Faery Talk

I didn’t want to talk about the faery.

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 can make stuff up. I call it fiction; 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 think 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.

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.

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 were 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 she say? I’m still not so sure I want to talk about it, and I wouldn’t yet – not yet – 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 Hidden Experience 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, “Can You Find the Fairy?” 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 H.E. 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.

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…

The article on Hidden Experience concerns Mike’s friend’s hastily shot photograph, in which a perfectly clear and pixie-like woman’s disembodied head floats almost concealed behind the branch of a tree in dense foliage.

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.

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.

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, “Hey! We were having a conversation here… ” 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.

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.

Ireland, 2001; the Soft Music of Angels

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.

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.

Enter Mysterious Dot; Sedona, Arizona, 1999 (Pt. 2)

[Continued from previous post...]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Imhotep and the Mysterious White Dot; Sedona, Arizona, 1999 (Pt. 1)

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.)*

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.

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.

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.

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.

[To be continued.]

*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 returned to see her again. 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 Anya Briggs, 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.

[Etc.]

A Mist or Matter [Part 2, that is, as in, more, continued…]

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.

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, started falling out of the sky. I moved to Rhinebeck, New York, where the stars also fell, usually as I drove home at night after classes, and once even a fireball went shooting lazily over the highway. While on my externship in Colorado, I saw a tongue of cartoon flame 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.

Eventually, all that stuff stopped falling. I think it stopped falling. The sky has stopped falling; 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.

A Mist or Matter of Sharply Dropping Stars

I would have written it off as fantasy entirely if it weren’t for two things. The first was that for every time I saw one, it seemed too much like silent but emphatic punctuation, the night sky’s underscoring to whatever thought or event of the moment, with its commentary to the effect of, “Yes, now pay attention,” or “It is so, but not quite as you think,” or some such gnomic assurance, rather like a cosmic Magic 8 Ball – but one that answers always in the affirmative, and only when it wants to. I look up into the darkness just in time to notice as a point of light at that moment drops straight down, and this happens again and again. I’m driving, I’m waiting in line, when I used to smoke I’d be outside smoking… It doesn’t shoot across the sky in a great arc, leaving a trail of vapor, as would any self-respecting meteor, but simply moves in a steady progression from point A to B, and always, from my perspective, directly down. Between the years of 2006 and 2008 or 09, it was happening a lot, or I noticed it a lot. And whenever I saw this, my mind would split and run off in opposing directions.

The myth- or mothmind, the one that has wings, would say that something somewhere has just given me a message, to clue in to what I was thinking or doing at the time; that it means something, that it’s telling me that something is right or significant. It’s a sign. The other mind, the one that’s made of ice and rocks, would tell me that I’ve just watched some ice or rocks fall through the atmosphere and get themselves changed by friction into gas, and really there’s nothing more to it than that. And then what’s more, it turns back onto the mothmind and in that admonishing tone makes a point of it: There is nothing more to it than that. As if speaking to a child.

I have internalized the entire debate.

The other reason I’ve not entirely acceded to the bullying tendencies of the rock-headed side is because the other possibility, the mothmind, has by happenstance or synchronicity found a kind of validation in an unlikely context. I’d been reading again, probably for the first time in well over a decade, Whitley Strieber’s Communion, which is full of the wonder and horror and uncertainty of some really rough treatment at the hands of some really strange people. What makes Communion an unlikely context is that, amidst all of this extreme circumstance, Whitley describes the smallest and most timorous thing: exactly the same phenomenon of looking up at the sky, and finding, as if by answer to his burning question, a single point of light drop straight down. The thing that he’d been asking for at that moment was some confirmation from his visitors that their interventions, which he’d only just become aware of, were real. Needless to say, he is sharply disappointed by this display as any sort of answer. He does not say – not in the text of the book – that he might have only seen a meteor; he tacitly accepts it for what its image suggests, which is an entirely unsatisfactory response, a lame answer to a difficult and important question. What happens in this moment for me as I read this, is that my story, my own myth, is now woven retroactively into the image-substance of Strieber’s in a way that it hadn’t been already. The mothmind takes wing, circles about the fire. It has been supplied with literary metaphor deeper than its own imagining, touching now upon an idea shared. This does not make it a literal fact or facet of visitor encounter, but it does make it something.

For Strieber, this sign was soon thereafter followed by a contact experience, in full consciousness, that was quite profound. No such thing has happened to me. Not even close. Instead, I was dogged by dropping stars for nearly three years, until, after some long time, I realized that I wasn’t seeing them any more. These came often over Whidbey Island, and just as frequently over Rhinebeck, NY – at opposite ends of the country, where I lived during the time.

One happened as I waited in the ferry line, having just come from Seattle and the first public screening of my film All My Love, late in 2006, in a small theater to about twenty people, two of whom walked out an hour into its 90 minutes (which I’m still convinced was because they’d wandered into the wrong theater – easy enough to do at this venue, and as frequently happens – and were too polite to leave any sooner). The audience, I believe – though I have never met them or known their identities, nor had the producer given me any warning that this would be the case – seemed to be made up in part by benefactors of the film, the controllers of family foundations and private donors, and judging from overheard comments, they may not have been convinced their support (or perhaps only the reasons offered, though not by me, for which their support had been solicited) was well-represented. Reactions among the small audience were mixed: my friends and colleagues liked it, while others left somewhat baffled. I went home with some profoundly ambivalent feelings, but I knew at least that I had done something. I’d put a lot of work into the film, and it was the best that I could make it at the time. Waiting in the ferry queue for the next boat, I looked up toward my destination across the water, and when I saw just then a pinprick spot of light descend from directly overhead, it seemed as if it were a silent acknowledgement, telling me that yes, something worthwhile had been accomplished, something toward the fulfillment of my purpose on earth; the work itself, yes, but moreover that it had been seen.

(More later.)

Aerial Light: The Lost American Highway Soul

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  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 On The Road and Blue Highways. 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 so entirely lost in it. One’s life and safety depend on the functioning of the machinery, on having enough gas in the tank.

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.

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  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 very fast. 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.

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 reading into of an active and conscious projection is the level of engagement that seems to be asked of me, and certainty or conclusion are what I will (perhaps thankfully) never be given.

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 as I’m living it, 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?