Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (33 page)

So much for that first little experience – no, wait, what did I mean when I wrote, "I heard the beginning of a noise?" Well, there are sounds so short and broken-off that you can't tell what they were going to be, or even for sure just how loud they were, so that you ask yourself if you imagined them. It was like that – a tick without a tock, a ding without the dong, a creak that went only halfway, never reaching that final
kuh
sound. Or like a single footstep that started rather loud and ended muted down to nothing – very much like the whole little experience itself, beginning with a gust of shock and terror and almost instantly reducing to the commonplace. Well, so much for that.

The next few days were pleasant and exciting ones, as I got together materials for my new project, assembling the favorite books I knew I'd want to quote (Shakespeare and the King James Bible,
Moby Dick
and
Wuthering Heights
, Ibsen and Bertrand Russell, Stapledon and Heinlein), looking through the daybooks I've kept for literary and what I like to call metaphysical matters, and telling my mind (programming it, really) to look for similar insights whenever they happened to turn up during the course of the day – and then happily noting down those new insights in turn. There was only one little fly in the ointment: I knew I'd embarked on projects somewhat like this before – autobiographical and critical things – and failed to bring them to conclusions. But then I've had the same thing happen to me on stories. With everything, one needs a bit of luck.

My next little experience began up on the roof. (They all did, for that matter.) It was a very clear evening without a moon, and I'd been memorizing the stars in Capricorn and faint Aquarius and the little constellations that lie between those and the Northern Cross: Sagitta, Delphinus, and dim Equuleus. You learn the stars rather like you learn countries and cities on a map, getting the big names first (the brightest stars and star groups) and then patiently filling in the areas between – and always on the watch for striking forms. At such times I almost forget the general dimming effect of San Francisco's lights since what I'm working on is so far above them.

And then, as I was resting my eyes from the binoculars, shut off by the roof's walls and the boxlike structure housing the elevator's motor from the city's most dazzling glares (the big, whitely fluorescent streetlights are the worst, the ones that are supposed to keep late walkers safe), I saw a beam of bright silver light strike straight upward for about a second from the roof of a small hotel three blocks away. And after about a dozen seconds more it came again, equally brief. It really looked like a sort of laser-thing: a beam of definite length (about two stories) and solid-looking. It happened twice more, not at regular intervals, but always as far as I could judge in exactly the same place (and I'd had time to spin a fantasy about a secret enclave of extraterrestrials signaling to confederates poised just outside the stratosphere) when it occurred to me to use my binoculars on it. They solved the mystery almost at once: It wasn't a light beam at all, but a tall flagpole painted silver (no wonder it looked solid!) and at intervals washed by the roving beam of a big arc light shooting upward from the street beyond and swinging in slow circles – the sort of thing they use to signalize the opening of movie houses and new restaurants, even quite tiny ones.

What had made the incident out of the ordinary was that most flagpoles are painted dull white, not silver, and that the clearness of the night had made the arc light's wide beam almost invisible. If there'd been just a few wisps of cloud or fog in the air above, I'd have spotted it at once for what it was. It was rather strange to think of all that light streaming invisibly up from the depths of the city's reticulated canyons and gorges.

I wondered why I'd never noted that flagpole before. Probably they never flew a flag on it.

It all didn't happen to make me recall my three star-birds, and so when after working over once more this night's chosen heavenly territory, including a veering aside to scan the rich starfields of Aquila and the diamond of Altair, one of Earth's closest stellar neighbors, I was completely taken by surprise again when on entering my apartment, the half noise was repeated and the same skinny dark shape glided along the wall across the narrow flaglike bands of light and dark. Only this time the skeptical, deflating reaction came a tiny bit sooner, followed at once by the almost peevish inner remark,
Oh, yes, that again!
And then as I turned on the bedside light, I wondered, as one will, how I would have reacted if the half step had been completed and if the footsteps had gone on, getting louder as they made their swift short trip and there peered around the side of the doorway at me ... what? It occurred to me that the nastiest and most frightening thing in the world must differ widely from person to person, and I smiled. Surely in man's inward lexicon, the phobias outnumber the philias a thousand to one!

Oh, I'll admit that when I wandered into the living room and kitchen a bit later, shutting the blinds and turning on some lights, I did inspect things in a kind of perfunctory way, but noted nothing at all out of order. I told myself that all buildings make a variety of little noises at night, waterpipes especially can get downright loquacious, and then there are refrigerator motors sighing on and off and the faint little clicks and whines that come from electric clocks, all manner of babble – that half noise might be anything. At least I knew the identity of the black glider – the vaguely seen black frame always at the corner of my eye when I had on my glasses and most certainly there now.

I went on assembling the primary materials for my new project and a week later I was able to set down, word by mulled-over word, the unembroidered, unexemplified, unproven gist of what I felt about life, or at least a first version of it. I still have it as I typed it from a penciled draft with many erasures, crossings out, and interlineations:

 

There is this awareness that is I, this mind that's me, a little mortal world of space and time, which glows and aches, which purrs and darkens, haunted and quickened by the ghosts that are memory, imagination, and thought, forever changing under urgings from within and proddings from without, yet able to hold still by fits and starts (and now and then refreshed by sleep and dreams), forever seeking to extend its bounds, forever hunting for the mixture of reality and fantasy – the formula, the script, the scenario, the story to tell itself or others-which will enable it to do its work, savor its thrills, and keep on going. A baby tells itself the simplest story: that it is all that matters, it is God, commanding and constraining all the rest, all otherness. But then the script becomes more complicated. Stories take many forms: a scientific theory or a fairy tale, a world history or an anecdote, a call to action or a cry for help – all, all are stories. Sometimes they tell of our love for another, or they embody our illusioned and illusioning vision of the one we love – they are courtship. But every story must be interesting or it will not work, will not be heard, even the stories that we tell ourselves. And so it must contain illusion, fantasy. No matter how grim its facts, it must contain that saving note, be it only a surpassingly interesting bitter, dry taste. And then there are the other mortal minds I know are there, fellow awarenesses, companion consciousnesses, some close, a very few almost in touching space (but never quite), most farther off in almost unimaginable multitudes, each one like mine a little world of space and time moment by moment seeking its story, the combination of illusion and hard fact, of widest waking and of deepest dreaming, which will allow it to create, enjoy, survive. A company of loving, warring minds, a tender, rough companioning of tiny cosmoses forever telling stories to each other and themselves – that's what there is. And I know that I must stay aware of all the others, listening to their stories, trying to understand them, their sufferings, their joys, and their imaginings, respecting the thorny facts of both their inner and their outer lives, and nourishing the needful illusions at least of those who are closest to me, if I am to make progress in my quest. Finally there is the world, stranger than any mind or any story, the unknown universe, the shadowy scaffolding holding these minds together, the grid on which they are mysteriously arrayed, their container and their field, perhaps (but is there any question of it?) all-powerful yet quite unseen, it's form unsensed, known only to the companion minds by the sensations it showers upon them and pelts them with, by its cruel and delicious proddings and graspings, by its agonizing and ecstatic messages (but never a story), and by its curt summonses and sentences, including death. Yes, that is how it is, those are the fundamentals: There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe; there are the friend-enemy minds shouting and whispering their tales and always seeking the three miracles – that minds should really touch, or that the silent universe should speak, tell minds a story, or (perhaps the same thing) that there should be a story that works that is all hard facts, all reality, with no illusions and no fantasy; and lastly there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, mortal me.

 

As I reread that short statement after typing it out clean, I found it a little more philosophical than I'd intended and also perhaps a little more overly glamorized with words like "ecstatic" and "agonizing," "mysteriously" and "stranger." But on the whole I was satisfied with it. Now to analyze it more deeply and flesh it out with insights and examples from my own life and from my own reflections on the work of others!

But as the working days went on and became weeks (remember, I'd pretty much given up all other work for the duration of this project) I found it increasingly difficult to make any real progress. For one thing, I gradually became aware that in order to analyze that little statement much more deeply and describe my findings, I'd need to use one or more of the vocabularies of professional philosophy and psychology – which would mean months at least of reading and reviewing and of assimilating new advances, and I certainly didn't have the time for that. (The vocabularies of philosophies can be
very
special – Whitehead's, for instance, makes much use of the archaic verb "prehend," which for him means something very different from "comprehend" or "perceive.") Moreover, the whole idea had been to skim accumulated insights and wisdom (if any!) off my mind, not become a student again and start from the beginning.

And I found it was pretty much the same when I tried to say something about other writers, past and contemporary, beyond a few obvious remarks and memorable quotations. I'd need to read their works again and study their lives in a lot more detail than I had ever done, before I'd be able to shape statements of any significance, things I really believed about them.

And when I tried to write about my own life, I kept discovering that for the most part it was much like anyone else's. I didn't want to set down a lot of dreary dates and places, only the interesting things, but how tell about those honestly without bringing in the rest? Moreover, it began to seem to me that all the really interesting subjects, like sex and money, feelings of guilt, worries about one's courage, and concern about one's selfishness were things one wasn't supposed to write about, either because they were too personal, involving others, or because they were common to all men and women and so quite unexceptional.

This state of frustration didn't grip me all the time, of course. It came in waves and gradually accumulated. I'd generally manage to start off each day feeling excited about the project (though it began to take more and more morning time to get my head into that place, I will admit), perhaps some part of my short statement would come alive for me again, like that bit about the universe being a grid on which minds are mysteriously arrayed, but by the end of the day I would have worried all the life out of it and my mind would be as blank as the face of my manikin in the fabric shop window downstairs. I remember once or twice in the course of one of our daily encounters shaking my head ruefully at her, almost as if seeking for sympathy. She seemed to have a lot more patience and poise than I had.

I was beginning to spend more time on the roof, too, not only for the sake of the stars and astronomy, but just to get away from my desk with all its problems. In fact, my next little experience leading up to the ghostly one began shortly before sunset one day when I'd been working long, though fruitlessly. The sky, which was cloudless from my east window, began to glow with an unusual violet color and I hurried up to get a wider view.

All day long a steady west wind had been streaming out the flags on the hotels and driving away east what smog there was, so that the sky was unusually clear. But the sun had sunk behind the great fog bank that generally rests on the Pacific just outside the Golden Gate. However, he had not yet set, for to the south, where there were no tall buildings to obstruct my vision, his beams were turning a few scattered clouds over San Jose (some thirty miles away) a delicate shade of lemon yellow that seemed to be the exact compliment of the violet in the sky (just as orange sunset clouds tend to go with a deep blue sky).

And then as I watched, there suddenly appeared in the midst of that sunset, very close to the horizon in a cloudless stretch, a single yellow cloud like a tiny dash. It seemed to appear from nowhere, just like that. And then as I continued to watch, another cloud appeared close beside the first at the same altitude, beginning as a bright yellow point and then swiftly growing until it was as long as the first, very much as if a giant invisible hand had drawn another short dash.

During the course of the next few minutes, as I watched with a growing sense of wonder and a feeling of giant release from the day's frustrations, eight more such mini-clouds (or whatever) appeared at fairly regular intervals, until there were ten of them glowing in line there, fluorescent yellow stitches in the sky.