Where Night Meets Dawn

I wake from a dreamless sleep in a dark cold. It feels as if there is nothing around me, not even the ground on which I lie, though I take this for granted as I am not falling. Trembling, I push myself up and attempt to feel my way through the chill nothingness, though where I am going, I don’t know. Barefoot and stumbling drunkenly, I eventually hit a wall. Gratefully I stand there, relieved and breathing hard, somewhat at peace, as if relaxing beneath a warm shower of water. Blindly, I roll the dice and choose to inch left along its cratered surface until I come to its ninety degree cohort and I catch a draught of cool air rushing in from somewhere overhead. My hands begin to paw frantically about in search of a switch, a cord, a knob, some sign of intelligent life other than these mute obelisk reflecting back the night. My eyes should have adjusted by now but I can still see nothing. It is getting colder. I begin to jog, running a guiding hand along the wall, counting time to measure the circumference of the room. But it is not long before I hit something hard with my foot and tumble face first into the cold hard floor. The generalized pain spreading across my head is welcome. It dissipates the fear and insecurity of the senselessness surrounding me. Something warm runs down my cheek as I reach my hand behind me to feel what I tripped over. My fingers flutter across the hard square like a butterfly in the sun. Feeling something other than myself and the wall is a tactile pleasure. I bring myself closer to it until I feel a hinge here, a hasp there—it’s a box. Open it, I scream in my head, drowning out the mean silence, but opening it does nothing more than add more mystery to the dark. What is inside of—what was that noise? A shifting shush, as silent as a woman’s hips in silk. I start to reach my hand, searching every corner in the surprisingly large box when out of the corner of my eye a pinprick of white appears. I realize I am looking up. I see the infinitesimal scintilla of starlight shoot toward a far off point in the invisible horizon. It is soon joined by a sibling. And another. And before long a vast panorama of iotas twinkle from one end of the endless black and amass toward a growing ball of illumination in the distance—a star. It is only after some indeterminable time has passed that I sense something touching me, that I realize something soft and matching black as the night is crawling up my arm. My attention goes back to the ball dancing about as it collects the tiny moths streaking toward its warm giving light. It grows so fast that it is impossible to tell how far away it actually is. The thing from the box continues to move up my arm, onto my shoulder. I look down but cannot see it, cannot see anything, except the star. The fear my brain tells me to feel concerning the unknown danger is allayed by this light, despite its lack of reflectivity. As it grows more rotund and takes a larger portion of what might be called the sky, it emits a warm fuzzy buzzing, the first sound I recognize hearing aside from my own internal voice. The warmth I feel as the thing wraps around my neck like a scarf on a chill winter’s night is somehow comforting rather than terrifying. Though amorphous like a liquid, I now have a sense of its size and shape, and can feel its blob-like body inching up the side of my head. Suddenly the star expands to almost double its size before retracting, and in time to the musical humming begins to pulsate in time, all the while still adding to its now massive rotundity. It is then that I catch the merest glimmer of a reflection of the black exoskeleton of the snakey-shaped thing crawling in my ear. Even then I feel no sense of impending dread or danger, though I begin to feel uncontrollably sleepy. The burgeoning star of light pulses and thrums ever larger and so close that as I reach out my hands to touch it I see the silhouettes of my fingers, tendrils of hair, the carotene shine of my nails. The thing slips completely into my head and my eyes close. I manage a last smile, still feeling the warmth of the star’s emission while falling back to the ground, as it somewhat comforts the blow of the unforgiving floor on my head.

Off and on for more than two months this is the dream that recurs in my sleep as I approach my departure date to moving to Alaska, though I tell no one. On the outside I am all sure smiles and confident control. On the inside I am pure recklessness, like the dream, unsure of which way to move in a dark and alien territory.

I begin to wear wool and flannel. I buy waterproof boots and a silk balaclava. I jump into rivers fully dressed to test my anti-bacterial quick-dry underwear. I move about from town to town, city to city, state to state in the western U.S. I have no home. Except my camera, a few books and the clothes on my back, I have no possessions to speak of. This is not a boast, but merely how I choose to live. In an age of amassing wealth and property, of resource wars and cataclysmic disasters, this concerted vagabond roaming is what comforts me. I am feeling my way through the darkness, grasping at invisible walls, tripping over unseen obstacles, experiencing the beauty and the terror simultaneously.

I understand how this may sound. I hear myself and I groan. Often my ego tells me to give it up kid, get a normal job, get married, have some babies and be respectable like the rest of us. The voice tells me that money is good, that it is really alright to clamor after the elusive muse of celebrity, to obsess over body image, to eat processed foods of indeterminate origin and healthfulness, to chase after the American Dream. Hey kid, what if everyone did what you are doing, shirked responsibility, bucked conventional wisdom, chased their dreams no matter how unrealistic? No one would get a damn thing done would they? Then, from out of some dark place, I hear myself growl, Fuck you voice of reason, fuck you.

The Great Wall of China at Changcheng

I look at my friends and my family and I see the sad grimaces they force on their faces when I come near, not wanting to ask what I am doing, but still trapped by the formality of language into cliched Q & As. Though occasionally we break through the patina of trite anecdotes, it doesn’t come as easily as it used to—mere drug use isn’t enough anymore. Not wanting to hear about anything that can’t be immediately grasped and understood, labeled and filed away under proper 21st century experience is still a great affliction of our close-minded reptile brains. It is understandable. Life is after all a lose-lose situation—everyone dies and it’s a slog to the end. We all are forced to watch our loved ones die. Just as we force others to watch us die. Jesus, how depressing. No wonder people need money, power, hardcore drugs, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, sugar, sex, religion, politics, fascism, extremism, insanity, rock and roll and so on. Who doesn’t need something, more or less, along those lines? And who doesn’t have something to say about what is right and what is wrong not only for themselves, but for everyone else? O great ball of light, o great creature of the box, how to escape the tedious simplicity of human nature? There is no escape. One merely forges on through the cold darkness as far as we can into the occasional moments of illumination the external world sheds arbitrarily. I myself have always been attracted to that gorgeous moment of discovery in the midst of a single breathe, between the point of inhalation and exhalation, when time stops and the brain empties. The rest of the world falls away and you are left with whatever beauty you have surrounded yourself with, the makings of your own personal heaven: a pristine vista, a valley at sunrise, body-surfing in the ocean, fast cars and loud music, watching horses gallop, the smile of a loved one, the joy of accomplishment, or maybe just the first bite of a jelly glazed doughnut. Release.

It may be cold and distant, it may be invisible and impossible to find, it may be you don’t know where to begin, but it’s there if you want it to be. You just have to give chase. It’s time I started to take my own advice. So, I’m off to Alaska with my few books, my camera and bag of film, my waterproof boots and silk balaclava and my anti-bacterial quick-dry underwear. I will be in touch. I’m not dead yet.