Holes buttoned-open in the dark overcast. Amid the tempest eyeholes formed, and even under the yoke of fury I suddenly saw right through to sky.
It opened like a prayer before me, a great celestial stitchery weaving open unceremoniously and quite unconcerned with me or what I did. When it happened it happened without religion, without strings pulled, or battles fought or wondrous strands of theories thought. And I’d say the beauty arose from the way the mist dissolved as if its labors were free from the lusty workings of the world. The light doused and fractured, cracked, and the weather made its way back to storming.
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What still amazes me about the world is how little you have to do for it to happen. You sit back and it will operate under the power of internal fission, taking endless days towards night and fruition. You breathe, you feel the weight of levers, and on your silver dot of time you are inscribed onto the great pale plate of history.
.We understand. We have a true notion. We know how it goes under the sky: the world grinding on and under the onionskin of crust, the drum-work gives way to high gears of progress, a fearful beauty that does not mock us but moves on only toward tomorrow.
I am not shy or lazy. I have contributed to this world, a singular contribution but still my ripples ride fast from me in concentric circles, like planetary rings, giant algorithms of math. Sometimes I read them as an atlas as they pass away from me, spheres on which my consequences hinge. But most often I am unconscious of them. While they may be invisible they are light, and they are breathless, and they are as cold as vapor but they crackle with such immortal elegance I weep at the thought of them. I cry because though I am their maker, I know not what they do. After all, existential labor is beyond only knowing.
But what I know is grace. I know the way the waves break and the science of sunsets when they touch down on cold earth, and what lies there is prophesy. The language of rivers and the secrets of tides. I feel the way the wind whispers in familiar tones and pats my back telling me I am more than just skin and bones and for the love of God don’t give up, Son. When I am on the crest of the world I see it all unfurl and feel the design of unseen workings. It crackles at my fingers. It is then I grasp the manic logic that keeps this all on track with its wondrous machine. The Great Provocateur. The nature we are all akin to.
Under the sky-buttons, the damask of rainsoaked night, I suffer like none other. In fact, every so often the closed eye of sky lies so heavy on my mind that even good news cannot allay it. Even the storm cannot contain it. The comfort of my sadness staggers me so, and during these times of unbridled despair the depths of my spirit are laid cold and bare, and open me like embraces from cold corpses.
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A story if you will, not long ago I was walking home on the streets of my city. It was late, quiet, somehow majestic, and the world just froze. So deep did I feel the weight of this freeze, I had to yawn, I had to open my mouth in order just to breathe. And down on the earth’s skin a strata of forces pressed me from within. At the time I felt a twining in my capillaries and I was moved to stare right through the sky to the factories of stars. How my vision hazed over that night allowing for one moment of unprecedented sight: I saw the complexity of solar wind, the prisms trapped in their frozen fandango and the sky buttons opening and then I fell down fast through a wide-open crack and the wind was screaming and freezing at my back; Terra Firma rushed and expanded beneath me and the ground that supported me every day of my natural life suddenly gave way like pure seawater and I fell through the churning slaughter of sharks and fishes and unbreathable air down into the depths below. This is the way it went. This is the way of unpredictable days. But coincidence is undeniable, leading me to believe that the world operates under mysticisms that cannot be counted by mere numbers. We perceive the gears that rotate beneath the rice-paper film and feel that it may give way at any moment, that with the slightest pass of our hand it would tear and underneath would lay organs pumping and frothing, filled with quivering blood, never stopping the until the reckoning day comes to takes us forth, and we fall, so quickly from our precarious perches, and down we go. Again.
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The hole in the stormy sky above is now an aperture, opening and then winking shut. The photograph has been taken and this unreal moment has been made mundane on film, set in a drawer to be forgotten or mocked by prying children. Slowly, the layers of consciousness lay down as strata, another schemata of history laid upon the past, another layer put down upon the last. Somewhere, maybe above, a screen is positioned upon another and two images are superimposed, creating a new pattern, two Xs now forming an asterisk.
By Nico Crisafulli
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