No One Was Paying Attention to the Sky

[Image: “Florida (July 2021),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (in somewhat different form):

Desire is never on the map

it’s that unnamed lake you found once, driving a gravel road, 
not where you thought you were going fast, window down,

hair loose to the dry wind, bare foot pressing metal, soft feathers 
of cottonwood drift through, maple seed spinning in its wild gyre.

Bugs spatter on the windshield in Rorschach  you want to read
like tea leaves, imagine you might learn how you’ve come

to this road, which left turn at midnight, which wrong side
of  town. Then there it is glittering pure and cold before you,

and suddenly you want that stone-skipping ache more
than your life, even knowing how the cold  water

makes each hair stand on end as you enter,
one foot at a time sand crumbling underfoot,

then, the delicious  submersion, as you slip
the laws of gravity, surface tension.

And so it is you push off from shore, not caring 
that this lake—as you knew the instant

you saw it—has no bottom.

(Holly Hughes [source])

…and:

The ultimate nature of the experience of life is that toil and pleasure, sorrow and joy, are inseparably mixed in it. The very will to life that brought one to light, however, was a will to come even through pain into this world; else one never would have got here. And that is the notion underlying the oriental idea of reincarnation. Since you came to birth in this world at this time, in this place, and with this particular destiny, it was this indeed that you wanted and required for your own ultimate illumination. That was a great big wonderful thing that you thereupon brought to pass; not the “you,” of course, that you now suppose yourself to be, but the “you” that was already there before you were born and which even now is keeping your heart beating and your lungs breathing and doing for you all those complicated things inside that are your life. You are not now to lose your nerve! Go on through with it and play your own game all the way!

(Joseph Campbell [source])

…and:

Winter Afternoon by the Lake

Black trunks, black branches, and white snow.
No one nearby, five o’clock, below zero,
Late January.  No birds.  No wind.
You look, and your life seems stopped.  Perhaps

You died suddenly earlier today.  But the thin
Moon says no.  The trees say, “It’s been this way
Before, often.  It’s cold, but it’s quiet.”  We’ve experienced
This before, among the messy Saxons putting back

The hide flap.  A voice says:  “It’s old.  You’ll never
See this again, the way it is now, because
Just today you sensed that someone gave you
Life and said, “Stay as long as you like.”

The snow and the black trees, pause, to see if we’re
Ready to re-enter that stillness.  “Not yet.”

For Owen

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.

(Flannery O’Connor [source])

From elsewhere:

My favorite [experiment in measuring our “inner clock”], by a distance, involved jumping off cranes. The neuroscientist David Eagleman set out to test the common intuition that subjective time slows down in moments of high drama, such as in the moments before a car crash. He reasoned that this subjective slowing down might be due to an internal clock running faster—more ticks of the clock in a given time period, longer perceived duration. This in turn should lead to a “speeding up” of the rate of perception since a faster clock should mean an improved ability to perceive short durations.

To test this idea, Eagleman and his team designed a special digital watch, which displayed a series of numbers that flickered so quickly that they were impossible to read in normal conditions. Then he persuaded some brave volunteers to repeatedly perform scary adrenaline-loaded leaps into the void while staring at their flickering watches. If an internal clock was indeed speeding up, then—his reasoning went—the volunteers should see the blur resolve into readable numbers while in free fall. They couldn’t, so his study provided no evidence for an internal clock. Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but still… what an experiment!

(Anil Seth [source])

…and:

Mercury Rising (A Visualization)
(excerpt)

Q. Why is not the air in CITIES so FRESH, as that in the COUNTRY?
A. Because it is impregnated with the breath of its numerous inhabitants…
—from Guide to Science, 1868 by Rev. Dr. Brewer

[…]

2a.

you take the trail into the forest,
look up at the trees,
the streams of light coming down through the branches.

you walk on a bed of pine needles.

on your left,
a little ways off the path,
you see a clearing where there’s a small animal.

you ask the animal a question and it gives you an answer.
“vapor.”
you thank it for that and return to the path.

as you walk along
you see something shiny
and when you get closer
you see it’s a key.

you pick it up and put it in your pocket.

further along off to the right,
you see another clearing,
and another small animal awaits you.

you ask it a question.

it gives you an answer, but it’s hard to make out.
you can sense a word forming with an ‘r’:
“reality”?
and you thank it for that.

you return to the trail.

(Jena Osman [source])

…and (in lightly edited form):

Mac: “I’m watching the sky, sir. It’s doing some amazing things. It’s got everything, reds, greens, a kind of shimmering and there’s a noise, too, like a far-off thunder, only it’s softer. I wish I could describe it, I wish you could see it…

Happer: Be more specific. You’re my eyes and ears there. Give me details.

Mac: Sir, I’ll give you the colours first. It’s white and green and red, I’m sorry, that’s the phone box… Oh it’s blue! It’s just blue! It’s like a shower of colour…!“

Happer: “Ah, you’re a lucky man, MacIntyre. I haven’t seen the aurora since ’53, in Alaska.“

[…]

Mac: “I haven’t seen a comet yet, sir. I don’t know if I could spot one with all this other stuff going on. The other night Ben was saying that meteors are always a good sign of a comet and that stuff we saw coming from Leo the other night may just be an indication of what might be happening in the future… With regard to comets, of course. I will probably just keep my eye posted on Leo because there’s some extraordinary things happening in the sky and as you suggested I’ll watch Virgo as well, and I’ll let you know if anything— God! It just went red all over! It’s red all over!“

([source])