A night on Earth

Hey.

I left the house late last night and began to walk. Knowing a city is knowing where you can walk alone at two a.m. It’s knowing that Castro doesn’t connect to 28th and you have to go around the hill. Knowing the city is knowing that the crooked yellow-black wraiths that line the street are beautiful greens in the sunlight, their life bound to return, their silence only temporary. For now, though, the trees conspire with the sodium lamps to cast jumbled shadows over the many cracks in the sidewalk. I trip and stumble like a fool.

Conspire—no, not quite. Trees are innocence itself. It is experience—the frigid wind, the harsh light, the dim light, the damp—that gnarls the upright sapling. I know it would rather stand straight. I know I would.

The moon is up tonight. I have an affection for the moon, because it is not the sun. It is unable to produce its own light. It is almost the same size as the sun in the sky, but only through an illusion of distance. In all things the moon is secondary. I have a deep affection for the moon.

Sleep takes me as I walk and I begin to dream.

In one dream I live in an apartment with large west-facing windows. I’m perpetually in between jobs—or maybe I’ve retired. The cupboards are stocked with tea (decaffeinated) and dark chocolate. I’ve finally learned how to cook lentils properly. Photos of the high mountains on the walls and the comforting knowledge that their icy crags are confined to my imagination. The afternoon sun glows through the leaves/tendrils/spines of the same plants that I’ve tended and repotted and repotted. The shifting patches of warmth. The voice from the next room. The notebooks that fill themselves. The familiar weight of the body that walked this far. The clarity of order. The hint of forever.

An older dream; another apartment. North-facing windows; cold; socks always. Nothing grows here. The mind, sharpened like a knife, applied to the ultimate task. The mind as salvation. The mind as weapon. The mind as the deity. The mind as the devout. Ringing in the ears like the hammers of a thousand forges. The same notebooks, the same symbols, but here bent and burdened by expectation; here they dance for me. Nietzsche: “nihilism is... not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plough; one destroys.”

In the red car next to the graveyard. Her large brown eyes an inch from mine. The electronic music I decided I was supposed to play drifts out of ancient speakers and hangs like a curtain between us. I turn it off. The sudden silence reminds me that I feel nervous… no, afraid…? But the feeling passes and she runs her fingers through my hair and leans in. She opens her mouth—I taste her breath—and, in a whisper that fills the entire world… what was it? what did we say to each other in the red car next to the graveyard?

The corner of the basement of the library. Two chairs hastily pushed together. Stellar physics, chapter 6, radiative transfer. Then the same corner, same chairs, just me. Combinatorics.

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Wouldn’t it be interesting if there’s an equation, or an algorithm, that explains life? Maybe whenever energy passes through a physical system these little eddies arise and resist the flow. The ones that use the energy to preserve their own structure tend to stick around. Eventually some of them learn to predict where the energy will show up next, and others do it a little better, and others better still. Those eddies—that’s you and me and the birds and the trees—we decode the world as we live and in doing so inscribe its truths into ourselves.

And, you know, the laws of physics are reversible in time. If you could run a tree backwards it would shine.