, thankfully, a finite thing, and its close in mid-April was drawing nearer. I had only to hang on for a few weeks more, and then move on back to Washington, but I had no idea how difficult that would prove to be.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2014/05/this-killing-winter-part-four.html" target="_blank">To be continued.</a>]</span><br />
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BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-8557349673747616852014-05-03T17:28:00.001-07:002014-05-09T19:45:39.934-07:00This Killing Winter: Part Two<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2014/04/this-killing-winter-part-one.html" target="_blank">Continued from the previous post.</a>]</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The transient housing for employees at the ski resort where I work each winter is, at its best, occasionally adequate. Moldy dorm rooms with two or three to a person house most in town, while some ways out of Park City, a fishing camp at the base of the reservoir dam, complete with little two-room cottages, affords at least the possibility of a room to oneself in which to take refuge. This is where I have stayed. My first cabin mate of this latest winter season was a considerate, if usually drunken man about my same age named Don. Things with him were going well enough until he drank himself into a tequila rage one night, then was inexplicably gone the next day, his room cleared out, himself no longer employed at the resort. But some one or two weeks before this happened, I woke up from a dream that did not seem to be a dream at all, yet in retrospect it seemed predictive.<br /> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In this “dream” I’d only just started to drop off into sleep, just past that twilight state in which things and voices and entire scenes may intrude as prelude to sleep and proper dream. While hovering in this state I heard a shout – it seemed to be Don’s voice – and this rattled me back awake, unsure if I’d really heard or not heard it. There was no further sound to follow this, but I realized in short order that I smelled a heady scent of shit; my entire room smelled of the stuff, and it was revolting. It didn’t seem to be coming from me, so far as I could tell, but it seemed inescapable. I tried to simply lay there for a short while, hoping to get back to sleep despite this, but in time, realized that I would at least need to go to the bathroom myself if I was to relax at all again. And as soon as I picked my head up off the pillow, the reek was gone. It had entirely dissipated in that instant, as though it had never been there. There was suddenly no more trace of it at all.<br /> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This perplexed me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the whole thing that next morning: an agonized shout, the smell of dung. Although it could be explained away, no doubt, any number of ways, I had the troubling sense that something had been trying to send me a message. At work in the bakery that morning, I mentioned it to my coworker, a very feet-on-the-ground type of woman, one I truly liked, though one not willing to entertain much of this etheric sort of thing, who said, “Maybe it’s your faeries talking.” There was at least a hint of mocking in her tone. But still it got me to thinking.<br /> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Within two weeks of this, Don had drunk himself into a blind rage and then he was gone, like a ghost. Something of his own dark side had caught up with him. I’d had to endure a night of his agonized shouts and him pounding against the walls (while not exactly willing, myself, to confront a tequila-fueled monster ape who was clearly suffering, and ask him to stop). I later thought often of the dream, or hallucination, or whatever it was. Perhaps it was that Don had only shouted in his sleep, agonized by some nightmare. But there was also the suffocating smell of shit in the air, gone the moment I’d moved at all… and that was peculiar, and it seemed to signify something. I felt that the whole thing, whether I was reaching or not, could be read symbolically, just like a dream, whether it had been mine or my roommate’s, or not a dream at all. Don had choked on his own crap.<br /> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The next “dream” came a couple of weeks after this had happened. With Don now out of the picture, but the resort still hiring (and therefore housing) people beyond its capacity, I knew it was only a matter of time before the next roommate moved in. I was told to expect one shortly by the housing manager. I only hoped this guy might be as agreeable as the last. Yet as the days past, and then became some weeks, I spent spent the time in the cabin to myself and loving it. I am, after all, a very private person. I like the quiet. I thrive on solitude, yet I knew it couldn’t last. One particular night – or rather, one early morning – I was awoken by the sound of people, two or three of them, suddenly throwing open the door to the cabin and tromping loudly in. They chatted amongst themselves as if it were mid-day and there was no one else about, certainly no one trying to sleep in the dark and small hours in the occupied room. One of them seemed to express some annoyance at the signs of someone already living in the place – that would be me – and the whole group in time trotted back outside into the snow, leaving the front door wide open, as if they were in the midst of moving in. Are these my new roommates? I thought, and, What complete assholes! My heart was racing. I was furious. What’s more, they’d left the front door open, and the heat was escaping. I could already feel the temperature start to drop.<br /> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I got up out of bed to at least shut the door, and when I stepped out from my bedroom into the darkened kitchen, found the front door already well-shut. There was nobody there, and as far as I could tell, there had never been anybody there. But here was another intrusive “dream”, from somewhere outside the cusp of normal sleep. This had felt nothing like the sort of dream I might normally wake from, shake off, and realize had been just that. This was something altogether different. This was all but physical, and as it turned out, altogether predictive as well.<br /> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was maybe two weeks later that somebody did finally show up, and this in the middle of the night, just like I’d “dreamed” it. I woke up around one a.m. to the sound of somebody opening the front door, walking through the kitchen, closing themselves up in the empty, bare room and flushing the toilet. It was clear that there was somebody actually there. I had no idea who. Anxiously, in time, I was able to get back to sleep, until in the morning the sound of them now leaving woke me up once more. I stretched and looked out through the slats of my window’s blinds to see a pair of feet walking heavily off through the snow. Okay, I thought, that was just odd. And disturbing. I learned the next day, when the housing manager again came by, that this was in fact my new roommate. Great. I groaned inwardly, but knew that it had been coming. I heard or saw nothing more of this mystery person for several more nights until again, in the middle of the night, I woke up from the sound of the door thrown open, and all the lights were turned on, and two pairs of feet walked heavily back and forth through the kitchen. Voices talked – at full volume – and something was set down into the empty room. A box? The two left again, only to return again, repeat the noisy intrusion, leave again, return again, then leave. It was like a Chinese water torture. My blood was boiling.<br /> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I again remembered my “dream”. It had been exactly this.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2014/05/this-killing-winter-part-three.html" target="_blank">To be continued.</a>]</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-42190675360879475522014-04-26T18:46:00.000-07:002014-05-03T17:29:41.601-07:00This Killing Winter, Part One<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I don’t know if I should be writing about this. There is more than one reason for my hesitation. The events of the last few months in my life are relevant to the topic of this blog, but they are so tangled up in personal minutiae that it may be too hard to unravel clearly, and the whole thing ends badly, if it can be said to end at all. It’ll take a few postings to work it out, but I guess I’ve got time now. The work of the winter season is over with, and I’m home again in Washington. There’s a certain amount of chaos at my house that I need to sort out – some thieves broke in and stole what they wanted while I was away – but at least the pressure is off me now, so far as I can tell. Now it’s time to rest for a moment and recover, and try and sort a few very difficult things out.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I guess it begins with the psychic Anya Briggs. Not that anything that’s happened is her fault; she just got me to thinking in certain ways. In particular, she got me to thinking about the elemental spirits that seem to be living around my home, and urged me, during a Skype session with her in the summer of 2012, to open a dialog with these critters, as there seemed to be one clamoring for my attention, making our own conversation difficult. I was game for it, and so began conversing with the faeries, not exactly believing nor disbelieving, since I couldn’t see them – at least, not directly – but willing to try, and to watch all the while for what might come of it. [For further details, see <a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/09/faery-talk.html">Faery Talk</a> posting] The results were imaginative and playful, and opened me up to an imaginal realm of possibility; one not quite new entirely, but now differently and interestingly nuanced – peopled with new invisibles that may be my own creation, that may be objectively real, or that may be both or neither or all of the above and more. That there was a hint of darkness to this dialog surprised me, but it seemed not unreasonable that talk with an elemental spirit may carry with it also a measure of violence. Certainly not everything in the imaginal kingdom was light and ease and rainbows. In short, the fae seemed a bit capricious and difficult, if not outright vindictive sometimes. They had personality.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is important.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For the remains of the summer and into that autumn, I continued to blunder through my conversations with the fae, and I couldn’t say what exactly it amounted to, but it seemed fun. I saw small things moving in the corners of my eyes, in fact almost all of the time, particularly in early evening, in the twilight hour. In my meditations, I tried to listen and to speak. There often seemed something fluttery and soft at the back of my mind, though I could never discount that I might be imagining it. But that wasn’t what mattered. The literalness of the thing was of no consequence. What I was addressing rendered the question of “real” or “unreal” at least a little bit irrelevant. The imaginal is what it is.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Soon enough, December grew close and it was time for me to leave for Utah, where I work in the winter and have for a while. If the faeries were tied to the land in Washington, then I would be leaving them; if they weren’t, they were welcome to come with me and continue the conversation. It seemed as if a little of both might be the case.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is all to set the stage.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After the winter season was over, I’d planned a trip to New York City to visit some friends, and so set up a session in person with Anya, whom I’d never met face-to-face, except through Skype. In our session, she remarked about my sleep. I’ve long had troubles sleeping, but she told me that once I’d gotten back home again, back to the island, I’d sleep like a little baby. The sleep of the innocent. And it was true: in the two weeks I’d been back in Washington before coming to New York, I’d never slept better, except maybe for one night in Geneva, when traveling through Europe. This, she said, was because of these elementals, because I’d taken the trouble to acknowledge them. For this effort, they were helping me, and they were also helping to protect my home. I took this with my usual stance of both openness and skepticism, accepting while neither believing nor not, though I found this last assertion at least a bit surprising.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There was a lot more to the session, but I won’t go into that here. I flew back to Washington and settled into the summer. I worked a bit more in Utah, returned to Whidbey in the autumn, then left again for another Park City winter. It amounted to a lot of driving. Just before leaving this last time, I replaced my ailing Saturn with a used Jeep. When I left, it was with a sense of anxious foreboding. I put it down to the new car, not knowing what sort of problems it might have. As it turned out, there was a lot more to it than that. As it turned out, it may very well be that the fae are partial to their location. As it turned out, they may very well have been righteously pissed that I was leaving, again.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2014/05/this-killing-winter-part-two.html" target="_blank">To be continued.</a>]</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-11007785547501500292013-11-13T16:05:00.000-08:002013-11-13T16:05:08.748-08:00I-Bar Christmas-light Coat-hanger Thing in the City Night Sky (1986)
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was some
weeks ago that I remembered this event. I wouldn't call it buried, but for some
reason I’d simply forgotten about it until then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After working for a while with my writing group,
the few of us walked from our regular coffee shop on the pier to the local tavern up
the street (I had coffee; the others by now preferred wine), and we got to talking
about local author Tom Robbins, who was hugely popular when I was in college in
the 1980’s. I remarked that I’d seen him speak once at the UW, back in the day.
Soon after telling the others the bare facts about this, and that he was an
engaging speaker, there was something that nagged at me, though, and I knew
there was more to the story. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Yes,
I’d gone to see the author. A friend and I drove up from Olympia for the event,
to see him at the University’s Kane Hall, a mammoth auditorium where I’d once
taken a 101 Psychology course with 700 other freshmen before transferring to
another school. The lecture hall was even more crowded on this occasion, and I
remembered that Robbins, the author of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”,
“Jitterbug Perfume”, et al, was funny and entertaining, and seemed to know how
to work the audience. But I knew there was something more to it, and I was sure
there was a UFO connection. It bothered me, because this idea seemed tacked
onto my recollection of the event, like a flag or a post-it note. It felt
artificial, like I was reaching for something not there.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It wasn’t
until the next morning that the rest of it came back to me. I was surprised
that I’d not remembered it sooner, because it was something I’d been aware of
for all of my life since the day it happened. It wasn’t a buried memory or
traumatic, just weird. This would have been sometime in 1986, and my friend
Birdy and I drove the 70 miles north on I-5 in my dilapidated Impala for the event.
It was just as we entered the city, reaching downtown, with the financial
district on our left and 1<sup>st</sup> Hill on the right, where several
hospitals are (the neighborhood is nicknamed “Pill Hill”) that something
floated directly, noiselessly over the car. I think it moved from right to
left, and it flew more or less like a helicopter, crossing the freeway and going
between the tall buildings of downtown. It was easy, superficially, to dismiss
this as a helicopter, except there was no helicopter there, not that I could
see. Rather, it was all glowing and golden, seemed to have a plain shape like
an iron I-beam, and was strung with all colors of hanging lights along tangled
wires like a Christmas tree, one rather sloppily decorated. Add to that how it
flew into the narrow spaces in between buildings, and the whole picture becomes
very strange. I’d thought at the time that it must be a helicopter, though,
landing at the helipad of one of the hospitals – which maybe it was. Maybe I
remember it in reverse: that it came out from between the buildings and headed
for the hill. This was certainly how I thought of it for at least a year
afterwards. But it always haunted me, because there was something subtly not
right about it – like, for instance, the ridiculously gaudy decorations and
unsafe flight pattern.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Neither
Birdy nor I said anything about it. We’d both seen it, clear as day, although
it was night. It was impossible to miss. We had some time after parking the car
to nose around the University Campus before the reading. Still, I can’t
remember it ever coming up between us. We found a dark corner and smoked a
little weed, then went on into the lecture hall for the event. When Robbins
came to the stage, after the applause had died down and a few introductory
remarks, he read from a new story, something not yet published, which he explained,
“This is a story about how I saw a UFO.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Addendum to
the above entry:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Riding the
airporter shuttle back to Whidbey from SeaTac last week, I had a chance, as we
passed through the above-mentioned stretch of the I-5 corridor, to take a good,
close look at the conditions there as I would have seen them so many years ago,
approaching from the same direction. The spaces between the buildings at that
exact spot were much wider than the concentration of high-rises only a block or
two further north, and there seems in fact to be a helipad at Harborview
Hospital that more or less abuts the freeway. Everything about the location
admits the likelihood that what I saw was exactly what I half-way took it as: a
Medivac helicopter coming in for a landing, or, alternately, taking off again.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Except there
is still the matter of its appearance. I perhaps didn’t see it entirely clearly,
but I have always remembered in such stark detail the weird, loose hang of that
string of lights beneath the aircraft, run from one end to the other, and the
vivid golden color of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">something</i> –
these details and the lack of any coherent shape to the object. There was no “helicopter”
that I could see, only a minimal structure supporting sloppily-hung, ornamental
lights. There was also no sound as this machine floated low and directly
overhead.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like with so
many of these “encounters”, I feel like I’m being played with, and it may be no
one but myself and my imagination in this tricksterish role. Yet there is, so
often, just enough unlikely detail to let me doubt these dismissals, and either
add support to self-delusion, or ask that I look more deeply through the cracks.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-67828976990012793562013-10-21T17:45:00.000-07:002013-10-21T17:45:00.556-07:00Revenge of Floaty Military Thing
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My last post
described a strange military jet airplane that seemed to float silently beside
the highway in mid-day, over a patch of woods not far from where I live. It’s
been several months since I wrote that post, but I have thought of this
sighting many times since then. Not obsessively, and not to attach any
particular significance to it. I really don’t imagine that this airplane was
necessarily anything but what it appeared to be, which was a normal military
jet that seemed to behave strangely. Yet I’ve also allowed it to signify a
certain <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">possibility</i> of meaning, and
in so doing, certain synchronistic or curious phenomena constellated around it
[<a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2013/06/floaty-military-thing-invalidates-all.html" target="_blank">link previous post and addenda here</a>]. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’ve noticed
something else curious in how I think of this as well. I now remember it
differently from how I did before. In this new memory – which I tell myself is
not how I saw it, yet which persists, seemingly of its own – there are two
impossible features. The first is that the airplane had a long, silver-metallic
pole that stuck down several meters from the belly of its fuselage, that may
have also had a blinking light at the tip of it. This feature is identical to a
sighting that I had of an actual UFO in the late 1980’s [<a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/05/additive-responsive-shape.html" target="_blank">link to post here</a>]. If
this pole or antenna were actually jutting from the underside of the plane, it
would’ve been impossible to land without breaking it, or at least retracting it.
Also, to say it again, I’m quite certain this feature wasn’t there at the time,
yet, despite this, I can’t seem to help but remember it this way. The other
addition or distortion I have is even stranger: I distinctly remember there being
a hatchway open, also on the underside of the fuselage, and a man in a white
sweatshirt who wore a flight helmet, leaning out of the opening, smiling and
waving down at the traffic that passed beneath, perhaps specifically at me.
This is just bizarre, like some cartoon version of what actually happened. Yet
every time I think of it, this is how it appears to me in memory.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I postulate
nothing about these reconfigured memories beyond what they present themselves
as, yet both features have curious referents. The pole or antenna relates
directly back to a UFO sighting of my early adulthood. The smiling man who
waves reminds me of an attempted kidnapping when I was quite young, when a man
tried to entice me into his car. He pulled the car up beside me, opened one of
the back doors, and smiled brightly and with one arm, gesturing for me to climb
inside. Since I’d been warned about exactly this at a recent school rally, I
knew to run away, and that’s what I did. But the knowledge that things could
have gone very differently for me has never been far from mind, and though it
may seem a stretch, to relate this early incident to what I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">imagine</i> seeing a man in a airplane
doing, the psychological association of “abduction” is valid, because what I’m
describing is fundamentally a psychological event, with the concept of the UFO
as an invisible, though central, constellating event.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Memory seems
never to be only one thing. In fact it isn’t. Yet memory has been the underlying
and constant theme throughout these posts, since all are based on memories of
observations and impressions, either near or distant in time. Moreover, these
recollections are the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">interpretations</i>
of memory – descriptions, which exist apart from the memories themselves and
may be more or less accurate, yet are not the thing itself. The description is
unavoidably a modification of the memory, a shaping of recalled sense
impressions and thoughts and feelings into words, which recollection itself is
an ever-shifting modification from the original experience. There are gaps
between these things, epistemological gaps and reinterpretations. And though
I’ve tried to describe what experience I’ve had as accurately and truthfully as
possible, I know that these distortions are an inevitable result of the highly
plastic medium of consciousness – a consciousness impacted by this image or
idea of the secularly numinous, which in some cases, and from a certain
perspective, can be described as contact experience with the UFO – which are exactly
the spaces this original sighting and its memory seem to be playful within. A
trickster. A shape-shifter. Yet I don’t know that anyone is doing it to me but
myself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is the
nature of the recognition, what I call the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">alien
as myself</i>, as it is my own consciousness which seems to be the most
fundamentally mysterious thing to me, and my experience, as such, of the UFO or
“ET” which provides the most direct portal to it, which fixes my attention on
it, whatever the ultimate nature of that phenomenon is – self or other or both,
or beyond such categorization.</span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-87819494453197722952013-06-10T12:02:00.002-07:002013-06-16T12:08:58.473-07:00Floaty Military Thing Invalidates All Thinking<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’d been driving north in the early afternoon last
Friday (as of now, three days ago) between Coupeville and Oak Harbor, where a
Naval Air base dominates the northern half of Whidbey Island both economically
and demographically. To see military aircraft of different ages, from the very
new to the old-but-still-flying, particularly this close to Oak Harbor, and in
close proximity, is normal. There’s nothing in the least unusual about that. But
when I saw a large military transport jet, deep gray-green, looking to be a
newer sort and eerily hanging over the woods alongside the highway, it caught
my eye for two reasons: first, I don’t normally see that large of an airplane
along that particular route, especially flying that low (it was only a hundred
or so yards above the treeline), though I couldn’t say that it never happens; but
secondly, and most strangely, because it hardly seemed to be moving at all. It
may <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> have been moving. It looked
as though it simply <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">floated over the
forest</i>.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
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</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was driving in the opposite direction and moved
past in relation to it, so any movement seemed like it could easily have been
that of me going past at fifty miles an hour while it stood still in the air.
If it flew (as opposed to simply floating like some kind of blimp) it hardly
seemed to go even ten miles an hour. Also, I couldn’t hear the sound of any
jets. My car stereo was up, not so very loud – enough to mask the ordinary
sounds of the road – though I wouldn’t think a large military jet flying so
close by would be overwhelmed by it, not hardly. It had a single, white,
blinking light at the bottom of its fuselage. This for some reason also struck
me as odd, or significant somehow, this single, plain light. Otherwise, it had
no running lights that I could see.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I craned my neck around to watch it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> moving as I passed nearby and under,
looking as closely at it as I safely could in the highway traffic. I thought to
pull off to the side, but there wasn’t enough of a shoulder to do it safely. I still
wish that I had.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This sighting bothers me, for a few reasons. The
obvious conclusion is that it is likely not a sighting of anything all that
unusual. This was likely just some conventional military jet transport with
vertical lift technology. The fact that it was so quiet is strange, certainly,
but also not inexplicable. Perhaps jet technology has been developed that makes
that little noise. I’ve seen fighters pass close over the I-5 freeway near Fort
Lewis that I could scarcely hear from inside a car. If that’s all this was, I
have no problem with that; I feel no need to try and spin something exotic out
of the mundane. But the image of the thing haunts me, because there was
something just wrong enough about it (and just public enough also, hovering
that close to the highway) that I <i>had</i>
to notice, and enough about it explicable enough, without any more than the common
knowledge of military technology, that I also <i>have</i> to dismiss it, and I can’t escape this feeling that somebody
is playing with me, because I am now stuck so firmly in this liminal zone of
how I think of this thing. I wanted to write this up immediately, I was that intrigued
by what I saw, but at the same time I keep thinking, it’s nothing, it’s
nothing, don’t make a fool of yourself, tilting at windmills and the like. To
post this is to invalidate the point of this site by making something out of
nothing. But not to post it is to invalidate this work also, to communicate
these moments of liminal strangeness.</span><br />
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Addendum:</span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Shortly after posting this, in the Oak Harbor coffee shop where I was working, in a nearby conversation that I couldn't help overhearing a man said, "I've been tilting at windmills..." Quixote lives.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Further Addendum:</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Before seeing the strangely floating jet airplane
last Friday (now one week ago, exactly, as I write this) I’d gone to the gym in Coupeville, and
in its small parking lot, I noticed that the minivan I’d parked next to had one
flat tire in back. It could’ve been somebody’s car from the physical therapy
office that shared the building, but turned out to be that of the older woman
inside, the only other person at the gym just then. She came outside and I
showed it to her, and we hovered around her van for a few minutes, trying to
figure out what to do about it. We finally decided that calling AAA was
probably the best thing. So I went on inside and had my workout, then found her
still waiting in her van when I came out again. She told me that several people
had stopped to tell her about the flat tire while she’d been waiting – a nice
gesture, but by now she’d more than gotten the point. The tow truck should be
along in a few more minutes, she said.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I got into my car and drove on to Oak Harbor, and it
was along the way that I saw what I described above. I wondered at the time if
there was some kind of connection between these things: the flat tire, my
telling the old woman about it, and then this. It seemed reaching to look for any
causal relationship, but the feeling that there was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">some</i> connection nagged at me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So when I came to the gym again, exactly one week
later, that same older woman was there, cycling on one of the stationary
bicycles beside the desk as I signed in. She told me that after waiting for the
tow truck to come that day, after all those people also told her about the flat
she now knew pretty well that she had, and several more hours spent at or
around the tire shop, getting the flat fixed, that nobody could find anything
wrong with the tire, other than it was flat, neither the tow truck driver nor
the repairmen at the shop. Unless someone had come along and let the air out as
a prank, the tire had gone spontaneously flat for no reason they could see.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This only added to my uneasy feeling that there was
some kind of set-up, that the one thing led toward the other, with my awareness
at the pivot point.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
<!--EndFragment--></span><br />
<!--EndFragment--></div>
BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-66762225314757466792013-05-15T18:40:00.001-07:002013-05-15T18:40:17.995-07:00Early Complications Regarding Sleep and Gravity
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I was
very young – my best guess puts me between 5 and 8 years old – there were two
events I remember centered around sleep, or at least the bed and my attempts at
sleep.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can’t say
why these experiences didn’t occur to me earlier. They’ve not exactly been lost
to memory, but at the same time I’d not recalled them readily either, not in
connection with these – what I’m referring to as numinous – phenomena. They
certainly qualify. In fact, I’ve always thought of them as relating in some
very general way to the UFO experience, as it presents itself in my life. Yet
these remain as isolated events, without inherent reference to anything but
themselves, and were not precursors to, nor as far as I’m aware did they follow
upon, anything. I’ve thought of them in this connection because of their
peculiar flavor, a kind of sense at the back of my head that I get when I
contemplate events of this nature. This has as yet been the ultimate litmus
test for those episodes that I’ve detailed in this site, this beguiling synesthesia
that leaves me with the feeling I’ve come up against something “alien” or
other.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the first
memory, I’m in my bed, but I’m not asleep. It’s very early in the morning, and
I’ve only just woken up. It was probably what woke me; if I wasn’t up already,
this would’ve done it. I remember the foot-end of the bed picking up and
dropping, over and over again rapidly, an oscillation running through the bed
frame’s foot end only, like someone had taken it up by a few inches and shook
it hard and really fast. But there was nobody else in the room with me. Neither
had there been an earthquake, though these do happen sometimes in the region –
in the Seattle area and its surrounding suburbs. No one in my home or in school
that day said anything about an earthquake though, and it would’ve been all the
talk, and it had distinctly been only the foot-end of the bed that shook like
this, not the head, not throughout. No one but me, it seemed, had experienced
anything. I don’t recall what happened, if anything, after that, though it
seems this shaking may have occurred over more than one night. I don’t so
clearly remember. For all the racket this must have caused, there was no
response from my parents or my older sister, who were also in the house – my
sister in the room below mine. I recall the slight, staccato impact, the sound,
however restrained, of the bed’s footpegs hammering the floor, though gently,
and so quick – more a vibration than a pounding.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other, similar event came later. I woke up suddenly from
a dream – it was almost certainly a dream of falling – to find myself <i>above</i> the mattress by a foot or more and
plummeting back towards it. My face slammed into the pillow a split second
later and my whole body bounced, suddenly wide awake and utterly perplexed.
Flying dreams would later be a common theme for me, but seemed the coda to a similar
dream, one of falling from a height, one too seamlessly spliced into my waking
life.</span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-16366039417889635702013-04-22T21:37:00.000-07:002013-04-22T21:37:23.650-07:00Bookending Highway Sychronicities
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-05lTF7U8UFY/UXYO-pO240I/AAAAAAAAAgQ/8HCsKf6MT-8/s1600/superior!.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-05lTF7U8UFY/UXYO-pO240I/AAAAAAAAAgQ/8HCsKf6MT-8/s1600/superior!.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the short
story that I’m working on now, entitled “Twicehorse”, I have my protagonist
driving across the country, moving from Seattle to New York State in a wounded,
old truck. I’d been working up to the point where he stops for his first night.
When trying to find a plausible location on the road atlas for him to wind up,
my eyes came to rest on the dot marked Superior, Montana, which seemed a
reasonable place, both location-wise and in terms of its anonymity. I knew
nothing at all about it, though the particulars of the actual town are not that
important for the story. It was just for its location, more or less arbitrary,
where a man driving in a slow and ailing truck for a long day might finally
stop to rest.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Driving
myself all day Tuesday from where I’d stopped the night before in eastern Idaho
– this was my second day on the road, returning home to Washington State from a
winter spent in Utah, and I’d taken a detour from my usual route through Oregon
– I’d forgone, out of impatience, the smaller and more scenic rural highways I’d
traveled the day before in favor of the interstate and its speed, and finally convinced
myself to stop when the shadows had grown suddenly long, the sun abruptly
hidden behind surrounding mountain peaks, and though I knew I could’ve carried
on for another hour or two in the remaining daylight, it was beginning to feel
as if my nervous system were revolting. It shot signals out in sudden waves of sick
anxiety, despite the comfortable rhythm that I’d finally settled into. So I
decided that the next decent-looking motel would have to do. I’d noticed a sign
some miles back already for a run-o’-the-mill sort of place that promised
nothing extravagant, that seemed perfect in fact, and the next exit up was the
one to take. It wasn’t until I’d carted my bags into the room that the significance
of Superior, Montana, the speck of a town where I’d stopped, occurred to me.
I’d come to rest in the same town where I was making my character stop – albeit
traveling in the opposite direction – and had done so without knowing it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was a fine
town for my purposes of waiting the night out, of getting food and rest, all of
one small street zig-zagging its way beside and beneath the I-90 freeway
amongst mountains and thick pine forest, with nothing in particular to
distinguish it, at least to my eyes. The police department stood directly
across the road from the motel. The old couple filling in for the absent owner at
the front desk didn’t know how to work the credit card machine. But mostly, for
myself as for my story’s protagonist, the specific characteristics of the town
were unimportant. Whatever else I may have imagined about the location (for the
purposes of the story) was not there to be found – not so far as I could see –
and it seemed there was nothing especial to be gained in being there beyond a
meal or two and a night’s rest. It was the incidence of the name, its spot upon
the map – a reference point in my mind, in language, in space – the virtue of
its location more than anything else that informs this constellation of events,
though one may ask what else is there, what if any meaning is leaned-towards in
this index of co-arrangement?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the story
that I’m writing, my protagonist is reading a particularly difficult book of
fiction, one that subsumes his actual life. His fictive world is blurred into
the road on which he travels.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In another odd
constellation, I’d bought and downloaded the audiobook of Trish and Rob
MacGregor’s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Aliens-Backyard-Rob-MacGregor/dp/1937530337/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366691444&sr=1-1&keywords=aliens+in+the+backyard" target="_blank">Aliens In The Backyard: UFOs, Abductions and Synchronicity</a></i> (which is an excellent book, by the way) the
next morning while still at the motel. The audio file’s duration is 7 hours and
47 minutes, and I started listening to it as soon as I’d gassed up the car and
entered onto the freeway. The book finished its play-through with the familiar,
“Audible hopes you have enjoyed…” just as I swung into my neighborhood’s
entrance back home on the island.</span>BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-24037901202346295462012-11-29T19:28:00.000-08:002012-11-29T19:30:52.924-08:00Sky-Spark As Liminal Medium of Departure<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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 <a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/08/aerial-light-lost-american-highway-soul.html" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue;">shoot off over the freeway</span></a> one night in Indiana, while driving
cross-country. For all I know, it’s the same light. For all I know, it’s
nothing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-47569132028514192242012-11-02T08:42:00.000-07:002012-11-02T08:42:14.955-07:00Shapes of Coming Things<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-n9F80W9-Of4/UJPpBCuE0WI/AAAAAAAAAfk/vXwsmUxu004/s1600/skyshape.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-n9F80W9-Of4/UJPpBCuE0WI/AAAAAAAAAfk/vXwsmUxu004/s1600/skyshape.jpg" /></a></div>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-66265321037265873412012-10-19T17:45:00.001-07:002012-10-19T17:45:35.821-07:00Travelogues of the Dead: ECETI Ranch, Part 3 (Conclusions…)
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/10/travelogues-of-damned-eceti-ranch-part-2.html" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue;">[…Continued from the previous post]</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It may now be that I’ve waited too long
to recount some elements of this first visit to the ranch in the necessary
detail. I’ve lost sight of too many particulars, forgotten too much about the
people who were there: the woman who ran some kind of center in Costa Rica
where lights out of the sky are landing regularly, where her abductions have
become a matter of course; or the visiting Russian remote viewer and his
elegant wife, whether holdovers from the era of the KGB or something more
recent, I never knew; or the lively and intelligent former Franciscan monk; or
perhaps the brooding, dark couple who’d gotten lost and arrived late, their GPS
system having misled them down roads still closed from wintertime, fellow
speakers, like JG, over the festival circuit (or so I gathered); or that entire
young family – parents, children, one illicit dog – returning now from the Midwest
with a truckload of fresh maple syrup, chasing after the significant experience
they’d had at the conference that summer previous… I’m necessarily condensing
these various characters from this and subsequent visits, because that is
primarily what I found at ECETI: a revolving cast of fascinating people; moreso
this than significant contact experience... I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">think</i> – I say that guardedly, and will explain in a moment –
because subsequent visits, perhaps necessarily, brought sharply diminishing
results as regard actual sightings and the like, weather conditions not
allowing for further skywatchings. I’ve since seen videos posted from ECETI and
it’s guests, enough at least, to see this familiar scenario of odd little
distant lights <a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/10/travelogues-of-damned-eceti-ranch-part-2.html" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue;">[see previous post]</span></a> repeated often.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But what these grainy green infrared
video clips don’t show, and can’t begin to explain, are the ancillary things,
such as how, when I woke up that next morning, though my eyes were still shut
in reluctance to face the day, I was finally forced to open them, to try and
see who it was who’d found their way into the same bed beside me: I’d clearly
heard a woman’s voice sigh with waking, and the sound of the covers rustling
with her movement, not mine. Yet I knew that I’d gone to bed, entirely sober,
alone… just as I was in fact still alone – nobody else was there. Bright, if
diffuse, sunlight filtered in through the thin curtain as I looked around the
bed and the room. It was just me in here. But I’d <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">heard</i>… right <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">there</i>…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Okay, it was entirely possible that the
walls between rooms are so thin that essentially no barrier exists to mediate
the sounds between rooms. Usually I can tell the difference between a sound
immediately beside me and one in the next room several feet away, even if there
is nothing more substantial than a curtain between the two, but I’ll be happy
to admit that there could conceivably be no particular significance to this.
Except that that is not how it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">felt</i>,
because what it felt like was an object lesson of some sort, a metaphor in
living, if ghostly, form, as if she (invisible she) were a gamepiece arranged
(I being another piece in the game) – we two, myself and the ghost – in the
same place at the same time, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not
quite exactly</i>, as if there were something deeply funny to some third
person, some <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">metaperson</i>, about how she
and I were just exactly not quite together in the same dimension. I’ve had time
to reflect on this since, and see levels to the lesson now, or joke, that would
be difficult to explain. The ghostwoman, real or not, means something very
personal and multilayered, and that is all I will say.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a similar connection, when I returned
to ECETI ranch almost exactly a year later, again staying in the same room in
the guesthouse, in my sleep that night I had what is for me a very unusual
dream. Nothing of any great significance had happened the evening previous. The
weather had prevented any viewing of the skies, and I’d had a nice chat with
the other guests staying that night in the house, but the circumstances were
otherwise unremarkable. But in the night I’d dreamed of being in a room that
was completely white, simply flooded with light – it had walls and a floor and
I supposed a sort of a ceiling, though I couldn’t see it – and I was immersed
in the even, white light, and seemed to have no body. Take that at any level of
meaning that can be imagined: I had <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">no</i>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">body</i>. I later called this dream my
dream of the reset room, because that was the thing that happened: the connection
between myself and this ghost of the previous visit (I call it a ghost, though
I know it really isn’t) had been leveled and returned to a zero, our karma, as
such, was cleared. Do over; start again, we’ll call the whole thing good.*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I don’t know if I’ll go back to the ranch
or not, though my experiences there have had meaning – albeit not of the sort
that I’d gone looking for. But it seems that everything is like that; at least
it is in my life. My feelings regarding ECETI are profoundly ambivalent. Although
I’ve found the people there, both living at the ranch and those visiting, like
myself, to be friendly, accommodating and often fascinating, there is a certain
vocabulary of belief that holds over the place, one that I cannot
wholeheartedly speak with conviction. Perhaps doing so is not required. Perhaps
what I feel is my innate sense of aloneness, that thing I’ve held on to in
order to remain myself. I would stop far short of calling the atmosphere there
cultish (it has been accused of this), yet it does very much center around the
teachings and charisma of James Gilliland, a gentle man who has certainty and
sincerity, and an evident depth of spiritual experience. His position of
definitiveness – as he has answers about what is happening around the ranch,
about what beings are involved, where they’re from, and what they are up to –
while providing a framework of guidance, also places a limit over one’s
understanding of events that are otherwise ambiguous and personal, and I find
myself resistant to drawing absolute conclusions about what one has seen, and
what has happened, and far more over what it means. I am not qualified to
criticize James, as I’ve not gotten to know him well at all. I certainly don’t
wish to be overly critical; I believe him to be a good man. Yet I maintain a
self-protective distance – perhaps this is symptomatic of my own egotism and
its wounds, far moreso than any quality I may find in him – as I also know all
too well my proclivity towards being subsumed under such an influence as his,
and have learned by many hard lessons to distrust charisma. Still, I feel that
I have stopped far short of experiencing all that lies <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">potentia</i> at ECETI.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">*I’m being cryptic, I know, and I’m
sorry, but to say anything more about the deeper context in this would take
several thousand more words, involve conjecture that may well be considered libelous,
and at the very least greatly invade the privacy of another person; so this is
as far as I can go.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-34056578733010784012012-10-12T10:27:00.001-07:002017-10-13T08:47:31.401-07:00Travelogues of the Damned: ECETI Ranch, Part 2<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/10/travelogues-of-damned-experiences-at.html" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue;">[Continued from the previous post… ]</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Framed photographs of colorful,
splotchlike orbs taken at night in the field covered the walls of the
guesthouse living room, and one, a blur of spectral colors, which had been
described to me definitively by my admitting host as a faery, it in particular
caught my attention – it even had defined “wings” and something resembling a
skirt or tail, hanging in the night air above a small cluster of people, who all
looked up toward it. It reminded me distantly of the Marian apparitions
photographed around the Coptic Church in Cairo, between 1968 and 1971. As the
evening wore on, there gathered in the guesthouse perhaps half a dozen of us
altogether who were not with the ranch itself, but there to encounter what
might be encountered. I was a little surprised to find myself relatively at
ease with this small and unfamiliar group, as conversation came untroubled and informal
comfort seemed the order of things. After a time, the same woman who’d first
admitted me and shown me to my room put her head in the door again in to
announce to us that James had received acknowledgement that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">they</i> were here now… that it was time to
come to the field if we wanted to see them. A wave of anticipation rushed over us
as we hurriedly gathered up our jackets and cameras, following after.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It was a short walk through darkness and
beyond the main building to the field, where James and the others were waiting.
As I walked out amongst the scattered deck chairs in the chill, open air, I
started to notice colorful blotches of light popping in the peripheries of my
vision, greens and reds. They wiggled and disappeared as quickly as they’d
arrived. It seemed an interior, perceptual thing, though very physical, and not
quite like anything I’d experienced before, so I said out loud, yet still
mostly to myself, “What are these colors I’m seeing in the corners of my eyes?”
James replied, surprising me that he’d even heard my soft voice, “Those are the
beings that live out here.” We looked up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It was some moments before anything
started to happen, but then one of us said something to the effect of, “Oh,
there’s one…” Above us, in the sky, one of the many dots moved laterally
against the darkness. A satellite? James pointed a laser at it, for the benefit
of anyone who’d not caught it yet. In the wake of anticipation, I wondered if
this could auger something more to come. I’d heard stories from my new friend
back at the house of spectacular behaviors of lighted objects that had
convinced her to come to live at the ranch. But of what I saw now, this in
itself it didn’t seem like much. Then a second dot of light was noticed, moving
in a different direction. The laser beam called this one out as well, and
infrared goggles started being passed around. In time, more and more of these
dots appeared, moving always in continuous lines. “Let me see if I can get them
to power up,” James said, confidently, following one with his pointer, flashing
the beam on and off. Sure enough, as though reluctant to perform, yet badgered
into it by the laserbeam, the dot did flash back at us. People cheered. This
was repeated a few times, by a few different dots – as several of them appeared
over the hour and a half that we were out there in the field, under the
clearing in the skies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When the infrared binoculars were passed
over to me, I took a swing with them around the green-lit star field. Nothing.
Even as more dots were sighted, cheered on by the others, and I tried chasing
after them, I just couldn’t seem to catch up with anything. When I said as
much, somebody – I couldn’t tell who in the darkness – suggested that I train the
binoculars toward one particular spot and wait, so I tried this tack, holding
steady, looking directly to an area chosen at random, and waited. I began to
get a sinking feeling, a sadness altogether too familiar, as if even in this
feakazoid behavior, I just wasn’t somehow good enough to get it, a lonely child
again who would never quite fit in. As I sank into this old despair, through
the goggles, in the center of a dark patch, there was a sudden, bright flare-up
and just-as-quick disappearance. My animator’s time-sense calculated: at 24
frames per second of film, it would have been over with in 3; one eighth of a
second. Nobody else commented, as no one seemed to see it but me. But I had
very definitely seen it, at just exactly the moment that I’d given up and felt
most entirely alone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When James called it good, deciding that this
performance was over for the night and we should go in, one of the staff
tallied that we’d seen 22 such little moving dots of light in the 90 minutes
that we’d been watching. I’d heard in James’s interviews about the “Heavens
Above” satellite-tracking software they employed to check what hardware was
actually accounted for in the sky at a given time, but hadn’t seen or heard any
numbers for that time span that evening, but even given the mostly unexceptional
nature of what we did see, moving-spot-wise (and not accounting for my more
subjective experiences) the numbers seem, at the very least, a little weird.
That’s a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lot</i> of satellites, some of
which seemed happy to blip at us more or less on command. Yet it was all so
distant, diminished, unspectacular, and to the skeptic, unconvincing – while to
those inclined toward belief, it seemed yet more ready proof. One visitor, a
young man who’d come in a group with two others, was visibly annoyed at the willingness
of the rest to accept this as in any way significant. He’d seen a few
satellites and nothing more. I couldn’t exactly blame him for feeling this way,
but I’d had the experience of something reaching me – and only me – at the
moment when I needed it the most. And I’d had the feathery little blob-colors
touching me, as I could almost more feel than see them, brushing quickly,
playfully up against the flanks of my soul, as I’d first stepped out into the
field. But it was so subtle and subjective, so easy to dismiss, and in that
sense, exactly like most of the experiences I’ve had of this sort.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/10/travelogues-of-dead-eceti-ranch-part-3.html" target="_blank">[Concluded in the next post… ]</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-84487655929960312632012-10-05T09:53:00.002-07:002012-10-12T10:29:27.483-07:00Travelogues of the Damned: Experiences at ECETI Ranch, Part 1<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ECETI Ranch may be the sort of place that
needs little to no introduction. Ranch owner and mystic James Gilliland has
spoken much and well over numerous media to describe the history of his
involvement with the place and the sort of thing that tends to happen on its
grounds – and especially in the skies over them – at Trout Lake, Washington. I’d
first heard Gilliland over Coast To Coast AM, then later on the podcasts of
Whitley Strieber and William Henry. Because Trout Lake – which is not exactly
in my backyard, but neither is it so far from it – was only a short jog off the
I-84 that I’d begun migrating seasonally between the Puget Sound and Utah, and
the ranch is open to visitors, there seemed no good reason not to stop in and
see if I couldn’t invite something more into my life by way of contact
experience, or at the very least, experience of some sort or another. That
seemed to be the point.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was at the end of the ski season in
the springtime of 2010 and my seasonal job in Park City had wrapped up when I
booked a room for myself along the return drive to Washington. I didn’t know
what to expect. I knew at least not to hope for too much – it seemed unlikely
that any astoundingly weird craft or beings should appear on order. And anyhow,
I wasn’t looking for Spielbergian special effects and spectacle. What I wanted
most of all was to enrich the mostly quiet thing that I’ve lived with for so
long: this sense of something <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other,</i> never
so far off<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>– this being of depth, this
inversion of or vast expansion from the human, insofar as I’ve come to know the
experience of being human – and that I’ve always felt or imagined myself in
some manner tied up with. What I worried about was that I might wander into
some or another cultic sensibility, some all-too-human network for escapist
fantasy, a sick support in mutual delusion. What’s more, I’m very aware of my
own sometimes timorous grasp on the conditions of the actual, or on myself for
that matter, knowing that if presented with an idea – or more especially, a
charismatic personality – compelling enough, that I can lose my balance, I can
loose my mind, I can became too easily subsumed within the stronger field of another’s
belief, if it should be aligned closely enough to what I already intuitively
feel to be true. This is a danger for anyone. And yet, such a sensitivity, a
willing or unwilling lack of a coherent self, is perhaps necessary to truly
experience another thing, to get past the assumptions that one inherently makes,
and thus to enter into a different point of view. The danger of this is less to
believe wrongly than to become empty, to be no one for a time, and thus to
become another’s emotional tool.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I arrived at the ranch, I was
greeted by a very friendly young woman and a barking dog. The dog’s name I’ve
since had repeated to me several times, though I’ve never been able to remember
it. A slightly aloof, small, patchwork mutt, we did at least have a chance to
converse a little, later on, the dog and I, and we seemed to work out some
arrangement where it was not necessary for it to bark any further at me. The
woman showed me to a room in the guest house – a building which, comfortable
enough, seemed to have grown, room by room, organically out of stray materials
as they had become available. For the same price as any number of bleak
roadside motels that I’d stayed in, I was certainly not complaining. What the
building may have lacked in finish, it more than made up for in personality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As it was only then that ECETI had opened
up again to guests after a long winter, I was as yet the only person in the
detached guest house, and had the run of ranch to myself. It was still fairly
early in the day. I really had nothing to do, no plan, no work that I’d brought
with me. I was told that if conditions were right for it in the evening, there
would be a sky-watch in the field after dark, in the “Field of Dreams”. Until
then, I was on my own, so wandered about the grounds. I crossed and walked the
perimeter of the field. I ran across James as he worked at setting a wooden
frame into the ground near the newly-constructed meeting hall – something to do
with the septic system he explained – so I introduced myself. He seemed genial
enough, and complained about the hoops the county was making him jump through
to stay open (legal hassles that would only get a hundred times worse in the
months to come) – and then his next words to me were that he had seen, in a
vision, the roads and the trees that line the roads sway and buckle and shake
like waves, as though the ground were water, and that this was most likely the
great earthquake to come. It seemed to me, even me, an odd way to introduce
oneself. I later read in James’ autobiography “The Ultimate Soul Journey” of
how he’d had similar visions leading up to the devastating San Francisco
earthquake of October 1989 while living in the area, of how he’d felt compelled
to tell people about it and take precautions, his visions ultimately proving
predictive and beneficial, if not lifesaving, to those who’d listened. Given
that context, his comments made a certain sense, but at the time they put me
off slightly – I’ve been hearing from local channelers and the like their
similar predictions of the imminent destruction of Seattle by earthquake for
more than two decades, and it has as yet failed to happen (I believe I said as
much to James) and though I would be foolish to say that it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can’t</i> happen – in fact it almost
certainly someday will – I’m also not about to spend my life in a state of
eternal disaster preparedness either.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I returned to my room for a short,
midafternoon nap. As the day wore on, more people arrived: those on staff who’d
been away for the winter, more guests also. I found myself in a state of
strange familiarity with one of the staff, a dark-haired woman close to my own
age with whom I found conversation easy. In time, as guests came and were shown
to their rooms, I was mistaken for staff myself. When asked how long I’d been
there for, I answered, “Maybe four hours,” and was stared at in blank
disbelief. I took it as fortuitous that I seemed to belong; either that or a
testament to my powers of camouflage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/10/travelogues-of-damned-eceti-ranch-part-2.html" target="_blank">[More to come of my experiences at the ranch in the next posting.]</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-64921231782148811742012-09-25T09:31:00.003-07:002012-09-25T09:31:54.241-07:00Faery Talk
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cNHOW5NNvyQ/UGHcEGjnZgI/AAAAAAAAAd0/n1ohXGaHjVc/s1600/offering.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cNHOW5NNvyQ/UGHcEGjnZgI/AAAAAAAAAd0/n1ohXGaHjVc/s320/offering.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I didn’t
want to talk about the faery.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In fact, I
keep thinking to shut this whole thing down, this blog, to stop writing it.
It’s a crisis I go through each week, since I’ve now exhausted the raw material
of my journals and just don’t have that many stories left. Now I resent the
straightjacket of a weekly schedule of postings that I’ve put myself to, and
inevitably, I will have to stop, or at least retool the thing to serve a
different purpose, and one that I don’t hate. Not that I exactly hate this now,
but the problem is that I can’t make stuff up. Or, okay, I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can</i> make stuff up. I call it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fiction</i>;
but that’s not what the purpose of this format is, and that’s not what I’m
doing here. This is a sort of serialized memoir in which certain significant
moments of my life are highlighted by an otherworldly quality of event or
thought, and though it is in part a literary exercise and thought experiment,
the point of writing about this stuff is not to convince anybody of anything –
not about my character, nor my veracity, nor the objective reality of things I’ve
experienced – but neither is it to distort nor embellish, nor to try to impress
anyone, but to describe in the most effective way I can what has really
happened, or sometimes what I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">think</i>
has happened, or what I think about what I think has happened, or maybe the way
I feel about what I think about the things I think have, you know, happened,
etc… and, but… the reasons I have for this are entirely selfish, and that is
what holds me to it; not some sense of duty (though I feel there is a purpose)
but what I get directly from the process of doing it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And so I was
ready to give it up, except that I do have at least a couple of stories left.
One is ongoing, the other in my recent past. I’ll start with the ongoing one, even
though I don’t know what to make of it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IeajKN6x5d0/UGHbCVeRoTI/AAAAAAAAAds/jnKMVo1Hme0/s1600/1234recpt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IeajKN6x5d0/UGHbCVeRoTI/AAAAAAAAAds/jnKMVo1Hme0/s320/1234recpt.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I really
didn’t want to talk about the faery, because I’m not exactly convinced that
it’s there – it’s really more of a thought experiment, as in, what if it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">were</i> there, and how to proceed, as in,
with maybe trying to carry on a conversation with it, with her, to see what
happens? What would I say? More importantly, what would <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">she</i> say? I’m still not so sure I want to talk about it, and I
wouldn’t yet – not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">yet</i> – except for
something that makes me think it might be appropriate: I’d decided the other
morning, sitting down to a cup of coffee, to go looking back through Mike
Clelland’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hidden Experience</i> blog,
since there is a lot of it that I’ve not read. Not having any purpose or plan
to it, I clicked on the tag for psychic Anya Briggs, having some acquaintance
with her, and found the story from March 10 of this year, <a href="http://hiddenexperience.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/can-you-find-fairy.html" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue;">“Can You Find the Fairy?”</span></a> It blew my mind – for reasons that I hope to make clear. After reading
the article and deciding it was time to articulate some of this experiment, I
left the coffee shop where I’d been working, and stopped along the way home at
the local grocery store to pick up a few things. An impulse buy put the amount
for my purchase at $12.34 – which readers of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">H.E.</i> will recognize as a synchronistic signifier of particular
import to Clelland, indicating a need to take especial notice. I felt – as I
did, oddly enough, when first contacting Anya – as if I’d strayed out of my own
story and into his narrative instead. But then I do have boundary issues. It
seemed, in any event, time to take notice. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now it was
Anya who got me all onto this faery thing in the first place, when in a recent
session with her over Skype, we’d had a perfectly clear signal all throughout
the hour-plus conversation until, toward the end, little pixilated swooshes
started appearing suddenly, moving in quick diagonals across the screen from my
end. Anya got excited, picking up that it was an elemental spirit that lived
around my home, impatiently trying to make contact, and that she, Anya, had
been seeing a lot of these beings recently. Since this very selective interference
seemed to happen with an uncanny sense of purpose, and I’d also been seeing
similar things out of the corners of my eyes for some time previously, I was
prepared to take Anya’s advice, by way of saying hello, to set out some sort of
offering for the spirit, a small cup of water, into which I floated the head of
a flower…</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The article
on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hidden Experience</i> concerns Mike’s
friend’s hastily shot photograph, in which a perfectly clear and pixie-like
woman’s disembodied <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">head</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">floats</i> almost concealed behind the
branch of a tree in dense foliage. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’d been
asking the spirit to show me what she looks like. I guess asking a
shape-shifter what it looks like is just walking straight into it; but since
this seems a retroactive sort of joke, unhinged from any sequence of normal chronology…
it just makes the joke that much more funny. Anya did tell me that they have a
very different relationship to time than human people.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was only
the night before this, in my regular meditation, that I’d invited the spirit in
for a talk – “talk” being in this case very loosely defined – and had (though
not for the first time at all) a very vivid sense of presence, something like a
thick, cold wind approach me from behind, an electric crawling sensation inside
of my skull, at the back of my skull, and this very much like the sense of a
presence I’d had over a decade ago, when I’d experimented for a time with
channeling and connected to something identifying itself as IMHOTEP (and yeah,
it spoke in caps) – and though this presence now was similar, it was also
different. I get the feeling now as I write about it: it has a cool, blue
character to it, and is uniquely feminine, which is a hard thing to describe
adequately, because it has nothing to do with sex, but is very much more
abstract than that. The IMHOTEP character was ruddy red, big and cloudlike, and
masculine, and though it’s been a long while since I’ve tried to contact that,
the impression remains vivid.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I made it a
regular part of my day, setting out the cup of water, getting a new flower for
it when the old one wilted, tossing out the little bugs and specks of dirt that
accumulated in the cup from birds coming to drink from it. For more than a
month, the small ceramic cup remained as an ongoing offering. When I had to
recently prepare the house for fumigation (beetles in the wood were eating it
to the ground) with a silent apology, I took the cup in from its post on the
back deck, beside the tree where the faery seems to keep herself. When later I
went outside again, at the exact moment I stepped out the door, a sparrow
smashed itself against the window and died right at my feet. It was as if the
faery were saying, “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hey! We were having a
</i>conversation<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> here… </i>” after I’d
rudely hung up the phone. I watched the small bird’s wings pump slowly in and
out as it gradually resigned itself to not living anymore, black eyes staring
dazedly nowhere. I’ve since put the cup back out.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And I
noticed, when looking again at the receipt from the grocery store, that my
impulse buy had been rung up mistakenly by the friendly cashier. An out-dated
pastry item, marked down on the box, she’d keyed in at full price. It was an
accident that put my total into the realm of significance.</span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-9381892432068982762012-09-18T00:27:00.000-07:002012-09-18T00:27:19.146-07:00Ireland, 2001; the Soft Music of Angels<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GtudaM6yryw/UFghs_UcwLI/AAAAAAAAAcE/AEEhIwfZYeU/s1600/irish.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GtudaM6yryw/UFghs_UcwLI/AAAAAAAAAcE/AEEhIwfZYeU/s1600/irish.jpg" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In 2001, for
our honeymoon, my new wife and I flew first into London. There we rented a car
and drove West, to the small town of Box, Wiltshire, where I’d lived for most
of a year some short time before, and then went on to the ancient city of Bath,
where I’d also stayed for a time. We continued through Wales, caught a ferry
across the water, and spent the remaining week or so driving through the Irish
countryside, more or less without aim, stopping when we felt like we’d found
someplace we wanted to stay. It was in some small town along a bay, I forget
the name of it now, where we held up for a night, and where I heard, in the sound
of the tolling of the churchbell that next day, the angel chorus.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We’d walked
the streets of the village that morning before we left. So many of the
particulars of that place are now lost to me – what the room was like where we
slept, or if we made love, or if our breakfast, or the meal of the night
before, was any good – but I do remember clearly how with every great peal of
the massive bell of the stone church nearby behind us as we walked the cobbled
streets, soon to leave, how in its reverberant, hanging notes, I could just
barely detect, and if I listened carefully, very closely, thought that I could tell,
voice from voice, note from note, each singly, an impossibly sweet harmony
sustained between them of human voices, or of nearly human voices, of perfect
pitch, of perfect and unearthly chorus, quiet, as though revealed by, yet
somehow also held within the solid sound of heavy-struck and old, odd metal.
And I knew also that I’d heard this sort of thing before, once, or something like
it before, once when I was younger, not exact in its qualities but like it – a
sound likewise concealed within a sound, a song not exactly there: I’d listened
once when I was young to an unlikely music I’d found by accident one night inside
of a wall beside my head where I slept, and in the wall was I think the noise
of a pipe, or some such noise, and somehow my mind had parsed the sound, had
taken it apart – a white sound, an even and full-spectrum sound – and piece by
piece arrayed it into the music, so-called, like an organ of sorts that played,
endlessly, slow cycles of notes in sparse and obsessive repetition, the same
thing I’m certain Philip Glass had once heard but never written nor played it
himself. I’d listened then to the music for an hour, or maybe longer than an
hour, until I realized that I’d not heard it at all.</span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-3141444731768751862012-09-11T10:54:00.000-07:002012-09-28T19:30:51.260-07:00Enter Mysterious Dot; Sedona, Arizona, 1999 (Pt. 2)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/09/imhotep-and-mysterious-white-dot-sedona.html" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue;">[Continued from previous post...]</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sitting in meditation on a rock at the
end of the trail through Boynton Canyon, near the cliff ruins – which for all I
knew these flat rocks could have been stacked up only the week previous into
the little fortress walls; shoulder-height and roofless, there was something
more than a little disappointing to these ancient Indian relics, which struck
me more as a fort built by enterprising children to play at being Indians
inside of – I used the visualization exercise I’d only just learned from the
psychic channel in order to connect with some other entity (the one I would in
time identify as IMHOTEP) and felt energized, though more by a high level of
anxiety than any sense of coherent spiritual contact. I wasn’t really expecting
much from the exercise. This was, after all, only the first time I’d ever done
it. Nevertheless, when finished, I walked the winding trail through the canyon
back to its source with a sense of deep significance, searching for a presence
of something – though with half my mind I doubted that there was anything more
to this feeling than a desperate need to believe I’d accomplished something,
that this whole episode had been more than simply being taken for a sucker.
With another part of my mind, I felt as if I needed to watch for signs, because
they would likely be there. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There were few others on the trail; in
fact I don’t now remember anybody else, though I did at one point see, at less
than halfway back, up ahead quite some distance, a white and moving dot of what
I took to be the fabric of a sweatshirt. Though I hadn’t actually seen this, I had
the vivid impression of a middle-aged woman coming in my direction. This was
visible only for some brief moments through the foliage between us, yet it (or
she) seemed clearly enough to be moving toward me, human-sized and following
the trail ahead, in the dappled sunlight and shadows of deciduous trees, and I
don’t know where exactly I’d gotten this impression that it was a middle-aged
woman, because I never saw any detail of this figure beyond the whiteness of
the shirt, but that was the picture I was distinctly left with. When I
eventually reached the point in the trail where the two of us should have met
up with one another, there was nobody. Maybe I’d just misjudged our
trajectories, I thought, but even further on, there was no sign at all of her.
When I got to the place where I’d last seen her white dot through the leaves, I
stopped and looked carefully around. Nobody. But what I found instead was only
the barest hint of something like a trail, not exactly a well-worn path, but a
path all the same, undoubtedly, something that at least animals had traveled. It
led up a rock embankment to my right, so I followed it, scrambling up. I wanted
to see where this woman could have disappeared to. But I never did find her, if
there even was one – although a short distance further in, well out of sight of
the main trail, there was a plateau of red rock, and across the shelf were
dozens and dozens of deliberately constructed little piles of rocks in small pyramidal
constellations. These were things I’d sometimes run across in the area, along
the trails: little constructions left by hikers, I supposed, other pilgrims to
these mystic lands, to signify a spot where they’d stopped and maybe (I
guessed) found some kind of insight, or at least a pleasant moment of
meditation. Or maybe they just liked where they were, because it was nice. On
this shelf, these arrangements were clustered in every direction, closely together,
as if an orgy of meditation had taken place there; a whole battalion of seekers
wide-eyed as myself, come to this particular spot, hotly visualizing God knows
what; or just sitting and, you know, just sitting. But there were no people,
not now. I felt certain that I had been led here deliberately by the appearance
of the mysterious white dot, which I realized only in that moment had never
really appeared as anything other than just that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a related aside, I later ran across a
very similar massed arrangement of small stones. It was late in October of
2001, and I was on my honeymoon, driving through Southwestern Ireland. My new
wife and I stopped somewhere in the countryside to see a long barrow tomb or
collection of standing stones, I forget exactly where. A tour bus had stopped
also in the parking lot, and there was no shortage of people about, hefting
cameras, on this bleakly overcast afternoon. Many had gone to snap photos of
the small monument or returned already to the coach, but nobody seemed
interested in the rock field immediately next to the lot where hundreds of
these small arrangements had been made. No one seemed to so much as noticed it.
There was something wondrous to seeing so many little deliberate piles of rock,
so carefully and absurdly set. There was nothing haphazard about it: hundreds
of these stacks balanced directly beside each other, with no space to move
between them. The effort to do this would have been enormous, and carefully
considered as well, and though I don’t mean to imply that there was anything
paranormal to it, it struck me as at least a little curious that no one else
seemed to notice this or care.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I remained in or near Sedona for another
week, having taken a room in a bed and breakfast in nearby Jerome. Soon my
friends would arrive – they would be flying in later. But for now, I was by
myself, engaged in having visions, writing madly about everything I thought or
saw or thought I saw in a manic and all-but-unreadable, looping scribble,
filling page after page of notebook paper with the wild and blank intensity of
fever. I’ve since lost the notebooks. I don’t know what I wrote, and don’t
think it matters. I spent the remaining days in a desperate, wired state,
looking for something I couldn’t imagine, needing something I would never quite
find.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-90781604464636226712012-09-03T20:37:00.000-07:002012-09-28T19:29:35.472-07:00Imhotep and the Mysterious White Dot; Sedona, Arizona, 1999 (Pt. 1)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When the psychic told me she would not
allow me to record our session for legal reasons, I should’ve twigged that
something wasn’t right. Put it up to over-credulity, perhaps – I’d like to
think I’m a little wiser now, thirteen years later (I hope to God that I am, at
least a little) – or perhaps to the willing suspension of disbelief that a
certain kind of story requires, and sometimes, deserves. And I’d been in her
chair before, once, one year previous, when I and my friends had found her
while on our vacation; my first time in Sedona, Arizona, and her little house at
the end of town with the glass globes arranged all about the garden outside and
the big sign, says PSYCHIC, and something about it – maybe it was the glass
globes – just appealed to me: the seeker in me, the sucker in me. It was on
that first visit that she’d told me she could teach me to channel, but that the
time wasn’t right, I should come back in a year. Okay, I thought. I don’t
remember much else of the particulars of that first visit, other than the chair
she’d put me into was an assemblage of copper tubes, having a pyramid on top,
and she placed coins and amulets over my arms and wrists, told me that for
health reasons I should drink my own urine, or, as an alternative (which I took
her up on) allow myself to be shuttled over to her colleague’s office for the
most expensive emergency massage I’ve ever had. (One of my two friends I’d come
with, who also had a session with this woman, got exactly the same advice re:
the necessary consumption of bodily waste. I don’t know how she resolved the
issue. My other friend politely declined any services whatever.)*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So when I returned a year later, it was
for the express purposes of learning how to channel. The psychic did not
remember me. She did not tell me to drink my own urine. She put me into the
chair with the pyramid on top and once again balanced coins and amulets onto my
forearms so that I couldn’t move without them falling off me, and as before, I
remember little of the actual session, other than it involved how I would be
able to use sound as a healing technology (which still seems to me like a good
idea), and in the end I was given some practical instruction in how to channel.
It was a very different sort of reading from the one previous, in that there
were no histrionics, no attempt to scare or upsell me, perhaps because the
massage practitioner had by then moved on.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I won’t describe the specifics of the
instruction, other than it involved a manner of meditation, and it was
something that I was eager to start out on. The psychic told me that I should
go to one of the several famed power spots in the area, most of which I was
already familiar with, and spend some time trying the exercises. I decided to
go into nearby Boynton Canyon, as that would involve a decent hike in, and
offer some seclusion as well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As an aside, it was year or two later,
having dinner with a friend of my now ex-wife’s, a German woman, a no-bullshit character
employed in a medical supervisory post, when she told us the story of how she
had hiked this same canyon several years earlier, alone, just shortly after the
construction of the high-end (and reputedly cursed) resort positioned just at
its mouth. She’d come upon the splayed remains, some distance up a ridge, of a
coyote that had, to all appearances, been ritually sacrificed, and she felt
thereafter, for the remainder of her stay in the region, as if eyes were
following her everywhere she went. In a nearby mountain town some forty miles
away, the people she passed as she strolled along the street all seemed to
watch her knowingly, aware that she’d found their secret. This was a woman not
given to flights of imagination or paranoia, not normally. But then these were
not normal circumstances, at least for her.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now, for me, later, in the springtime of
1999, sitting on a rock at the terminus of the canyon trail revealed nothing in
particular except a feeling, though it was not one I could easily describe.
Later, with more work with the exercise, this feeling would resolve into
something more specific and pronounced. I would feel myself being flooded by a
peculiar intensity to the back of the inside of my head, the sensation of a
presence of something very big, to which I attached the name IMHOTEP (like
that, in caps), not knowing at first who this represented historically, or
what, mythologically. That I would research and learn more about in time. But at
first, I only had the name and the strange intensity of feeling – though in
this initial attempt, I didn’t even have that much: only a vague sensation, a
hopeful tingle, and also, I found, a vast and lasting anxiety that would carry
me through the whole of the next week.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/09/imhotep-and-mysterious-white-dot-sedona_11.html" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue;">[To be continued.]</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">*Disclaimer: I am sometimes an idiot. If
I have a functioning bullshit filter at all today, it’s because I have
willingly subjected myself to egregious amounts of bullshit in the past. I will
probably also do so in the future. In my defense, I think it’s maybe part and
parcel of being open to the weird that one also accepts, at least for a time,
the stupid. Also, holding a figure such as the above-described professional
psychic up for scrutinous ridicule, or ridiculous scrutiny, is about as
challenging as dynamiting barrels of carp. The point here is less that this woman
would appear to be patently fraudulent, at least 85% so, but that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I returned to see her again</i>. I drove
1300 miles plus, not only for that reason, but also for that reason, perhaps on
the basis of that remaining 15%. Also: this does not represent a baby +
bathwater = everything tossed scenario as regards the veracity of psychic-
and/or mediumship as a whole, in my opinion, as I have written in the past, in
admiring terms, of professional p/m <a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-boy-has-maybe-got-his-boundary.html" target="_blank">Anya Briggs</a>, who is, I believe, among
others of my direct experience, a truly gifted channel and someone whose
integrity proves worthy of my trust. It is a complex issue in which the quality
of information received and the character of the receiver can be very different
and sometimes unrelated things; i.e. the information may be worthwhile and/or
it may be garbage, depending on its invisible source; and/or, the person
receiving may be a clown or a sincere human, or perhaps an entirely sincere
clown, pretending to be human, receiving information that is real or spurious
or combinations of both, etc. Etc.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[Etc.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-10243126680452320702012-08-28T09:36:00.002-07:002012-08-28T13:27:24.566-07:00A Mist or Matter [Part 2, that is, as in, more, continued…]<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The period of time in which I so often
saw these falling stars, since it seems defined by their frequency, is maybe a
thing worth thinking about. If I’ve learned anything in the keeping of these
journals, and later on, these postings, it’s that of the majority of my
“encounters” – if even such a word is the word applicable here, which it isn’t –
the thing seen is important in the context into which it inserts itself; that
these intersections of the supranormal (even if it were often only the idea of
such) are like little color-flags stuck into the pages of my life’s book at
points of interest, moments in which the plot turns, the main character becomes
a little more seasoned, a little less bothersome, perhaps a bit more like
someone you’d want to talk to.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">From 2006 until 2009, or thereabouts, it
was a time of redefinition and starting over, and starting over yet again. After
a disastrous marriage and failed business venture, I needed to find a new
career, or at least something with a living wage attached to it, and had no
idea where to go. I’d had a career in design before all of that, but it had run
out – just simply run out. Then I thought I’d found my stride afterwards in filmmaking, a childhood
dream, but that dead-ended also. I’d left Seattle and lived for a short while
on a sailboat in Redondo, CA, trying to think of how to start looking for a new
life, where it occurred to me – rocking back and forth on the waves in the
marina, waiting to hear back on the slew of resumés and demo reels that I’d driven
twelve hundred miles to hand-deliver, now watching some absolutely
uninteresting cooking show on a portable tv – that I could go back to school
(yet again) and learn to cook professionally. It was a stupid idea. I had no
background, demonstrable ability, not even any particular interest in cooking
at all, and what’s more, every single punter in America seemed to have come up
with exactly the same idea at the same time, although I didn’t understand that yet.
But a year and a half later I still had no better idea, in fact no other idea
at all, so I did it, and it was in the midst of this whole process of deciding
and taking action that the stars, I noticed, <a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-mist-or-matter-of-sharply-dropping.html">started falling out of the sky</a>. I
moved to Rhinebeck, New York, where the stars also fell, usually as I drove
home at night after classes, and once even a <a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/07/rhinebeck-ny-late-autumn-2007.html">fireball</a> went shooting lazily over
the highway. While on my externship in Colorado, I saw a <a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/07/colorado-springs-2008.html">tongue of cartoon flame</a> form and vanish in the air beside me, like Casper the Holy Ghost. This
decision, more or less an arbitrary one, but one undertaken with the inanely
maniacal, single-minded fervor of a robot, more for the sake of shaking things
up and making some kind of desperately-needed change than for the knowledge or
skill in itself (which I could almost not care about) seemed to fray the edges
of the real, to pull all this fizzy marginalia out of the sky and make me
think, and look, and think again, and look, if only to wonder what was going
on, or if anything truly was.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Eventually, all that stuff stopped falling. I <i>think</i> it stopped falling. <i>The sky has stopped
falling</i>; I’m only here now, and I have to ask, is this what happens when I
step to the side, lose the path, turn orthogonally out from the constraints of
a concessionary life and run counter to sense, even to my own nature? Could I
make it happen for real if I were to go truly mad, and stop only playing at it?
Would that help, and I am capable of such a step? Because it seems to me as if
I need other magic now; that an act of will, if absurd enough, can rewrite the
facts of the person, because it has to, just as it can shake out the more
arbitrary facts of the sky, as if the stars were only people once, or were
people now, or if they were only people.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-66431432516017551002012-08-21T10:07:00.000-07:002012-09-28T19:27:31.753-07:00A Mist or Matter of Sharply Dropping Stars<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mb6CO12RAG0/UDO_qnAtKII/AAAAAAAAAbY/_obnbBBJANo/s1600/dropstar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mb6CO12RAG0/UDO_qnAtKII/AAAAAAAAAbY/_obnbBBJANo/s400/dropstar.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">There is nothing more to it than that</i>. As if speaking to a child.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have
internalized the entire debate.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Communion</i>, 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Communion</i> 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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One happened
as I waited in the ferry line, having just come from Seattle and the first
public screening of my film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://tri-poly-blip.blogspot.com/2010/10/all-my-love-part-1-solidify.html">All My Love</a></i>,
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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">seen</i>.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://numinousintrusions.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-mist-or-matter-part-2-that-is-as-in.html" target="_blank">(More later.)</a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6919390797817453339.post-11406808786812034652012-08-14T10:14:00.000-07:002012-08-14T10:14:15.634-07:00Aerial Light: The Lost American Highway Soul
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’ve done my
share of driving. It used to be along a North/South axis between my home state
of Washington and points in California, Nevada and Arizona. Finally in 2007 I
broke through to the East/West axis in a significant way when I moved for a
time to New York. I’d first started this driving thing a decade earlier, after
living for most of a year in the west of England, where my colleague and friend
Karolyn told me – my being an American – about her plan to someday come to
America, to rent a car and drive it across the country. This was<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>how I finally came to understand
something about the vast spaces that the US represents to someone in the
relatively compact UK, the opportunities for emptiness and landscape
unavailable in a country that can be traversed in a single day. Of course I’d read
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On The Road</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blue Highways</i>. The concept of a long drive was not foreign to me;
I’d even taken a few road trips myself. But it was clear that I’d never quite
thought of it in the right way before, much less appreciated what was freely
available to me in my own home country – a place which I’d up until then
thought of as more of an international embarrassment than anything else. In
America, there was space, an entire continent’s width of it, a baffling sense
of scale which, if you let it, could reduce the single human ego to more or
less exactly what it was: one tiny point of reference, a moving dot, a thing so
easily lost sight of once the perspective is opened and the scenery, even if
only partially, immersed into. The prospect of this can be absolutely
terrifying, and not out of weakness or undo ego-attachment, but simply from
being a vulnerable human animal. One becomes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">so entirely lost</i> in it. One’s life and safety depend on the
functioning of the machinery, on having enough gas in the tank.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At first I
made a point of taking the small, forking roads, keeping as free from the
interstate as possible. This was usually far more interesting, more varied and
lively. But as these personal transits became over time more functional, and as
gas prices crept higher, the journey came to be about less about the journey
than the straightest line as shortest distance between points A and B. I’d come
to appreciate the efficiency of the toll highways of the Midwest, with their
arrangements of full-service rest stops at regular intervals designed to
prevent unnecessary deviations or subjections to contingencies of velocity. A
singular focus upon steady movement was, under these conditions, gained, and
this was something that my soul had its hunger for, though no doubt much also
had been traded out along the way.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was along
one of these toll highways, running, I believe, through Indiana – it seems to
be in the nature of the thing that specifics of which state or which year or
even which direction are lost – and I was either returning to Washington from
New York, or I was going to New York from Colorado a year earlier. This would
have put it in either July of 2009, or October of 2008, respectively. It was
sometime after nightfall, though it wouldn’t have been terribly late – I tend
not to drive late when<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>traveling
over a course of several days like that. What I saw was just the briefest
glimpse, but it was clear enough: there was a light – I couldn’t say how big or
small, just a white ball of light – and it was less than a hundred feet off the
ground, above the road, a short distance ahead. I only noticed it at all, as
opposed to thinking it a streetlamp, because of the sudden movement as the
thing shot off, running in parallel to the freeway, heading in the same
direction as me – that is, away from me – and going <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">very</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fast</i>. There wasn’t
any sound from it apart from the noise of the road, which I couldn’t hear for the
stereo. A helicopter that close would’ve made a lot of noise, I’m sure. It
didn’t accelerate, but was just in an instant going about as fast as a jet
airplane might, and vanished in the distance as quickly as it had appeared.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like so much
else of this sort that I’ve seen, or think that I have seen, there was only the
briefest, tiny glimpse, as if to tantalize – a desire frustrated – the
suggestion of something that anyone could explain away without much effort.
This convinces no one, not even me, but I have the sense that it isn’t supposed
to; in fact, that it’s supposed exactly not to. Suggestion, impression, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reading into</i> of an active and conscious
projection is the level of engagement that seems to be asked of me, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">certainty</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conclusion</i> are what I will (perhaps thankfully) never be given.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But because
I’m a writer and I tell stories, and more specifically because as a writer who
is shaping these fragments of my life into stories, and thereby changing the
very structure of my life <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as I’m living
it</i>, the need for an ending requires, if not the certainty of conclusions, then
at least a point at which to wrap things up, a bell to ring that signifies the
end, which is this: that was my soul; I lost my soul, it got away from me;
look: I lost my soul while driving; I lost my soul while driving so far up and
down the interstates of America, and in such a hurry, and because I was so
small, and now I have to get it back; I have to chase it down; I have to chase
my soul down; I have to chase my soul back down in my imagination, because
where else am I going to find it? And I have to find it there because there is
where it is. Okay?</span></div>
BrianCShorthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10930868324695194666noreply@blogger.com