4-27-2015

4-27-2015

Here, imagine this scene and put yourself in it... It's night, of course, and overcast, but it's leaning toward the bright side of dim. Exactly not like an overcast day. At night when it's overcast, especially when the clouds are low, it's a lit up night time, different from a full moon because a full moon is stark and casts shadows which delineate the sharp borders between areas of light and dark...

...but on a night like this, light is shared and passed around and poured from here to there, transitioning softly and gradually. There aren't any lines; just fuzzy borders. The shapes of things seem much larger, which gives them more meaning. Huh? No, that's not quite right...

I think what it is, is that the shapes of things matter more. They're more present tense... they make a deeper imprint upon the moment. I don't know if that actually means anything, but things definitely give that impression of being something more than normal. Just the regular shapes of things soaked in the strange, diffuse un-light of the cloudlight.

Then... just now, only a few moments ago, I saw something that made me inhale sharply, and then...

...

!

...

That is, uh...

Ok.

I'll try to describe it as if this 'event' were giving me precise commands on how exactly to react. Here goes...

Inhale quickly and deeply, then involuntarily close your throat with a glottal stop; abrupt and important, fixating the act of breathing upon one enduring moment. Then really remember it the way it was...

So there I was, watching a column of low, bent over clouds of a bright orange-ish pink color march across a background of dark burnt umber. Then the farthest horizon beyond that orange procession was suddenly lit up with this hellish, unearthly and terrifying stroke of light, a narrow band that seemed to be only a precursor to the possibility of much more of itself that remained hidden beyond the horizon. Above, it was cut off by a relative darkness consisting of higher, closer clouds that formed an abrupt ceiling to the light. And inside that narrow, squashed place of orange where this was happening, it was... it was Armageddon, as it would look from a thousand miles away. It was a white lightening, with an orange afterglow that lit up and touched... geez, from my point of view... about a third of horizon. It may not sound like much, but it's all and more than I could see. It spread out through the fading orange expanse even further with white filaments like tree branches, or blood veins, or like an ancient river of ice on Mars reflecting the sunlight. A blinding electric fractal that scored the sky, leaving a complex afterimage of dancing purple furrows.

I stop my remembering now to remember why I wanted to describe this. And so I stop, and look up, and... there it is, all over again. Beauty, indescribable. And now I realize that I insult it by attempting to record the experience by shaping the memory of it with words, but I'm compelled to do it anyway.

Chaotic shapes form lines in three dimensions to a vanishing point, and the experience of watching this thing that I've been trying to describe here is just so satisfying. I'm seeing it, and it's talking itself to me the way that I wish I could be saying this to you.