We dream; We have a map of the world

I noticed, today, to my surprise, that fall has come to Santa Cruz. There are big brown leaves on the ground. When the wind comes they float all around. Aside from that not much is different.

I’ve never been able to write stories. Junior year I thought I’d change all that and take a creative fiction class. I sat down with the first assignment:

Write 1 story. 6-10 pages.

I thought and I thought and I was full of ideas. But no stories. Just strange, broken bits of imagery. Scenes would come to me but no story. Words would come to me but no sentence. Just words words wodrs rwdos… I had started out full of hope:

When today’s story hits the news there will be a revolution. And it’s not about any war, or disaster, or miscarriage of information. Optical wires will sag with the weight of this revelation, from…

From… from…

Maybe that was enough build-up for something that doesn’t exist yet. I tried to find a new direction. I trained my eyes on a spot on the wall and waited for the colors to flow. But there was no next line. There was no story. I put on some inspirational music. I stood at the window and looked out. I changed my shirt, I laid down in bed. I took a shower and changed my shirt again and still nothing. Finally I write:

She received a box of chocolates the next day that opened up like a pack of cigarettes.

Wednesday night she swelled to the size of the world and brought rain to all the thirsty lands. This is a hopeless endeavor.

I decided to put it away and work on Junior Lab instead. A few days later I dropped the course (but saved the draft, haha). I told myself, I didn’t have any more time to waste. Besides, I really should wait to take it with Junot Diaz.

Really, though, it was my failure to even begin to coagulate a story.

It’s funny because I dream in much the same way. With complete lack of discipline. I’ve lucid dreamt only twice. Both times to wake up from something potentially scary. The second time was quite recently and informed by a strange thing. I woke up to a dark room. Sat up and flipped the light switch. Nothing. “I know this,” I thought. “This is from Waking Life. Light switches don’t work in dreams.” How strange the details that rise up like bubbles from deep in our brains. Where this had been stored up until then, I don’t know. I’d seen the movie once, three years ago.

So, knowing this, I woke up again. For real this time. Tried the light trick. Still nothing.

Damn.

Other times, I have dreams that truly seem inspired by something. Once I dreamt of a bird tied to an awning by a string around its leg. Floating like a balloon. When I turned around it flew away and left a paper airplane in its place. In the same dream there was a seaplane with its engine turning. The drowning of a child, the sound was rushing. And when the tide came into the house that evening the animals came with it. With mouths full of water.

Last night, too, I dreamt of something truly novel, or so I thought. It was a movie put on by slits in a paper. A light is shown behind it and shadows cast onto the wall and every cut is an essential element of the story. When I woke up, with the sun in my eyes, I thought, “This is something truly novel and I’m glad to have dreamt it.”

A couple hours later, it hardly made any sense at all.

The sky is full of holes

Ancient Egyptians lived inside of a great celestial sphere. To them, the sun, the stars, the moon, were all points of light plastered on the under-surface of this sphere, born each night out of the horizon as the sphere rotated east to west. All these things: stars, sun, moon, horizon, held deep wonder and spiritual meaning for the civilization. And life revolved delicately around these beliefs.

But no, the truth is more beautiful. We are points of light floating in deep space; we are one of many. I’d like to think they’d be amazed to hear it.

I remember from cosmology class the Night Sky Problem. It’s a great illustration of the many things we take for granted. In 1826 Olber asked a simple question, why is the night sky dark?, and astonished everyone. You see, back then, we believed the Universe was infinitely large and infinitely old, filled with an infinite number of stars at some finite density and luminosity. This means, intuitively (also rigorously, but that won’t be necessary here), every line of sight should end on a star. The sky should be, on average, everywhere as bright as our sun.

It was Edgar Allen Poe who preempted all the scientists by providing the first hint at a solution to the problem. Finite time. He wrote, in the rather controversial “Eureka”:

“Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform density… since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.”

No one would be sure whether or not he was joking, (“because nothing was, therefore all things are.”), but on this topic, he would be right. The universe (that we know and live in) has a finite age. Current estimates place it at approximately 13.5 billion years. Light also travels at a finite speed. As we look deeper into space, we look further back in time. In fact, the whole history and evolution of the universe is painted right into the sky, it’s there for us to read if we know how, and where, to look. Imagine being able to look at a person, or an object, and see its whole history. This is one of the most profound things about cosmology.

The horizon distance is the distance to the edge of the current, observable universe. The distance from which light emitted immediately after the Big Bang is just now reaching the earth. This distance is very large. But it is not infinite. This is the main reason why the sky is full of holes.

But not the only. Light from the most distant sources are also redshifted dramatically as it travels to earth, by the continuing expansion of the universe. For example, the sky is nearly isotropically covered in a faint glow of microwaves from the last scattering of photons by the plasma which pervaded the early universe (at redshift 1100). Since our eyes cannot see in radio, or microwaves, or infrared, the sky appears dark to our eyes where it doesn’t, say, to a powerful radio telescope.

On the other hand, if you were to climb to Glacier Point in Yosemite and look up into the night sky there, you might not think it dark at all…

 

(This all goes back to the importance of asking questions. Easy questions. Obvious questions. Those are usually the ones most difficult to answer.)

 

Meanwhile, back on earth, my to-do list hasn’t changed in 2 weeks:

• finish cosmology problem sets
• read papers
• order b&w film

The last time I worked with film was high school. But then we had to develop our own negatives and enlarge our own prints in the dark room. For a small(?) fee of $7 here, Fuji will do all the work for you. I got my first 2 rolls of slide film back, shot with a borrowed Nikon FE film camera with a 35 mm lens and UV filter. The film is Velvia ISO 50 slide film, which is famous for its warm tones and almost offensively vivid colors.

Slides are such dainty little things.

A few I’ve scanned into the computer using AJ’s scanner. All shot during the last 2 weeks in Santa Cruz, CA.

My brain’s telling me there’s some really satisfying quality about these pictures that I can’t achieve with digital. But maybe it’s just the placebo effect. In any case, I really need to go back to Wilder Ranch.

Light Pulled In — A Review

When I got back from Cancun I found JP Licks perched like a statue on the front steps of the house. Staring straight ahead. My approach had been announced in an ongoing fashion by the sound of plastic wheels on pavement. Slowly increasing in volume like the arrival of Bad News. On an otherwise silent road– Lincoln, a through-street during the day, is cavernous at night. Bad News was carrying a backpack and a camera bag and dragging two suitcases (a small one filled with summer clothes, and a big one filled with winter clothes)– looked up and saw standing between her and a big green bed a few steps to the front door and a cat on a stoop.

On the back cover, it had said, “A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does.” If I could even hope to write like Arundhati Roy it would be a good day. Nevertheless I thought it fun to do book review entries in imitation of the book. The intro is in imitation of the style of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. But actually, I’m cheating because INFPs and INFPs write alike to begin with.

On my way back to Santa Cruz I spent some time with John in San Mateo. John accused me of not using his name enough. I said I wished it were more complex. He freed me finally from the all-inclusive resort wrist band that had been strangling me all week. With the sharp end of a key.

Back at the front door and the steps on Lincoln Street, JP Licks stretched her paws, muttered a greeting, then turned and followed me into the dark house.

“Sophie Mol?” she whispered to the rushing river. “We’re here! Here! Near the illimba tree!”
Nothing.
On Rahel’s heart Pappachi’s moth snapped open its somber wings.
Out.
In.
And lifted its legs.
Up.
Down.

They ran along the bank calling out to her. But she was gone. Carried away on the muffled highway. Graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night the broken yellow moon in it.

There was no storm music. No whirlpool spun up from the inky depths of the Meenachal. No shark supervised the tragedy.

Just a quiet handing-over ceremony. A boat spilling its cargo. A river accepting the offering. One small life. A brief sunbeam. With a silver thimble clenched for luck in its little fist.

(Pg. 277)

I finished the book on the broken up, 8-hour plane trip to Mexico. If I could give any piece of advice on how to read this book, it would be: don’t read it during the second leg of an 8-hour long plane ride anywhere. It’s been a while since I last read a book where the language plays such a intimate and central role in the experience of the story. The story itself, is simple. It is a single event, told in a nonlinear fashion. Before and after. Things can change in a day. The rest is the why.

I can’t help but admire the skill with which the story is told. The richness of the detail. The precise incision of imagination. With such a deep engagement of emotion, empathy, that a single event is able to be told with the fullness of a lifetime– several lifetimes– that it first fills the pages of a 300 page novel and then overflows it.

Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving.

(Pg. 109)

I’ve been rather unimpressed by some books lately, but this one, I think, is a work of art.

On the station platform Rahel doubled over and screamed and screamed.
The train pulled out. The light pulled in.