Firesky

Firesky

Samuel Bird

There is inequality in the speed and the gravity of the seemingness of a moment. This moment slows passing to a near stop and, in doing so, makes these moments its own existence to revel in. The depth of what this moment seems to be, makes all moments only present in this one, insofar as they are relative to it. What was this thing I called my life? Birth thrust me into it, perception made me confused, my labors sought to understand it and change it, but now, all of that is a little story I play out in my head. I am a small child, or perhaps a young man. I am back in that field that went on forever until its distant fringes met that sky that managed to squeeze in a few more degrees than what geometry could offer. I stood in that field, often alone, often with others, and often as someone completely different from myself. The sky would grow dark, sometimes with the emergence of clouds, sometimes with the twilight. When it was cloudy, their breaks and folds in the sky made a diorama of depth to gaze into. When it was night, the clouds had the decency to be absent, leaving me with those vibrant stars that seemed to be more something I was reseeing in the world and from within myself, than a part of this world alone. Then, like salivation before a meal or warmth before a hug, an emotion would come to me. This emotion is the majesty of all that I have ever felt. It is that awe that follows from a careful and prepared view into the sublime. It isn’t the cascading flames of pleasure coursing through me, but the absence of pleasure at all. It is that awe, wonder, and gratitude that allows the soul to step out of time, to see what its vessel as avatar has done, and evaluate it. I am not sure if this is just my fortune, or if this is necessary from getting to exist and being aware of it, but I have always valued it. Tears start to roll from eyes that never left the gaze to the heavens. Every moment and toil was a curse that sought to steal my life from me, but the totality of my life is something I hold with honor and tenderness, as if my own existence were my child. For what is to come, I now know what it will be. The first time I had this dream, even without the induction from a previous encounter, I could just tell. The sky would climactically swell and mount until it started. Stones aflame would start to fall from the sky. Sometimes they would fly across the sky, other times they would land a few feet from me. In each instant, I knew what these stones aflame meant. My life, every life I knew, and perhaps even this world, were coming to an end. There was no more that proceeded this moment, and even in my faith, I knew that what was to come would be so radically different from now, that it would be an effective death. I would stare up at them as the flickering trails of igniting debris would dance in my eyes. It was the most marvelous thing I had ever seen. I wouldn’t take shelter, plead, or even attempt to get my affairs in order. There was only the expansive dark sky and the inevitability that it aggressively imposed on me. Could a man run to and from to escape fate? He only then must accept it, weary and without the honor of resigning himself to it. As I have said, there is a day to fight fate. To dig a hole in the ground to hide after gathering resources. However, there is then a time to love fate. As those stones plummeted and then pummeled the only world I ever knew, all I had is what is and what was. In that moment, it would be best not to curse such. However, I don’t find it something that I bless because I want to. It seems so natural, as if I were all along this machine to make meaning, and this was my last great task. I am in the world, such a small part of it, and completely separate, when I realize my subjective synthesis, my experience and emotions, my making of memories, and the unit that holds them, go back to that nothing I came from. This is it, I am going home. I am slipping back behind the curtain that I attempted to peek behind my whole life. I feel some weight in recognizing that the only way to see behind the curtain is to never have a chance to see the stage again. The permanency of what is to come is directly at odds with the wretched impermanence of my being. I feel myself cursing fate, but now, in making this error, I seek to offset it. I then share that line that is the culmination and application of loving fate. “All and only, that which I love is what is and seems.” The stones strike closer, and the fire spreads. I stare into that sky as the paternal that I looked to bringing me into being, and now accepting its call back out of it. I stare into that sky to be with Him in honesty and earnestness. Right above me, a stone comes for me. Its size and speed make it ineligible for escape. In that last moment before it takes all I have ever known from me, my gaze leaves the sky to closed eyes, my arms outstretched, and my mouth turns up in the smile that most came from my soul. 

I have had this dream since I can remember. The facts of the dream change, but always revolve around what has been described here. In each, I know that my life and everyone I know is either certainly or most likely over. This dream is no nightmare, and even a tender and beloved part of my memories. Perhaps some great scientist will someday say that he has found the meaning to such a dream, that is, if dreams don’t destroy science first. Whatever that thinker comes up with, in my hubris, I will say that they are wrong. This dream is not graspable for meaning like most things, instead, it seems to be a part of that thing that affords meaning to everything else. This dream is referential to that idea that precedes all others in making meaning. I have elected not to share my Esse Maxim, but I can say that this dream is a majestic representation of such. You may wonder at what point of a gradient of literality this dream lies, to allow you to reverse-engineer the dream and find Esse Maxim. However, this dream and Esse Maxim precede the rationally conceptual and are prior in that conception that seems to be man’s finger nearest to God. In my deep love of paleontology, I had a silly thought that I meditated on for some time. The dinosaur skeleton I was looking at and its associated prehistoric owner came before Socrates. Every one of the beasts I was witnessing came before every thinker I knew and loved. We can make a case that it is because of the necessarily ever-increasing complexity of life and that we are more advanced, but I would rather extrapolate this “nothing” that “being” proceeds conception, and certainly formed conception like reason. When I awake from these dreams, I am a good little philosopher and use a series of shared qualities to assume another in argument by analogy. I might break down the categories and then use reason against them, but in the end, it is futile. You can’t dissect an elephant to find how it acts when you give it a peanut, follows behind you with glee, or enjoys cooling itself in the river. Modern man has dissected and encaged the world, and then thought that in this he knew it. However, how can one know something if they refuse to know it as it is before our dissection? There is no complete perception of a monkey in a cage, for it is the completion of its world in the jungle, that we have the completeness of the being of the monkey. While we conscious entities are distinct from the world, at least aspects of us cry for that place we came from. I don’t mind taking an idea and tearing it apart, but I can’t then suppose I know the whole as the tattered parts lie before me. This dream will ever stand as what it is. In monolithically doing so, it will foster new questioning, but it will also always be something to question. Have I omitted a secret from you, and hence am about to destroy your trust in me? I have long given up on solving existence. It is not just because of the futility. I have found that whatever bridges between being and nothingness is wiser than I. I can be fearful of what it brings next, or enthused, but I certainly can’t attempt to wrestle away the levers and dials of cosmology from its grip. I do not curse what I am, but I know where it stops and the rest of the world begins. Still, I go back to what the dream means. Asking what Esse Maxim, or things too close to it, mean is a little self-referential. It could both mean everything and nothing, when it is that thing which provides all the meaning available. 

I don’t know exactly why I wrote this. Something within reasoned that if I was going to share ideas and experiences, I better at some point share this most aesthetically central one to me. I tempered my passion with my motive, but today the former got the better of me. I didn’t fight it. If I had reason to, like a more core value or even my primal will was at odds with it, I would push out the thought and write something better for you. However, there was no reason I shouldn’t, and there was one pressing reason I should. I want to be what I am. This enigma is the result of fate and will coming together to make a “who.” This is an expression of the seemingness of what it is like to be Samuel. I remind you why I write. I am not here to teach you. I don’t think I have something such that it is deserving of teaching, though I find my peers the same. I write for two reasons: to explore Esse Maxim and to exemplify it. Which do you see today and why? I am loyal to what my experience finds me as being. This dream that I can’t explain came to me often, including the day I wrote this chapter, and then again when I went to edit it. The ontology of the dream in its consistency seems to privilege itself in its seemingness over anything available for my eyes to behold. I don’t have a consequence or objective here, as much as gesturing at pure conceptual experience and wondering if the doing so would resonate with some portion of your aspects. Have you had a dream similar to this, or one that you have experienced similarly? I wonder where your awareness wandered within your mind behind folds, corners, and recesses. I wish you could join me in here, friend. More than just so you can reside as close and true as possible, ever available for my love, we could watch thoughts as clouds pass us by. What would the consensus of a nude concept be? It is within here that I do my work, and I wish you could see the matter and subject prior to my ability to describe it. Attention turned to a racing mind finds the awareness at a world of vibrant movement. For some, meditation seems to be an effort to slow the mind to a still. For myself, it is to be present and learn to reside and even rule in that world we are too often told we may not visit. Maybe this is why I told you this dream. I wanted you to join me in one of these thought scenes that felt most important, only because it seems to be so. You will be told to do this and do that, but when will you be given permission to deeply see your inner world and know it? How can that knowledge, as sentimental familiarity, then not turn to an embrace? I have come to the end of the page, and found words have abandoned me, but you have not, within this dream.