In orbit

A giant laboratory to search for the particle. A tiny room, compared, in size to this workbench of a star and its system.

From the window, a view opens, overlaid with grid lines and paths of orbits.

The bounds of the window belie the vastness of this vista. It all seems so conceivable this way. But press the face close to the glass, make the walls disappear.

And suddenly the immensity — what seamen called profundity — becomes erupt to the eyes. It's too much, and the brain doesn't know how to handle the absence of ground and the apparent emptiness. That is, the lack of context.

With nothing to hold the eyes in place, they float away, they float out into this lab, and turn in different directions.

Now they can see more than one thing at once, turned directly apart from each other, they gather nearly the entire universe in their sights. But they are unpartnered and uncritical here on their own. Who can tell if one is lying about what it sees?

Better to gather the oculars back in. But keep the head close to that window. Darken the interior lights. No glare. Become a detached observer. Knowing only that you are more than sight from the rumbling in the chest as vertigo roils for release.

Cool and still

The air is so cool tonight, and the evening so still. There are crickets and other animal sounds, but their calls seem to resonate with the night and with me. I can feel the wetness in my hair from a recent shower. My skin feels like it is the most porous of boundaries between my body and the rest of the world. I can feel my heart beating. I heard recently that most animals live as long as it takes their hearts to beat about 1 and a half billion times. Thanks to several factors, humans live significantly longer than that. Yet it seems that any beat past that count is something borrowed. I walked out of a hotel this morning before breakfast and sat on a bench to smoke a cigarette. A tall, slight black man, bald and perhaps in his 50s, but maybe older, too, pushed through the double doors with some speed. Four paces from the doors, he stopped and looked straight out, his arms dangling from slightly stooped shoulders. "Whoa," he said, in a voice that suggested either dimness or wonder. "It's a beautiful day." He looked at me and I agreed. He walked past the bench and maybe just to himself, but definitely out loud, he said, "I'm glad I'm here to see it."

Later today, the following quote from James Michener's "Centennial" ran through my head.
"In the year 9268 B.C. at the chalk cliffs west of Rattlesnake Buttes, a human being twenty-seven years old, and therefore ancient and about to die, studied a chunk of rock which a younger man had quarried from the mountains."

Right around age 27. Biologically speaking, that's how long we're supposed to live. Everything else is a gift of hygiene, medicine and our relative mastery of the natural world.

Old thought made new

I wrote this back in February 2003 and had forgotten about it. I came across it today and was surprised by how much I liked it.

When Kelly Wilson went missing, a cloud settled over the town. People moved from their homes to work in their cars and didn’t walk the streets or sidewalks. They kept their eyes on their grocery carts and telephones went unused. A ringing phone became a terrible intrusion into the stillness of a home. The invitations of grassy green parks went unanswered; eddies in the river ran unbroken by children riding inner tubes. Every day was Sunday.

Photocopied sheets with various pictures of Kelly appeared like mold on telephone poles and on downtown walls. They took the place of real people in those places.

The town had at once been silenced by her disappearance and populated exclusively by her visage.