Is it Really "Art?"

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Defining art is a task that is both necessary yet inextricably complex. Regarding the former, a definition necessarily functions to dissociate art objects and non-art objects from one another. Defining an entity as “art” is a judgment which essentializes an object or concept into an elementary, binary classification that acts as a foundation to further attempt many meanings that could articulate a definition. This is to say, that to understand what art is, one also needs to understand what it is not. Although, in that there is no general consensus as to what art is, defining art comes to be a subjective matter which designates any definitive meaning to be uniquely particular and thus difficult to equate to a far-reaching generalization. In this sense, any definition of art will always be permeable, intangible, and indefinite. Thus, “art” is a word with abounding definitions that cannot be definitively fixed in the same way, for example, that the definition of the word “shovel” can be reasonably established. Any definition of “art” can be applied essentially or particularly, and subsequently disputed. Anything can be defined as “art,” yet justifying the definition can be problematic and ultimately unsatisfactory. Therefore, the question of definition means that art is both a classification that is easily administered as well as something that is paradoxically ineffable. However, the contentiousness of the question itself elicits its importance.    

The importance of defining art has led to a profusion of theories to support particular definitions throughout recorded history. Art has been variously defined as human-made objects or concepts that imitate natural phenomena, communicate information, express emotion, or prompt interpretation to find a meaning in such a way that distinguishes an object, characteristic, or concept from a non-art object, characteristic, or concept. In this fashion, the only essential quality to art is the word, “art.” Thus, theories of art have emerged that are cognizant of this difficulty and have accordingly developed principles that attempt to explain the meaning in and of art. The efforts of all the theoretical pursuits indicate the significance of art’s meaning and have contributed to a body of knowledge that is comprised of many definitions. Clearly, the existence of art theory correlates to a value in seeking to understand what art is and is not. Yet, as to the importance of defining art, the value lies in the question and not definitive answers. There is more value in pursuing an answer with a diversity of questions than arriving at an answer, because questions produce new and divergent ways of understanding a complex concept like art that do not necessarily define art. Consequently, endeavoring to define art is distinctly important, whereas an ultimate definition is less important. 

Two strategies emerged in the 20^th century to accommodate the radical changes in art and its appreciation. The first derived from the Frankfurt School with the theories of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. This approach argued that art should be understood within the economic and cultural conditions of modern capitalism. The second strategy developed from the theories of Arthur Danto and George Dickie which placed the meaning of an artwork outside the work itself. This approach argued that an artwork’s efficacy as art was no longer inherent to the work of art itself. These two strategies thoroughly altered the way in which art is understood and accordingly provide insight into the question of “what art is.”

In his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin addresses the ways in which mass reproduction of aesthetic works alters the experience and perception of art. However, it is noted that art changes along with cultural changes, and thus functions as a means in which to perceive and understand the wider world. Benjamin writes, “During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.” Demonstrating this process, Benjamin uses the term, “aura” to describe the authenticity of an original artwork that is established by way of a ritualistic basis. In this sense, the aura is associated to the cultural context in which the artwork was created. It has a provincial cult value in its extrinsic properties that exist as a part of the aura. With the standardization of mass produced and reproduced artworks, the aura has been disassociated from the work. The original work is now removed from experience, or there is no original at all in the sense that the artwork is designed for mass production, as with the mediums of photography and film. Nonetheless, Benjamin recognizes that these technological adaptations have the means to positively alter the ways in which art is created and appreciated. As a result of this paradigmatic shift, traditions are curbed by experimentation, and art can be widely appreciated through its new availability that can foster conditions for social and political change. Benjamin views these changes as an expansion of the definition and function of art.

Theodor Adorno, in his in his 1967 essay, “Is Art Lighthearted?” focuses on art’s connection to society. Whereas mass production can inspire new ways of understanding art in Benjamin’s perspective, Adorno views mass production as a symptom of capitalism that further displaces individual freedom. Thus, the effects of capitalism suppress “high” or serious art, and substitute readily available, low-quality entertainment for art’s genuine function. This function is liberatory in the sense that the beauty and complexity of art allows for a freedom of consciousness apart from the conditions of reality. Adorno claims that the liberatory value of art is that “it embodies something like freedom in the midst of unfreedom.” This “unfreedom” cultivates various cultural mechanisms, such as entertainment or what Adorno and Max Horkheimer term the “culture industry,” that function to subjugate individual and social freedoms with dull, satiating amusements. Consequently, Adorno advocates for a renewal in artistic originality that moves beyond mind-numbing entertainment, as well as the seriousness and gravity of the human condition, as exemplified in his statement; “it is not possible to write poetry after Auschwitz.” This new artistic originality would uniquely speak to the distinctiveness of human nature in a way that is transcendent of the conditions of reality.

In a wholly different approach from that of Adorno and Benjamin, Arthur Danto emphasizes the importance of theoretical perspectives to inform conceptions of art. In this perspective, documented in his 1964 essay “The Artworld,” works of art are components of a larger “artworld” that ultimately determine art’s status as art. That is to say, it is the context as established by a theory of art that accounts for the aesthetic efficacy of an artwork. In this fashion, the evocative capabilities of a work of art exist outside the object itself and are instead realized conceptually. Danto’s “artworld” is a contextual atmosphere that is informed by theories that account for cultural developments. He proclaims; “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” Hence, theories of art expand the meaning of art even though the work of art itself undergoes no transformation. The cultural zeitgeist creates the conditions for specific art, insofar as the artist understands the time and place in which their work will be understood as something evocative of a specific cultural meaning. Citing Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box as an exemplary of his theory, Danto affirms “It could not have been art fifty years ago. But then there could not have been, everything being equal, flight insurance in the Middle Ages, or Etruscan typewriter erasers. The world has to be ready for certain things, the artworld no less than the real one.” To this extent, Danto’s theory substantially broadens the explanation of what art is. 

In 1984, George Dickie wrote, “The New Institutional Theory of Art” in which he attaches an institutional system to the success or failure of a work of art. Dickie’s theory claims that the overall meaning of an artwork is participatory, in that an artist creates a specific artwork for a specific public, and that this combination entails an institutional network. These institutional factors conceptually formulate the manner in which an art object is determined to be art. This is to say, that an artist produces an artifact that is then received by a knowledgeable institutional public, which may consist of aficionados, scholars, critics, and curators, that then confer the artifact as art. Defining art as art is a classificatory matter, wherein the institutional framework of artist and informed public define art. In this sense, a definition of art is particular to a category, whereas outside of the category the same definition would not be understandable or acceptable as art. Dickie’s theory increases ways in which art can be understood as art, and therefore allows for more definitions of art.    

The theories of Benjamin, Adorno, Danto, and Dickie, infer and then conclude that art is definable. As aforementioned, there can be no singular definition to art other than the word, “art.” Rather, art is only art under certain conditions that fall under the auspices of its contextual schema. Warhol’s Brillo Box would not be art according to Adorno, just as a contemporary cave painting in Colorado that is executed in the style of a painting found at Lascaux would merely be a craft-like presentation produced by a skilled artisan. Thus, defining an entity as art or not art is relative to the motivations and dispositions of a particular weltanschauung or philosophy. Consequently, defining art matters most to the party that is attempting a definition, and secondarily to an interested public.

Causality and Complexity: It's Complicated

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In his paper, “Causes and Conditions”, J.L. Mackie determines to explain the insufficiencies in attributing effects to causes, as well as the conditions of causes. He begins by suggesting that causes are commonly misunderstood events. A general account of a misunderstood cause might proceed in this way: a cause is an event that comes before another event that is said to be the effect; additionally, the cause is something that is necessary to lead to the effect and sufficient to account for the effect. For Mackie, this sort of reasoning is far too simple and credulous when linking cause to effect. A more complex understanding is needed in asserting causal relationships. Hence, Mackie proposes an alternative way to understand causality as INUS conditions – an “Insufficient but Necessary part of a condition which is itself Unnecessary but Sufficient.”

     

To illustrate an INUS condition in what Mackie refers to as a, singular cause, he gives the example of a house fire. In this thought experiment, fire investigators have determined that a particular short circuit caused the fire. Yet, the short circuit was not necessary to cause the fire. This is because there could be multiple other reasons that could be attributable to the fire such as; a natural gas leak, an unattended candle, or another variation of an electrical malfunction. Similarly, the short circuit cannot be said to be a sufficient condition for the fire. This is because the short circuit was not isolated, but rather required the presence of flammable material as well as a means not to extinguish the initial beginnings of the fire like an individual possessing a fire extinguisher. Here it is important to note that a circumstance such as the flammable material is said to be a positive condition, while the absence of a means to extinguish the fire is said to be a negative condition. In this way, the investigators understand the short circuit to be unnecessary and insufficient to have started the house fire. So, how, Mackie asks, do the investigators know that the short circuit caused the fire? They know because there are other conditions like, the aforementioned flammable material and the absence of a means to extinguish the fire. When these conditions are added to the condition of the short circuit, a “complex condition” results. This complex condition is interpreted as sufficient for the fire to initiate. Although, this same complex condition is not necessary for the fire to initiate because the fire could have started in alternative ways. However, the short circuit as a part of this complex condition is essential, because the flammable material and absence of extinguishing means could not have started the fire by themselves or in combination. In Mackie’s words, “The short circuit which is said to have caused the fire is thus an indispensible part of a complex sufficient (but not necessary) condition of the fire.” So, in summation of Mackie’s singular cause, the house fire’s cause is an INUS condition in that the short circuit has been determined to be an insufficient (because it could not have started the fire by itself), albeit necessary (because it is essential to the fire) part of a condition which is itself unnecessary (because the fire could have started in other ways), yet sufficient (because the condition allows for the fire to be initiated) result.

Mackie goes on to relate a general causal statement to an INUS condition. He begins with the example of an economist claiming that the restriction of credit leads to, which is to say causes, unemployment. Here, Mackie points out that a “causal field” exists in the form of economics. This is to mean that economics, and an economy in which economics can function, are a multiplicity of causal conditions that differentiate. For a general causal statement, “the causal field is then the region that is to be thus divided” which in this case is the economy in which people are either employed or unemployed. The causal field of the general causal statement also allows for the alleged cause to differentiate, as in, the restriction of credit sometimes happens and sometimes does not happen. So, the economist is claiming that the restriction of credit in this economy is an insufficient (because the restriction of credit could not have directly caused unemployment alone) but necessary (because the economist included the restriction of credit in a causal field that allows for unemployment) part of an unnecessary (because unemployment could be the result of something else) but sufficient (because the restriction of credit allows for unemployment to happen) cause. Using the formal characters that Mackie applies throughout the paper, the economist is stating that for some X (positive and negative conditions) and some Y (another set of positive and negative conditions) combined with A (the restriction of credit) as in (AX or Y), is a necessary and sufficient condition for P (unemployment) in an F (causal field), yet neither A, X, or Y is sufficient on their own accord to account for the cause. Also, in a general causal statement such as this, it is important to differentiate between causes and the cause. If the general restriction of credit can be linked to general unemployment, then it is proper to articulate the restriction of credit as something that causes unemployment. Alternatively, in a singular causal statement, an individual’s restriction of credit can be said to be the cause of their unemployment.

Finally, the aforementioned causal field bears reiteration because it is a factor that functions in both general and singular causal statements. In the former, the causal field is the region in which differentiation occurs, and causes with respect to effects, are determined. Mackie’s example is the sentence, “What causes influenza in human beings in general?” Here, the causal field is “human beings in general” and consequently, differentiation is needed in this term. The new differentiated term could be, “In areas where influenza exists, how do some humans contract influenza, while other humans do not contract influenza?” The key is the differentiation of the cause within a broad spectrum. Mackie writes, “In all such cases, the cause is required to differentiate, within a wider region in which the effect sometimes occurs and sometimes does not.” In a singular causal statement, the causal field is a background in which causes are determined. Mackie’s example is the sentence, “What caused this man’s skin cancer?” There are many causal fields in this sentence and they are to be separated to help determine the cause of melanoma. One causal field could be the man’s job in which exposure to radiation was frequent. A new question could be, “How did this particular man develop melanoma when other individuals at the same place of employment did not?” In this sense, the causal field is now all the individuals that worked alongside the man in a place with copious amounts of radiation. Thus, causal fields figure into INUS conditions as complex conditions. For general causal statements, the causal field is a region like economics in which causes and effects are determined. For singular causal statements, the causal field is a background like a house where a fire started where a causal determination can be determined.

Constructing Time

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In the history of thought, the conception of time has always been a contentious issue. It is often taken for granted, as the previous sentence demonstrates, that time is real and inherently natural. Time has been viewed as something that is categorically absolute, as with Newtonian interpretations, as well as a dimension relative to motion in Einsteinian spacetime. While these notions are not wrong, they nonetheless regard and further establish time as an actuality that is quantifiable. However, it has been argued by Parmenides and probably most notably by Immanuel Kant that time is an artificial construction imposed on reality by the human mind. While this mental imposition is certainly beneficial in that the architecture of time allows humans to measure and thus understand reality, it does not in fact mean that time in itself is a fact of reality. In this sense, time like language, is at best a reifying mechanism that has taken a representation of reality and made the representation real and natural in itself. For Parmenides, Kant, and two 20^th century thinkers which are the focus of this essay, John Ellis McTaggart and Donald Cary Williams, time is not an axiomatic truth of reality but rather a symptomatic construct that represents the limitations of human thinking.   

In the early 20^th century, J. Ellis McTaggart published a paper titled, “The Unreality of Time” in which, like the title suggests, he argued against the reality of time. McTaggart begins by establishing that there are positions in the appearance of time that are manifested in two ways. First, positions can be distinguished as “earlier than” or “later than” and McTaggart refers to this as the “B series.” Second, positions can be distinguished as past, present, or future and he refers to these classifications as the “A series.” In the B series, events in time are permanent. This is to say, for example, if M came earlier than N, then it will always be earlier than N. Or, if a sunrise happened earlier than a sunset, then that sunrise will always and permanently be earlier than that sunset. In the A series, events in time change and are not permanent. To explicate this, McTaggart uses the death of Queen Anne as it appears in the A series. Queen Anne’s death began by being an event in the distant future. It then became an event in the immediate future. Then, the monarch’s death happened in the present. After which, her death became an event in the past, and as time appears to change, Queen Anne’s death becomes more of a distant event that happened in the past.

McTaggart points out that humans perceive time in both the manners described by the A and B series. However, the A series displays change while the B series is permanent and does not display change. Since time as it appears to humans displays change, then, as McTaggart asserts, the A series is necessary and foundational to the concept of time while the B series is not necessary. Additionally, the B series cannot exist on its own because its features of “earlier than” and “later than” are temporal in nature and thus require the element of change which only the A series can provide. In this sense, the B series needs the A series in order to function properly.

McTaggart claims that there is another series in the concept of time, and labels it as the “C series.” The C series provides order for time but does not involve change. With the order of the C series and the change of the A series, the B series comes into existence. This dynamic functions by change proceeding in a certain direction. The C series, to use McTaggart’s example, provides an order like M, N, O, P or P, O, N, M. In conjunction with the A series, the C series provides an order to time so that time can proceed to change from earlier to later as in, M, N, O, P, or also as, P, O, N, M. It is also important to note that the C series order can only proceed in two ways, so in using the same alphabetical example, the order can only be the two mentioned above and not something else like, O, N, M, P. In this way, the A and C series are necessary to time, and the B series arises from the order provided by the C series and the change provided by the A series.

In proving the unreality of time, McTaggart’s ultimate objective is to point out that the A series is contradictory. This is established by McTaggart claiming that events are either, past, present, or future. Yet, events in time always possess the property of a past, present, and future. Herein lies the contradiction, as McTaggart states, “Past, present, and future are incompatible determinations. Every event must be one or the other, but no event can be more than one” (McTaggart, 468). Additionally, a “vicious circle” (ibid) emerges in this reasoning because for events to possess a past, present, and future, there has to be time. So, the past, present, and future of the A series is dependent on the existence of time, yet, as McTaggart has shown, time requires the necessary foundation of the A series to exist. Thus, time cannot be real.

      

In the mid 20^th century, Donald C. Williams published a paper titled, “The Myth of Passage” in which he argued against the feeling of time passing. Williams believes that time exists in an Einsteinian, four dimensional spacetime fashion that he called “the manifold”, but rejects the notion that time is something that can flow or pass. Williams maintains that space cannot move within space, and similarly, time cannot move within time. This is to say that time interpreted as a thing that is quantifiable or measurable is a superfluous and purposeless metaphor. Time cannot be measured as something that flows because it simply exists as part of the manifold, and there is nothing relative to measure it against. Time cannot exist as something outside of itself in order to measure the passing of time. Williams construes time as an “ordered extension” (Williams, 463) that contains “parts of our being” (ibid), yet the feeling of aging through time is an illusion. In this way, the present or “absolute becoming” (ibid) is no more a real passage in time than is a point on a contiguous line. The only motion a human experiences is within the manifold and comprises of an individual existing at different places and times. Explaining this concept further, Williams states, “Time ‘flows’ only in the sense in which a line flows or a landscape ‘recedes into the west’... and each of us proceeds through time only as a fence proceeds across a farm” (ibid). He goes on to point out that the perceived becoming or passage of time is merely an unneeded mental construct that has perhaps developed from a unique human anxiety concerning the trajectory of aging, but ultimately this perception is not an inherent function of the spacetime manifold. Overall, these concepts of time that Williams has postulated can be related to McTaggart’s outright denial that time exists.

To begin, McTaggart believes that time is unreal due to the contradiction of the A series, while Williams believes that time is real but denies that it is something that measurably passes. However, Williams does incorporate some of McTaggart’s concepts into his own argument. Williams adopts the B series into his conception of the spacetime manifold and relegates the A series to a misunderstanding of the functionality of time. Williams asserts, “McTaggart was driven to deny the reality of time because he believed that while time must combine the dimensional spread with the fact of passage, the B series with the A series, every attempt to reconcile the two ended in absurdity” (Williams, 462). Essentially, Williams is claiming that the B series is correct because it represents time as an all encompassing dimension. This equates to Williams’ example of the sprawling fence on a farm. The “earlier than” or “later than” aspects of the B series can be located at different positions on the fence, which represents the manifold. Yet, the A series, for Williams, negatively contributes to the conception of time as something that flows. Thinking of time as a thing that has a past, present, and future, is wrong and only contributes to the myth of passage or the present as something that becomes. Williams writes, “It is the mainspring of McTaggart’s ‘A series’ which puts movement in time” (Williams, 461). This, of course, contrasts with Williams’ notion that time cannot move, as well as the perception that time has the ability to measure itself that results in a past, present, or future. Hence, for McTaggart, the A series is fundamental to the concept of time but in turn contradicts itself, thereby undermining the B series and the entire feasibility of time. For Williams, the A series is a useless construct that complicates time as conceived by the spacetime manifold, or B series. In both of these perspectives time is revealed to be a component of human thought and not a fact that is indicative of reality.   

There was a moment when, after having talked of seeing old movies, we realized drive-in theaters were something we both remembered. The experiences at the theaters told between us, from our unacquainted past, preserved these remembered times as a narrative in which we once understood ourselves. They were always a peak in some specific night when arriving and leaving were sharp slopes. On one occasion it was recounted to me that when my friend was an adolescent, their party left the theater, which was a theater in the rural West, and drove on a myriad of dirt roads – the same roads in which they arrived but now found difficult to recognize in the dark of the new morning. Lost, they came upon an abandoned, strange building seen a ways from their vehicle. My friend told me that someone said it might’ve been a Japanese internment camp. The meaning of hearing such a term that was connected to an old building in the rural dark has gone past bewilderment and entered into memory. Of course, this is my memory, even though I remember my friend saying it was likely apocryphal, but yet, real or not not, it is something that is there.

Late Cold War Sonnet

In ’77, détente was gone

Soviet SS-20s pointing west

Brezhnev sees Afghanistan like a Khan

Carter says, the US won’t be your guest.

Then came Reagan and shit hitting the fan

Pynchon and DeLillo’s visions came true

KGB, RYAN, were Andropov’s plan.

SDI then Chernenko’s quick death knew

Change was coming, yet missiles still pointing.

In ’85, Gorbachev smiled

Perestroika and Glasnost anointing

Changes that would leave Lenin defiled.

And so, the USSR then failed

And all the cold warriors wept, and wailed.

Footprints From The Day Before - Very Short Fiction

Face and city reflected in the stars through glass. The dishwasher lulls to sleep. Walls fade to foam, the trees turn to oceans. In whispers and hum. On the pink edge of haloed sky churning and blaring safety from soapy waters crashing inside its factory. Isotropic. Refineries sweating and bloated blending currents dusty, aged quiet, footprints from the day before. The hovering swarm attacks and sleeps with frequencies. To the soft silence. In the soft silence. Movement. In the black between reflections, the sight of an escape. To the shadows deep within molecular clouds under water where no stars are seen. No importance. No power. Out there is inside brains, infinities captured by the humming lullaby. Pleasing painless aloof. Branches extending into wind, into clouds, mountaintops and ghettos, rain breathing capital to the binding fulcrum, dripping to roots, to soil. Evaporation. Reflected in eyes and hands wrapped in discipline and vacations.

Washing the face under cold water. Nothing. The known shock dripping off the nose. Under eyelids, the mirror image of the self-reflection laced with imaginations seen before. Somewhere. Like that fucking train, the faraway moan and wail tending senses that long for someone else’s purpose. Loneliness that resides inside the barren desert scarred by train tracks across you, and the ways that have been seen, and will become. The thick sap of bullshit seeping from these words. The difference between Saturday and Monday. Your world inside the dishwasher. Time and the meaning of life and the pursuit of pleasure. Its humor. The unreal that populates the echoed loops I see and think through. Filters, the blue sky, the mountains. Don’t care. Green pastures, rain and hail pelting your things. Its happiness. Silence, why? Stories and stories to poems to words that point to silence.

Particles, bits of food part consumed, washing, washing. Static and snow. Decorations inside industrial machinery underneath dim fluorescence, cracked spines that light recognition. Feedback. Revolving circadian rhythms walking, fearing, sleeping, cheering. Entertainment, Farming, Reverberating. Edible displays fucking spaces of hypnotized assets; beings merchandise. Hearing, seeing, overstepping tracks of futures, from the day before. Transparent. The paths of airplanes into stars. Porn with love from love. Museums under shoes of the masses. And electrocuted moths with pavement. Separation. Nighttime dreams that radiate in morning antitwilight shadows of colors speaking against bloodshot eyes of shift workers’ diluted residence in waning incandescence. Value. Influence recycled into air, into wires, into ordinary blood bleeding everywhere. All over. Flowers from fossils growing higher and beyond the ceilings, towers, orbits, and time, to abstractions, freedom, majorities, and excess. Gone. Disappeared under the weight of footprints existing, only nowhere.

Dirt and Dark - Very Short Fiction

On blood and concrete the body. Fear. The body, a vanishing point on the horizon.

Under the summer night of street light, old buildings; hardened like the city that made its needs and torment. It was built to collapse inward from its own weight of thought, NoIse, instinct, QuIet. Now. From clenched fists, from boots, from 4 soldiers of the zeitgeist, imbuing ethos into already rubbled debris. The city runs away from the defeated mind; the body laying in its shadow of/and the slow fade to nothing. To death, final freedom, to Being gone and away.

Years

Working. The body works for others. Against.

Awake/Alive on the inside of all things - simulacrum, concrete ambitions of money to end. Patterns of power and The paradigm. Places on the outside living in dreams of carved out geometry of childhoods, or Being lost and home at once in the vacancy of mental illness. So it would seem To Be, wandering dirt roads and clouds at sunrise lawless of will, of the vibrant emptiness that is dark of knowledge and waking reality. Asleep 1/3rd. Gone and away from infinite desire. From pleasure. From diversion. From the taste of blood and the anxiety of need. The body leaves the city inside its reflection; climbing out for years, gone. Being.

Away, in dirt and dark. Walking

Early Morning Balloons - Very Short Fiction

From night are stars shining through. Ancient light in a wash of unknowing black. The AM that is young, naïve; follows no heart. Unshaped, beautiful; the born mind knows no imbalance, distraction. From time and place, the beginning of one Being each other. The same. Self. Under the lens of big, open skies that cradle the infant new. It is faint, weak, barely there, at once powerful in it’s distant burning. Signs; waves of color that touch the soft calm. Vast, twilight scattered, cool. And shadows begin; symmetry, form, the coming of day; the path has been crossed. The black will fade to Sun, the faithful stars will go in hiding veils.

Breathing sky. I and the flamed horizon. Places. Light, set in vision. Upward to stars and planets framed in books. Upward to pilots navigating balloons in morning brisk. Solid determined, young flights. Places found in the room of me. In a time. A recollection of past. Soaring hot air balloons that are breathed into, upward in colors, in slow steps above fields and hills. They move graceful, placid. They are morning dreams of I, against big music that propels the windless navigation. Moving everywhere at once, the scene explodes in every direction, every path, every possibility. The music is slow, quiet, at times it is silence.

Together In One - Very Short Fiction

I will be.

Or else this room. This being and place of rest; sweating reprieve from toil and pursuit. This middle. Factory break room of all. And me, inside them. The common river in the nightshift of desert plains. Coming to mid-point idle, dinners and lunches. In trance and slow passage to bitter aging meanness, we sit and eat, and stare. Out windows into street light and dark. Windows that sieve light, that reflect half in mirror, looking inside this room - fluorescent haze and night. Breathing inside this work of power and content; the calm anxiety. Breathing in the medium room of adulthood, sailing away in vessels on oceans never to return – to die in the waters, murdered by dreams, against purgatory rooms. I, and my opaque reflection in glass. To disappear in things, into a dark star. Invisible, restless.

The Belt of Venus

I’ve always had a affinity for early morning. It’s quiet and serene, and I seem to be in the best mood of the day during the morning twilight. Part of this is the beauty of the sky transitioning from night to day in relatively quick phases that produce all kinds of cool phenomena. One of those phenomena is called, The Belt of Venus.

Looking west during sunrise

‘The belt’ is a pinkish ring that’s also called the antisolar arch. It surrounds the horizon from the outer points of the rising or setting sun and is most visible directly opposite of the sun just after it sets or just before it rises with little or no clouds. The pink color of the belt is the reflection of the setting or rising sun on the other side of the horizon. And the reason sunsets and sunrises are more red than blue is because the sun’s light is farther away during twilight, which makes the light more reddened with longer wavelengths because it has to pass through more layers of atmosphere.

Looking east during sunset

The dark part underneath the pink belt is called the antisolar wedge. This is the actual shadow of the Earth reflected back onto the atmosphere.

In my opinion, The Belt of Venus has always been underrated when compared to the rising or setting sun. It’s all part of the same phenomena, but knowing why the sky turns colorful will surely impress any date. So lets all give the Belt of Venus its long overdue viewing and knowing and go out and see it!

Planetary Conjunction 12/1/08 with the Moon & clouds

For this most recent planetary conjunction I took my camera out to the ole backyard to photograph this upside down sourpuss face. I inverted the images so it looks like a lopsided frown. On both pictures, Venus is the brighter top most 'eye' while Jupiter is the dimmer planet, and the crescent Moon is sporting some nice earthshine. The first pic is kinda grainy because I used a really high ISO (1600) to offset the long shutter time that is clearly visible in the second pic, which is blurry due to the frosty wind and the subtle rotation of the earth - makes it look like a long sourpuss face. Even though I was standing in snow and dogshit, I had a broad smile as I watched the second (Moon), third (Venus), and forth (Jupiter) brightest objects in the sky get together.

Shaping Point - A Short Story

Singing solitary
Nowhere
As another

Moving through twilight, the guiding conduits of freeway bulge with resistance. Presence. And the late summer sky, big and open, he breathed it with a naivety that evoked primal impressions of conflict in the detached self. In skies vast but immediate, in roads ahead strewn about into miles of asphalt that penetrate tender lands running into the coming dark; that move and sway like the ancient winds in far away grassy hills and plains. Every man and machine moving in circles and cadence to this night of day. The tired journey around. Seen everywhere and all over the faces in side mirrors. Singing invisible songs, talking to phones, looking at him. Driving home on this Friday evening. Withdrawal. Feeling that the day and week are done, they had navigated another monotonous trial of will. Of false pride, strife, value. Keen and distant, and the clash of senses, thoughts scattered, bodies beaten. Together in One.
His shape was rough and torn, hands cracked, muscles constricted, the proof under fingernails. It had been a hard day and he was looking forward to being fucked up. Losing himself in drink just as work had lost him in the day. Further, into. Thoughts rambling in echoes of happenstance that blur his mind’s eye to traces and crumbs of experience. Music, cigarettes, bumper stickers, women through tinted windows. Encroaching light poles and the impending darkness turning on, and on.

Held in the middle
A protection like warm skin

He woke and saw the spider. Still and absolute. In the faint red glow of the alarm clock display, 3:42 AM. Only his eyes moved. He wanted to get up. To get up and crush it in his hand. He wanted to feel the body popping in a tissue, smashing its insides and smearing the rest on the blank wall by his bed. He was afraid and unmoving. Wondering where the spider had been. In the bed? On his bare skin, intruding on peace as a ripple in water? The moment of fear was paralyzing, exhilarating. This intuition spoke in stiff jabs that left breathless difference.

Rhythms maintaining order
Awake in dreams
Everywhere and within

Sweeping. Nails, bits of wire, cardboard, plastic wrappers from half devoured vending machine items, dirt, pieces of wood, tobacco spit, metal shavings, mostly it was drywall plaster - the white mud that gets everywhere in the last stages of construction. Intoxicating; the little cloud of dust and dirt that consumed him while he swept. The smells of everything kicked up in the air, breathing their way into him. He felt overtaken by it all. The dirty air, the garbage, penetrating him and his dust mask, his clothes and skin. It was in him and he’d cough it up later that night, he’d see it in mucus on tissues.
It was the labor of the individual. The young man. Falling into place from high nowhere, from ambition and meaning, to sweeping and wanting to go home. So pure and undiluted the feeling. To be away. To hate this place. Belonging to someone else, it was part of their institution and he knew he was a part of it. The integration. But, he was apart from it as well, everything he thought and said seemed to go against his being in places like this. The counterproductive friction that he produced for himself and others, like an unruly squall in the open ocean, disruptive but expected of the expanse. Yet a bludgeon hung over him that kept him in check. It was the money, like a whore, that controlled him and every decision he made. It was him and all of these guys that moved and swayed through work and weekend. Ennui in gentle waters. The balancing act of the American dream. This bludgeon; a reflection of all the weekends and needs standing on shoulders over his head, arms cocked and ready to swing. Pressure. Swollen and infected, his spirit was being laughed at. By someone, sometimes him, but definitely by those that he felt were above him in so many ways. The overachievers, prodigies, young artists, the talented. He would languish in the cool dim of so many others throughout his day. From bitter ambivalence that pecked and tugged, to violent anger that stormed through, destroying things and feelings. Mostly it was the Sadness; the ever present numb that filtered all experience, that blockaded his sensory vision like a dark blind spot to the extent that only the outer edges of the periphery were visible. Exhausted, weary, like walking in clothes soaked in heavy oil, it was the weight of tiredness that held down every motivation, dulling his fight. He sought sleep all the time. The comfort of unconsciousness.

After light and the room that holds

The spider was gone. 4:57 AM. He reached over the alarm clock, pulled it away from the wall, the lamp, the same, nothing. He stood up in the dark, in his small square room and waited for the vertigo to wear away. Standing, looking around, dizzy with sleep, his vision was hazed in gray static. Like the momentary after burn of a television that’s just been turned off, it was a demarcation point with end and beginning on either side. He starred into the dark of the room not looking at anything, but making out the emptiness of shapes, things around him, with him. In this half-wake delirium he was so happy, so at ease knowing that it would be over any second. He knew about life. He knew it was the spaces like this, where nothing is anything and nowhere is here. These miniscule chokes in existence that blurred all the other. His ears rang and his eyes blinked, he outstretched his arms to feel in the dark, to think of a first step, to think of the light.
And the end.
It was over because he realized it was over. The 3 steps to the light switch. The carpet and stuffy bedroom air. He felt the wall, his hands moved up and down, in circles, he looked into the blindness feeling for the switch. Finding it, he paused and saw a fresh snow covered prairie on a cloudless day, he squinted at oncoming traffic. The light was on. Everything harsh and whitewashed. Blinking, looking around the quiet, he found an empty room that he already knew. On the window pane, his partial reflection looking back against the bare wall and opaque night.
He looked under the sheets. Thinking about the bite, if it was venomous. He looked on the floor amiss the array of books, soiled laundry, work boots. The window sill, the drapes. Nothing. He thought of the poison and its effects, he thought of pain. The closet; could the spider be in his clothes? Under the bed? He crawled around the room relentlessly searching for any sign. A web, dead flies. Nothing. Scared and anxious, the reflection fading with the coming morning. He wondered if the spider could be far from home, the nocturnal searching of prey could have drawn it far from its web. The fear spread to purpose, to the pursuit of an end point. Through the window the eastern horizon started to glow.

Something in a distance
Suspended in duality
A different kind of beauty

Orange, pink, blue. The deep light and long shadows. A portrait that hangs behind buildings, mountains; juxtaposed against. It is. Dynamic and teeming with allure, the sky as the mind of an artist or a child that forms the ever-present background of everyone. And him in his car. In the solitude of a small space. Isolation in the evening traffic with everyone but without anyone. He felt better now, alone in the river of cars swimming against the current, it was laughable. A buoyancy. Looking in the rearview, the slow moving light behind the mountains to the west brought him a solace that was normally faint to his eyes. Today was different. Today was distraction. Today was different.
To be away. He thought. In the traffic, in his dazed state of automatic functions, he thought of being away, of being fucked up, of sleeping in daylight hours, he thought of the difference. Saturday and what it held. The smell of people. Barbeques, children, barking dogs, booming cars. The flatlands of his neighborhood. The browned greenery that is either dead or dusted with dirt, dilapidated houses that used to be, the trash and dirt blowing in wind, scavenging rodents and birds, the tribal-like graffiti on fences and concrete, flowers of all color in plastic pots, American flags, little satellite dishes facing east. He rolled his window down and felt the summer. The cooled evening of the freeway. It was the exhaust and breeze that appealed to this romantic self. This is the way of stories with no endings that perpetuate for generations. This is the music of culture, of entertainment and pleasure. It seeks the weekend through routine discipline, starry nights and worn out steel-toed boots. It’s what is. With heaven smiling down. Everything is so easy and beautiful.

Like waking
Something different from the view inside

In the large open of the future building, other workers would walk by and say things that he couldn’t understand. If he happened to make eye contact with one, he would nod or say, “yeah” or “uh-huh,” not caring about the returned looks of puzzlement. Through the contractor provided earplugs, human speech was made into grunts and mutterings. And he liked this. With earplugs, he heard his every breath, swallow, cough with utter clarity while the rest of his surroundings became a solid humming drone. It was as if he was inside himself, in his own body, like a solitary piloted vessel in vast or confined territory. The simple foam filters gave him his own room in which to exist, to think of the future and what it held for him. His dreams and ambitions, so close to his real place and purpose. He thought of his glories, the triumph over his surroundings, he thought of the recognition. The relentless hard work. A long life of success with admirers giving their praise to his achievements. He would command respect in all of his endeavors, he would give to charities, crowds would follow, he would be acclaimed with awards and honors. And the end, like deafness, like solitude, westerly in slow dissension. He would laugh and enjoy life, enthusiasm would flow with unwavering vigor, he would produce radical change, his vision would be talked about as, “laser-like precision.” And all the time he would cry like a king. Alone in this room, he would be far away from this and now. Earplugs wouldn’t be needed, the future would be different, the reciprocal of now. And death suddenly. At the top. A beating, an assassination, a violent murder. He imagined his blood in the media, all over the web, the front pages, TV. His transcendence. The story exported to the world, to history, a legacy. The innocence of his torn body. The looks of bad smells and shock. Sacrificial. The rhythms of rain showers and slow motion. The sorrow, the remembrance. Glacial anger channeled into movies, books, tribute events. Hearing the eulogy at the funeral praising him with goodness and reverence that induced mass mourning and sadness at the event of his passing. There would be suicides and copycat murders. Posthumous offerings. Pageantry. He would become eternal. Hero, artist, champion. Things. “Uh-huh.” So far away. Far away from here and anywhere he’s ever been. Delusional and so close to him that it is him. The illusion so actual and true that it exceeded the prophetical and arrived at the real. The faith he had in himself was so pure that not even reality could find its way back into his sentience. He was of difference. This man standing in here, this large open room, this man sweeping. This man smiling on images, this immense place in front of everyone’s thoughts, this man of adoration. This product of power, seeking out the more and the against, in the hard landscapes of diversion inside everyone. An undercurrent. Like a wind that blows over the prairie, constant and broad in tidal motions that will become formal, relaxed to sensation. That dryness whistling though, carrying echoes of sound. Reverberations of the original everywhere reaching places known, ordinary, accepted. So commonplace that the sounds carried are distant and altered, bearing a likeness to themselves, but not of birth, not of origination. Nor of himself. He is the image that blows in the dry winds of his own dull places. He moves to his self of prestige and eidolon-like status, experiencing all through the dream and enduring all through nocturnal dreams of what is normally called, the real.

End and beginning on either side

He watched the play of colors on the window. For a good few minutes he saw purples and pinks turn to oranges and yellows. Birds and quiet. The spider was nowhere, he wanted sleep. It was the day, and other than this beginning, he had no interest in it. Realizing the cold on his skin, he walked over to the curtains, pulled them shut and climbed into the bed. He thought of the dark and how he wanted to be free of fear and anxiety, he wanted to be the room that held him, and wanted to be nothing. Inanimate shapes around him, light after burnings imprinted into the eyes when he closed them shut, still glowing long after in luminescent trails that burned hotter and more poignant than the initial carefree glance. He loved these vivid reproductions of light, they were real, as real as the objects they personified, only enhanced. This is what he wanted. This, and then sleep unnoticeably creeping, taking him over. No dreaming, only a calm sleep. Over and over.

Today was distraction
Everything so easy and beautiful

Closer to home and the coming night, the first stars were appearing near the zenith. Stark, portentous, the bellies of clouds reflecting the glow of city in pink, hazed fortunes, toil and pace. A different kind of beauty. But he knew all this. In his elevated mood he hadn’t noticed it was taking longer than usual to get home until he saw, in the oncoming lanes, that there was an accident ahead. The characteristic twinkling blue and red light and diverted, distracted traffic. Coming upon the scene, he saw a car completely smashed in on the driver’s side. From what he could tell there seemed to be no other vehicles involved, hence the question as to how this happened, he saw no answer. He looked away giving his attention back to the road, but the flow of cars was at a near stand-still while police converged four lanes into two, and drivers captivated, turning heads, rotating gazes between disturbance and road. Just as the rest do, he watched in alternating single second frames of information and curiosity. Moving up closer he watched a boy cry into the shirt of a man that looked to be his father. Resemblance was obvious. Solid and stoic, the man was looking at nothing; a tight grip, a stare that had no focal point, as if the moment was attacking all senses, diffusing emotion into detachment. A television news crew was hurriedly setting their equipment up as a paramedic crew tended to a body inside an ambulance that was about to speed away. Thinking this body was a brother and a son, he looked again at the man and boy sitting on the concrete barrier that divided the east and westerly lanes of highway. He felt a fleeting sympathy for them, in the center of a spectacle of light and onlookers. It was an episode that had already happened. Witnessed everyday in front of billions of eyes, and tiredly played out without limit. The shock, only to those involved. For most of the onlookers the scene would be replaced or forgotten in a few days. He drove on.
Gaining speed, he fell into a kind of solemn cool. Staring through the windshield, a dream of light washed into streams of frozen motion. Oncoming headlights and the street light above as blurred into solitary streaks against the late evening commotion. Bemused symmetry. The confluence dissolving into a calm center. Moving in the direction of a place. Past the disturbance he continued eastward into skies and territory darker in scope and view. The night black, the landscape fading of iridescence into scant points of light. His exit in the seeable distance ahead, he thought of the body. The mangled car that once carried him, the paramedics closing the doors of the ambulance as others watched in finality. Who was this man and where had he been going? Dead and finished, to everyone that knew of him. To his father and brother, even to the one who barely understood.
Mind drifted into vignettes of the past, of childhood and place. He saw himself as a boy, not far from this site, in blown winter snow, wandering hills and fields. Running, playing, enduring cold and mind. He was away from the house and the endless patterns of boredom. Straying in arbitrary directions for hours, an obscure purpose, an absence. Solitary. Nature and an imagination giving him companionship in compromising ways that people can do. The personalities of compassion, elusiveness, a purpose of something other decentralized. Asleep in his thoughts, sown in dramatic plays of coherence. Of something in a distance, moving, fighting. In blasts of wind and snow, the view of white in all directions penetrating everything absolutely. It was alive and suspended in the monotone of the storm, floating in centers of sound and scene. Struggling against the blizzard, collapsing and rising with gusts. Like a star flickering in tides of atmosphere, irregular in site, it fought with and against. Hard to breathe. He thought it was going to die out here. It moved farther from him and he thought to run after, but he couldn’t. His struggle was exactly the same, he was enduring everything that this figure ahead in his direct view was going through. His fear was the storm around him, it was in him fighting. Remembering the cold shivering, sweating, he looked back to see his footprints, but there was no trace. He saw no trees, hills or sky. The whiteout wrapped him up as if under murky water. The landscape was turning to gray as it got darker out. It was gone, in the distance. At a loss, he failed to not wonder about it, then and now.
And then the spring and summer too. The same steps but in wind streaked meadows and sunshine that would burn his skin red. He remembered packing food and water, and then supplies like a blanket, flashlight, extra socks. Each journey gaining knowledge for the next. Farther ahead, always pushing. He would sleep with the chill of the late summer night under an old bridge, braving the poisonous things he knew were there but couldn’t see, the fear and his wild thoughts compounding everything. Preparing himself, he thought, for adulthood and independence, for the unmapped terrain of future experience. The freedom of being alone. And later from his distance, the city would turn on at the close of days. He remembered the night sky looking otherworldly in its variance from where he was. Continuous wandering for long stretches of time and place out of an innate desire that constantly propelled him through childhood and adolescence. The sinuous maps of thought, the forced endurance, winning an awareness of means and reason for being where he was for the small cost of physical exhaustion and alienation. And now through the telescopic vantage point of age, the wanderings defined himself early as different in the capacity to accept his immediate reality as it was, opposed to how everything should be. Despite awareness, that dusty memories crack and break down over time becoming dreams, fiction, endlessly recycled back into questions of trust. The wistful reminiscence, the authentic. The dualities in everything.

Refracting that wasn’t there

He sat by himself on an empty five-gallon bucket next to a future bay door. Friday’s lunch time and he had nothing to eat. It was more of a reprieve from the monotony of sweeping and hauling trash to the dumpster all morning, but not from the place or people within it. He smiled to himself as he watched a group of guys across the way sitting on their buckets, talking their slang, eating, and making gestures. The not-so-mysterious dialog of modern social grooming. He wondered of these traditions, of the culture that made these men. The forces that sculpt the ethos in groups of people. Outside the day was already hot. He saw the city through a heat mirage refracting and blurring the skyline into water that wasn’t there. It was sensational. The view of these modern castles built by the men in his company and him. Monuments to power, and the systems that mobilize massive teamwork, cooperation of all, the coercion and pride that is equal in magnificence. He was thinking of the significance when he sneezed into the lap of where lunch would normally be. He spat a few times on the concrete and smeared it with the bottom of his boot. A mix of recycled dirt and slime on a darkened floor, it was ugly to him.

Still and absolute
Only eyes moved

Walking into the building, he passed through the revolving doors, through the lobby and up to the entrance of the restaurant. Red velvet and brown satin interweaved into braids forming a tunneling archway that he thought was laughable in its pretentious kitsch. He smiled at the hostess and she did not look or greet him as he walked past. The braids turned looser to woven sheets and the tunnel grew dim and small as he walked its length. Claustrophobic and almost colorless now, he walked forward hunching over, feeling the fleshy fabric touch him like a breeze, like warm skin. Spreading through the off-centered curtains, he thought that he must’ve walked through 50 or so, until he unknowingly came to the last one, hurriedly peeling them back. Then, standing in an immense expanse of open space, he should’ve been out of breath, but he was calm. He stood, awed by the vast area that was this single room. Across from him, about 100 yards, a circular bar with numerous patrons and bartenders. The light was dim, yet hard. It was a room of distinct shadows cutting through the air with no gray. Looking up, his eyes followed the blank, windowless walls of this hollowed out high-rise to a brilliant point of light, akin to looking at the sun trapped in a box with all 4 corners disappearing into its light. This powerful energy source shining down hundreds of feet onto him and the floor. Remembering his hunger and why he came here, he moved toward a booth that had a tall cylindrical wall enclosing it and a single opening barely enough for a grown man to get through. Tables like individual pods randomly dispersed on the pale restaurant floor. The place was full of all kinds. A dull, blending chatter pervaded and echoed throughout, reminding him of an orchestra tuning before a concert. Dissonance. He slid his body into an empty booth and waited for service.
Thirst and hunger were consuming him. The empty feeling in his stomach held his body suspended just as the clean, acidic smell of ammonia clung to the air of the room. Frustrated, he stood up, scanned the room and waved at the closest waiter. Nothing. He stepped out and walked to the bar. When asking for help, people looked at him, but did nothing as if they heard him but had no reaction. Blank stares in the hollow building, he resolved to leave. Looking for a fire exit but, not surprisingly found nothing. He looked back and saw his father. A flash of confusion, relief, excitement, recognition. Alone at the bar watching television, he called out, “dad!” Pushing through the sudden mass of people, “dad!” Louder, smaller, crowded. Everywhere people talked, smiled, laughed. Shouting into ears, wry expressions hanging on words. “Dad!” Faces and noise. Skin and scent rubbed through, all over, plowing deeper into the chaos. Nowhere. His father couldn’t hear him and he stared further into. And he stopped. An aged statue, or a lost child in the hapless currents of this expanse. He saw nothing. Waited. Nothing saw him. The walls, the blinding light above, the decision. Turning, he ran toward the entrance, the curtains of sheets and braids, boring through people like they were nothing. Angry, and no one noticed.
Violently he pulled back and apart. The sheets had become sticky, weightless, and he tore through easily. Closer into, a growing apprehensiveness came. Like swimming underwater, he couldn’t see or feel, save for waves of anxiety rippling through nerves as he ran slower. He was tired and wary, feeling the stringed tension pulling, holding him in an almost polite way. Vibrating with the dissonance, the complete disharmony of everything now. In the undercurrent of helplessness, he stepped back but pulled everything in the dark place with. The sheets of strings were all over him, invisible now and a seemingly greater hold, pulling him back, moving him forward, exaggerating his movements but not letting him go. A hostage in an invisible place. He released his grip.
Closing his eyes, he desperately wanted to see those after burns of light from a few hours ago. A protection. Like the art that compelled him, these impressions were a manifestation of substance outside itself that functioned as time stamps, moments frozen in existence like architecture in light. The evocative excitement and comfort, yet the dark of the room existed in him. With his eyes shut he saw nothing of any thing or object, and now he was genuinely frightened. Now he felt a crippling fear that would not let go. He thought that he could die in this place, never seeing outside this again. And then he realized his being, his substance of thought, his tormentor. This empty room that held him in the middle of dreams.
And he saw the white of daytime underneath his eyelids and knew it was over. An intense headache and a warmth on his skin from the sun, he opened his eyes and knew that he was late for work. Flung the sheets and jumped out of bed, ran to the bathroom and stuck his head in the shower. The cold water shocking him in a kind of self inflicted punishment for oversleeping. He was fatigued and hungry, and there wasn’t enough time to pack his lunch. “Just have to suffer through it today.” The worst kind of work on the site would go to him in exchange for being late and he knew this. Concrete pour, trash detail. In the car racing down the freeway, loud echoes of the dream and more than the recommended dose of painkillers. “At least it’s Friday.”

A solitary piloted vessel
Far away from here and anywhere

“Looks like we got a company man here,” some asshole said as he tapped his wrist and kept walking. No one around. It was just past the end of the overtime shift. Like waking, he took out the earplugs, slid his dust mask off and threw them in the trash heap he’d been building all day. Leaned the broom on the wall and headed for the time clock.
He found the door of the contractor’s trailer locked. Inside was the time clock he needed to punch out with. He looked around for anyone that might have a key but found the site barren, as would be expected on a Friday evening. Walking toward his car, the intensity of the sun, the heat. He took the hardhat off and ran his fingers through sweaty hair, glanced back at the site a last time and saw the skeleton of the building he had spent his day in. It was starting to look like something. Something very different than what he had thought, distinctly different from the view inside. The same inside that had no record of him being there. Since he couldn’t punch out, it was as if he was still in there, or punched in and left, never coming back. Totally ridiculous and it would be hard to explain. Remembering the morning stupor, he almost wondered if he was in the wrong place. “The days are getting longer.” A sigh and a grin. Walking to the car, going home.

Presence
Everywhere and all over
Together in one

He pulled off the freeway at a rural county road exit. Day dreams consumed him to the point of hallucination delivering him miles past his exit, to be here in a mirage of naivety and repose, night and the shapes of emptiness. He drove farther into the country, parking at a dirt intersection with no reasons. Out of place. He waited for the dust to settle, then stepped away from the confines of the car and felt the same unsteadiness as he had in the bedroom during the day’s dark morning hours. Looking skyward, stretching from the cramped quarters, he felt something more than lightheadedness, an instinct intuitively broadcasting, pushing. An impression that he had been orbiting about himself. Locked in a revolving continuum all this time, many times over, to arrive at this place. He breathed hard, shallow, and reached for the vehicle, for anything to hold. Shoes slipping in the dirt, he gripped the open side door swinging with it, his equilibrium giving away, gravity pulling down. Wondering then knowing what had happened. The undertow of reminiscence, of fantasy, washing clean the present until a self imitation left him abandoned here. Beyond forgotten territory with no direction to the natural, the original. Here as another. One that did not inhabit the dreams of his future, that did not inhabit anything he saw.
He already knew this. Without any struggle, sitting in the dirt, leaning against the car as someone else. In sight, in body. Everywhere in an enormous purgatory of years encircling him, waiting for everything to begin. Priming and adapting all along without the acceptance of suffering; the endless pursuit that had made him tragic. In the shell of comfort around, he saw earnestness fail to infiltrate existence, leaving him unscathed in fictions that had become a projection of an unknowable place. He knew all of this. Yet he still watched from behind a periphery of mirrors that judged every action and inaction, every choice he made. And it had become exhausting, to the extent that this brief impacting knowledge would erode like an ancient crater weathered over in stasis. The fainting of a stranger into unconsciousness.
And there he sat. Weary, tired. He coughed and then spat onto the dirt next to his boot, seeing the dust of the day in spit, lit by the interior door light. Smothered it out of habit, embarrassment. He pulled himself up, took the key from the ignition and closed the door. Feeling the barren effects of his spell, he started down the road. If for nothing else, it was nice to hear the dirt underneath his boots, walking in the absolute dark of the late summer night. A rural sky immense in grandeur, an infinite view from his eyes. Constant yet dynamic. His head arched back to see as he walked down the unknown road. Outside of things.
Ahead a grouping of trees on each side of the road, probably surrounding a small creek and culvert. Completely still, no wind. No time. The extreme silence disturbed him, frightened his view. He stopped, looked up at the stars again, like home. And then something in the trees. No breath. Like crying. A young person. He couldn’t tell what side of the road the sound was coming from, just that it was in the trees. Emanating, suspended in nowhere. He was petrified but willed himself over to one side. Listening. And then it stopped like quiet and nothing. He looked back toward the car, for comfort, confirming it was there in the distance. He waited, completely still, calm. It slowly faded back, crying and moaning, but farther away, softer. He felt his skin radiate. The sound was moving within the trees, circular, slow, with no other noise to offset, like leaves under shoes, like flying. Weeping. He had to help, needed to see. Stepping toward and walking into the brush, the trees were tall and thick with dark against sky. He reached out to feel for branches, to see with his hands. Tripping over and into exposed roots, moist sand, probing farther, his heart knocking hard inside. It was still faint, well into and under the canopy of woods. The wail, pursuing him to the dried creek bed as he chased it. He stopped and stood looking around. In the quick of the moment, he thought someone might be playing, tormenting him. Laughing somewhere, watching and waiting for his next act. “I’m not falling for this shit!” Trying to believe that he wasn’t afraid. The imaginary audience made him to be a clown and he had to retaliate. “Why don’t you come out and show your chicken-shit, redneck faces?” Panicked yelling in full armor. “C’mon!” Nothing. Words in the air. “C’mon!” He waited, hardly moving, breathing. “Go back to the barn and fuck yourself some more.” And mumbled, “I’m leaving.” His display just disappeared into the night. The sound hadn’t stopped and he imagined a few sons of farmers laughing next to a kind of portable audio device. He found a baseball sized rock and threw it. And another. None of anything made sense to him. The crying was still moving in circles and waves. Whirling around him, ephemeral. Another rock and his frustrated growl turned to a loud yell. There was no one here but him and he knew this now. And the fading lone weeping. He knew a fool by himself, his breathing shallow and defeated, seeing through broken sense. He sat in the soft sand and cupped his face with dry, cracked hands then moving them up, pushing back hair, seeing arms scratched and bloodied from thicket. The trees around him rustled with a fresh breeze, the sounds of ocean tides in the leaves. Cool, moist air entered him, touching the inside of a home in disrepair. The visiting end fragmented, singing solitary, from nowhere to here. He was crying.
There was something. Behind the mass of trees, a light, gentle but austere. Immediately he stood up, wiped his face and squinted to see through the opaque flutter of leaves. It shone elongated like the space underneath a closed door. Something hidden, vague. He was curious but not afraid of this presence sharing a place with him, and he marveled at this. Like the light in the room of his dream, echoing back, it was an instantaneous empathy with something, anything, that he had not met in years. It was a visceral feeling that he felt but could not understand. It was the threat of fostering a relationship, a beginning at the expense of failure looming in the dark. And so a new calm permeated everything and the light grew with all of this. Soft winds moving through wood and brush, through his damp clothes, smelling of night and sweat. He began making his way out of the wooded area, pushing past limbs and branches, hearing twigs and dried leaves break underneath his weight.
From the lower grade, he pushed himself up to the plateau of the dirt road. Brushed himself off and looked back at the moon rising in the east. It was almost full, and beautifully darkened by dense layers of atmosphere near the horizon. He turned and walked toward the car. The dirt and gravel road, pale like the desert world behind him. Reflecting, diffusing the light he had known before.

In gentle waters
A dark blind spot

His car was the only one in the parking lot. The day was still hot and the sun had started to touch the mountains, changing everything in colors. He poked a key into the lock, opened the door and eased himself down. Simultaneously savoring the feeling of the seat and being annoyed by the heat of the car. He started it and felt the blast of air vents and loud music, taking him back to the morning rush to work. Switching off the radio and rolling the windows down, he put it in gear and pushed the accelerator out of the building site and onto the road.
Driving the roads of city, the systems of rhythm maintaining a pulse and order. Alive in everyone. Symmetrical circuits through bodies of community that stretch and overlap one another, blending divergent currents into a contentious confluence. And he, everywhere and within. The aloof witness, the busy talker, the absorbed listener. Going home under the wake of a setting sun. In patterns beginning and ending. In simple progressions of time. Awake in dreams, existing all around and inside their sights. Reflecting back, reciprocating experience as memory, as real. Worn out and disconnected, he slowly drove with the line of cars that were entering the freeway. Moving slow like colors bleeding together in the sky, his car diffused into streams of traffic. The shapes of one cast out, spread into the coming night.