the following is a "personal essay" i wrote several weeks ago for my Craft of Writing class. there's a lack of subtance and the emotions are too overbearing. my professor said there's no coherent flow to the piece as a whole, and no, i don't know where the idea to use all the Bob Dylan stuff came from. in hindsight, i feel like i didn't manage to express what i was attempting to express. blah blah blah.
"When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky"
We walked uphill towards the far end of the clearing, and found ourselves atop the ridge of a naturally-formed hillside ampitheater. A huge outdoor stage lay below where we stood, facing us. The friends we were visiting explained that we were on the abandoned grounds of an outdoor music festival, untouched since the 1970s when The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan had filled the surrounding hills with the waves and winds of rock and roll. For decades, it had lain hidden away like the ruins of a forgotten temple.
We climbed onto the stage, which was littered with squares of stage platforms that rolled on rusted wheels. Straining together, we maneuvered one of these pieces out from under the awning of the stage and stretched out on it, on our backs, under the stars. The moon was just a sliver that night, we had left the glare of man-made lights in our dust miles down the road, and our backs pressed against ground that Brian Wilson had once tread. For all these reasons, the stars seemed brighter, closer, and more numerous than ever before. What had always seemed just a few sparkling stones strewn across the heavens was then a thick, glittering dust that coated over the glassy dome of the sky. For a while we forgot everything, forgot all of our subterranean homesick blues, and became lost in the mystery of the firmament spread out around us.
*
I’ve been reading a book, “The Gifts of the Jews,” by a guy named Thomas Cahill. It talks about how people in ancient times understood the universe. To them, Cahill explains, the sky was the realm of the gods, literally populated by the dieties of their religion. They transcribed supernatural dramas and truths from the stars and based their agricultures, governments, religions, and personal lives upon the movement of lights in the rotating sky-dome. Of course, now we know better than these ancients, and their worldview seems bizarrely naive. We know that the sun is not really a flaming chariot that drives over our heads and crashes into the sea at the end of each day. We know better than to offer sacrifices to heavenly bodies or to structure our society after the constellations.
And yet, we have not escaped the heavens and their influence. The sun truly is the source of our planet’s life, and the moon reaches down even through our atmosphere to churn up the tides of the ocean. On an even deeper level, the heavens have remained the quintessential picture of mystery and beauty, whether in art, religion, or secrets whispered between lovers. As Cahill notes, the sky “is still our principal metaphor for limitlessness and transcendence,” a metaphor used to convey the mysteries of our human experience.
I wonder, then, if the scientists who have unmade the supersitious beliefs of the ancients and purged the sky of deities are all that different than the priests of old. With diagrams and equations, astronomers and physicists try to describe mystery and immensity from a distance that is almost unimaginable. They peer out through telescopes to search the dark void for light and matter, or they sort through notebooks of calculations bent on a task similar to that of a monk or a poet. They seek to describe and communicate to us ideas and visions that are so incredible we could not imagine them on our own, and with their help we finally begin to visualize and comprehend a universe that exceeds our expectations and imaginations. They are seers, or see-ers, just as much as priests or poets.
And so Bob Dylan, a seer in his own rite, said it like this:
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you.
You were trying to break into another world,
A world I never knew.
I always kind of wondered
If you ever made it through.
*
The next summer, Katie and I were on our way home from visiting the same friends and again found ourselves near the festival grounds. We pulled off through a field and into the same clearing. We parked and walked over the ridge of the hill to find the stage still there, still sacred. We remembered the intensity of the stars the summer before and looked up to a similar spectacle, this time with the full face of the moon also shining down on us. To our right was one of several abandoned, shed-like buildings we had seen the year before, and in the moonlight we saw that it had once been some sort of concession stand or ticket booth, with an awning extending out from a large window that covered most of its front. Edges of plywood surrounded the windowframe, but the main panels had been knocked out. We tried to see into its interior, but the moonlight from above revealed nothing past the windowframe.
As we examined the building, the sense of beauty that had filled the night shifted to an atmosphere of childish mischief and fright. We were sure the building was haunted, that someone or something lived there in the shadows. We dared each other to creep up to the window, and both accepted the challenge, snickering but becoming genuinely nervous. We made it to the window but still couldn’t see anything inside. Pieces of broken glass lay about our feet and seemed to catch the reflection of the stars.
On another dare, we stepped together over the damaged windowsill into the dark, our legs stretching to find the floor. The soles of our shoes crushed onto shards of glass and sent our pulses surging, but we held our breaths and took several steps into the dark, onto creaky floorboards, and halted. Our eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness, and we could just make out each other’s faces when several winged creatures, birds or bats, dropped down from the ceiling and flapped out of the window. We both screamed, leapt back over the windowsill, and ran to the car. Katie plunged the keys into the ignition, and whipped the car around through the grass and back down to the main road, both of us laughing at ourselves and overwhelmed with a strange sense of excitment. We had approached something unknown. It was just a shed, yes, but our imaginations had been overwhelmed by the mystery of it all, and so it felt as if we had, for a brief moment, broken into another world.
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