Why does night feel supernatural?

The world feels supernatural at night, because nighttime opens up more possibilities for imagination. I think this is for three reasons.

You might be thinking less about work or daily practicalities. There’s more time for introspection. Even if you’re not tired, you’re also slipping more into a dreamlike state which allows for abstraction.

Another reason is that shadowy spaces naturally spark our imagination. Sometimes it’s in a fearful way, but fears can be creative.

Also, it’s because we can see the stars. This always feels like magic. Preexisting formations make us want to create; outer space absorbed into inner space. The galaxy reminds us of the seemingly endless expanse we can begin, bit by bit, to fill with ideas. 

Blank spaces

Comic characters can't see the blank spaces between panels as they travel from one to another. If they could, they'd realize that's the space where they have the freedom to draw themselves.

Punching Poseidon

If you can, at least once in your life, punch Poseidon.

When the tide is tall and choppy, curling into water cliffs, charge into the waves. They'll pummel you with salty fists. Stand against them at first. They will start thrashing you. Let them. Let them sweep and scrape you across the shore. Dig your hands and feet into the sand. Be seaweed, rooted down, swaying with the current. Let the foaming mouth swallow and spew you out. Then, when it thinks it's quelled you, run at the waves again. Crash in. Tangle. Switch between boxing with the water and dancing with it. Seize the frothing joy.

The ocean will learn it can move you, but can't claim you. You both belong to yourselves, and will always battle it out or carry each other. You'll return to each other in tides.

Embryonic

Being in the ocean is one of the most soothing experiences. It guides you back to an embryonic lull and stirs with primordial echoes. The danger is that it's indiscriminately nurturing. It cradles you while sustaining your predators. The security and the perils are very much like gestation, because nothing is both as welcoming and dangerous as becoming alive.

Stretch

There's something calming about long shadows stretched across chain link fences and sidewalks. Maybe because it shows that even a flat facsimile of you can wrap itself around many surfaces at once and reach across the daylight. If you don't have the energy at the moment, it will fill in for you until you do.

Road maps II

Wires and veins and road maps are all similar visually, and linked in concept. Technology connects people as part of a larger body and is the highway we travel together.

Ivy

A while back, I wondered if ivy is so appropriate for Ivy League schools because the plant itself is always ascending. I've also noticed other similarities between the plant and the students. It networks, intertwining with the other vines. Onlookers tend to immediately think of the ivy before thinking of the institution (at least in a physical sense). Some of it forgets it has roots in the ground and is held up by a foundation; that it didn't rise so far only by itself. Other vines remember and lift more of them up.

Frankenstein Fairy (or “An Art Class Essay Eleven Years Late”)

This is a drawing I did when I was eighteen. In hindsight, the scale and perspective looks distorted. That wasn’t deliberate, but it seems oddly compatible with the theme. The girl’s hands are too big for her body—also an accident—but that may be appropriate for a Frankenstein fairy.

In my late teens, I came up with the concept of Frankenstein fairies. They were sullen-looking adolescents with green skin and stitches running along their faces and limbs. They wore leather jackets, skull shirts, and combat boots. Their wings only materialized when they were threatened. When treated as pariahs, they’d sprout luminous butterfly wings and either attack or fly away to a better place.

Ms. Lee, one of my high school art teachers, was intrigued by the image and asked me to write a piece about it. It was a suggestion, not an assignment. I didn’t follow through at the time because I couldn’t think of anything to say about it. But now, eleven years later, I can.

At that time in my life, I was focused on merging apparent opposites. Drawing sunflowers growing out of ashtrays. Going to Burger King in a prom dress. And in the process, discovering a middle ground. Frankenstein Fairy fit this theme because of the obvious contrast, but also because the “monster” himself was a contradiction.

I first read Mary Shelley’s book in fifth grade and felt an immediate possessive pull toward the character. Not wanting to take credit for him, but wanting to adopt him as a person. I later felt the same about Alice Cooper’s “Teenage Frankenstein,” a glorious musical ode to alienation. The song was his, but it was also mine because I thought of Alice Cooper as my person. It was the babushka doll effect of egocentrism.

Now I feel that the song can be claimed by everybody who’s ever felt alone and pushed away. We can be together in solitude. And Frankenstein’s monster belongs to everybody. Even his body is a composite of different people. We all are. Our DNA comes from a multitude of sources. Our personalities and opinions, too. It’s a whole merging of experiences that influence us, and we are all patchwork.

In the end, Frankenstein’s creature belongs to everyone because he is everyone. And we are all Frankenstein fairies.

When the highways sleep

(View from the passenger seat in Mike's car)

Foggy days are often described as eerie or gloomy, but to me they have always felt safe.

A misty landscape has a quality that makes you want to whisper. It’s partly because of the stillness that inspires reverence, and partly because the world seems asleep and you don’t want to disturb it. It’s also because your surroundings are playing hide and seek, and you don’t want them to hear you approaching. Fog is what happens when nature decides to become a puzzle or perform a vaporous striptease. It’s a game in the same way that changing leaves are dress-up.

Photos of the fog never seem to do it justice, because it irons it out onto a flat surface. This cloudiness is anything but flat. It was never meant to be confined to a two-dimensional space.

Like snow, fog is compared to a blanket, but it’s different than the blanket that snow provides. Snow is static, while mist is in constant motion. It lets you enter and shows you things if it trusts you. The view becomes crisper as you move close. You earn it, like getting to know someone who is usually guarded.

Any light in the haze looks ethereal, even if it’s from cars on the highway. They’re like alien fireflies. This kind of fog makes the highways seem so stark; a near-abandoned alternate world. Every trip out is an adventure in discovering old things in a new light.

Lights become guides, and the sky turns into a milky ocean with a moon eye. It’s unseeing and draws you closer with the tides. Indiscriminately, it draws everything home.

Driving through mist can make you feel embryonic. It’s safe in the way confined spaces are. Of course, mist doesn’t really confine a space by veiling most of it. It just creates that sense while opening more possibilities.
                Many times I feel like I’m walking through a fog in a world of my own. When there’s a tangible fog embracing the landscape, I’m not alone. Everyone is in that same space with me, exploring together. We're in an all-enveloping cocoon, waiting while our surroundings evolve and then finally resurface.

Infusion

One from the archives. I wrote this in January of 2012.

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             When you find yourself observing a new place, you absorb the essence of it. As this happens, you either perceive a presence or an absence. Spirit is presence; a perpetual emotional imprint.

            The words of a book are infused with spirit. Long-dead authors continue to speak. Their chorus arcs and curves along the space-time continuum, collectively dancing its verbal ballet. Living writers are also partly encompassed within their works, but not bottled up inside. A tome is not a tomb. Books preserve their authors, rather than contain them.

            Written exchanges also hold spirit. Messages are scrawled on bathroom walls; words traded between strangers. These conversations retain their vitality and awaken every time they are read.

            Everything that has ever been touched emanates spirit. We connect with others through a chain of shared objects, laying hands on one another vicariously.

            All songs have spirit. Born in the composer’s imagination, the brainchild is adopted by those who hear it. Each note sounds different to each ear. The musician’s intentions and the listener’s impressions all dwell in the tune. In this rich variance, it thrives. The notes stem from one seed, and then flourish into countless branches bearing fruits of inspiration.

            Spirit permeates nature. Trees harbor remembrance of everyone they encounter. Silent witnesses to centuries, they sustain the birds nesting on their boughs, squirrels burrowing into their crevices, and humans etching memories into their bark.

            Foggy days are rife with spirit. Mist juxtaposes against crisp cityscapes, suffusing our reality with haze. Even if we can’t see the mist, we feel it in rooms that balloon with presence, like lungs inhaling a breath.

            Ghost is the inverse of spirit. It is hollowness and hunger. A ghost is the silence between words; the empty space between objects.

            An abandoned house is a ghost. Parts of it contain spirit because it has been touched and experienced, but altogether it is a husk. It lacks any tokens of the former residents. They don’t linger in the edifice; it lingers in them. They gave it any sense of character it acquired, and this cannot be severed from themselves. When they depart, so goes the home.

            A ghost is a missed opportunity. It abides in a 24-hour diner with a buzzing neon sign, sipping coffee with a man who sits alone. He recalls the woman who once sat across from him; how they were enmeshed in conversation until 3 a.m. It was a biological destiny. Their DNA codes cracked the combination lock to a shared mental universe; an ecstatic neurochemical tango. Their steps were in perfect rhythm with the dance of written words.

            A ghost is left in your wake if you do not share your life with others. Instead of a mark, a void remains. This happens when you seal yourself up in a snow globe and refuse to be shaken. Your mind becomes a bubble expanding with self-contained knowledge. When you’re gone, all you’ve ever learned passes away with you.

            I’d like to think that if we share ourselves, we impart on the world after we die. This means that we won’t be anywhere, because we’ll be everywhere. I believe that when this takes place we are not present; we are presence. We disperse and transform into everything we have ever touched, written, read, sung, built, drawn, and loved.

           Instead of vanishing from the world, we become it.