Dragons Above and Other Wonders

There are certain things in life that really can’t be explained. I’m sure you could give a few examples of your own, but here’s one of mine—and I admit that I was reticent, actually reticent, about posting this when it happened because it seemed too fantastic to be believed, and I thought people might think I was making it up. I didn’t get a photo, you see, and thought I might be accused of exaggerating. I was having trouble believing it, and I was there.

However, as you know, Wordplay strives ever to tell the truth, and if we left this out, it would be a dereliction of duty, I think. What happened was this: I’d spent some time one afternoon putting together a photo essay about dragons trending in the culture. As I recall, it was right after that, as I was leaving the coffeehouse, that I walked out into a brewing storm. I drove over to the grocery store, marveling at the big mess of clouds swirling overhead.

While I was on the way over there, I started to notice that one cloud in particular had a shape to it. It was a long, black coil, like a snake, or, actually, a dragon, with a dragon head, a long, long body stretching and twisting across half the sky, and a mouth open as if ready to spew fire. I have never seen a cloud shaped like that and am sure it has something to do with one big air mass meeting another along a fairly uniform line. I know there had to be a scientific reason for that gigantic, rolled-up carpet shape, but it was still jaw-dropping, like other sights in nature you come across once in a great while. I wish I had taken a photograph, but lightning was striking in both the far and middle distance, and for safety’s sake, I stayed in the car until it all passed.

Besides thinking people wouldn’t believe me, I admit that I was so amazed by the appearance and timing of this cloud dragon that I started to wonder if it was some kind of a trick. Now, I know I once posted a blog about wild weather events I’d been caught up in and my speculations about whether someone (AKA the government) might be experimenting with cloud-seeding, etc. Even if someone is working on that, in some obscure bureau or other, I can’t imagine that anyone’s weather experiments have advanced to the level of cloud-sculpting on that scale, even if they know how to make precipitation fall.

I suppose I was trying to put the whole thing out of my mind, but I saw a program on The Weather Channel about “The World’s Wildest Weather Events” in which various phenomena like this were documented and discussed. One of the meteorologists was discussing the very rare phenomenon of straight-edge clouds, something she herself had witnessed, and she said that she had a difficult time believing the evidence of her own eyes even though she could explain the science behind it. It was, truly, an incredible sight, but no more so than what I had seen. I have to thank the meteorologist for sharing her story, which gave me the impetus to think over what I had seen and decide that, no matter how fantastic the event, not sharing it because it seemed unbelievable was precisely the wrong tack. After all, this blog exists as a forum for exploring the presence of mythology in everyday life, and if a cloud dragon appearing over your head is not an irruption of mythology into everyday life, I don’t know what would be.

When something like this happens, I’m tempted, as possibly you are, to try to come up with an explanation. I’m not sure there is one. Of course, Jung called this type of thing synchronicity and believed that it was evidence of a sort of dialogue between the human psyche and nature. Even if this is true, how it all works is still a mystery. I consider myself a capable writer, but I’m not at the level of conjuring up castles and dragons in the air, no matter how in tune my brain waves may be with the atmospheric vibe on a given day. Maybe it’s just a matter of having your eyes open and noticing things. The more active your imagination is, the more there is to see. And then, of course, you have to remember to look up.

Library as Portal

You might think that, being in L.A., I might have been doing some sightseeing on my down time, but the truth is, I don't consider this down time. Every minute that hasn't been spent getting organized and oriented has been spent on the job search, except for a few stolen moments here and there. Does time spent in libraries count as relaxing if you're a librarian who's job searching? I'm not sure, but if you're going to be sore over not getting a sightseeing report, I'll try to make up for it by telling you about a marvelous sight I did see in the course of my rambles.

My newcomer's handbook pointed out the library I'm going to tell you about as something worth visiting in its own right, so even though I went there with a purpose, I also went to see the building. While many things in life are over-hyped, this library was a case of something you have to see to believe. It brought to mind a restaurant called The Glitz in Kentucky that I've been to a couple of times: it's nearly impossible to exaggerate the decor and the impact it has, especially on a first-time visitor.

The library's metal-clad exterior was striking enough but could have held a conventional interior in the way of many other public libraries I've seen. It didn't. As soon as you walk in, you're faced with a huge tank of tropical fish taking up an entire wall; it reminded me of an exhibit I'd seen at the Long Beach Aquarium. It formed part of the wall for the Children's Department, which one enters through a portal composed of gigantic books. Inside, there's a T-Rex, a lighthouse, an art room, a spaceship, a painted ceiling, and countless other things along with the books to intrigue and delight.

Across from the Children's Department was a very comfortable-looking reading room, with Craftsman-style furnishings and fixtures that gave it the air of a private library in a home or a well-to-do college. A matching area stocked with newspapers, sofas, and clubby chairs anchored the other end of the first floor, past the gift shop and Circulation area. I've rarely seen more inviting spaces in a library of any kind, and this certainly made the point that as welcoming as the library is for kids, it is just as interested in its adult patrons.

The Internet computers upstairs were state-of-the-art, as were the meeting rooms along one side next to the escalator, each named for a famous writer of science fiction. The literature and fiction department, also on the second floor, featured Art Deco styling and art exhibits along with the book collection. Everywhere I looked, there was something to stimulate the eye or the mind. I walked around for the first half-hour with my jaw nearly dropped to the floor in the midst of all those curving lines and soaring spaces. I was told that much of the money for the building had been raised within the community, which strongly supports education and literacy, and I have to say that speaks well for this small city, which--while fairly affluent--is not one of the higher-end zip codes in L.A.

The library was busy (and a bit noisy), but the main thing that impressed me was how well it succeeded as a community center that combined ease of use, modern technology, old-fashioned charm and comfort, creative flair, and an atmosphere almost guaranteed to stimulate the mind. I've rarely seen a building that went so above and beyond in fulfilling its function. It was a true gateway to the imaginative realm, combining some of the best features of a museum, an art gallery, an athenaeum, a children's playground, a teen hangout, and a technology lab all enfolded into a library.

You may be saying, OK, OK, when are you going to tell us the name of this paragon of the library world, and my answer is, I'm not. Perhaps the community would welcome a huge influx of visitors traipsing through, and perhaps not, but if you're ever in L.A., ask around and someone can probably steer you in the right direction. The gods on Olympus could not enjoy a finer library, and in fact, if they have one, it might look quite a bit like this one. It's the library you've always wanted but didn't know you could ask for.

Steadfast

I went out for a walk a little later than I'd planned this evening, but it was one of those times when I thought it might have been lucky that I did. I say that because the sunset was really stunning, a fact I would have missed if I had gone out earlier. I was walking along, thinking that I might need to take a shorter walk than usual since it would soon be dark, but the air was mild and it felt like a fine evening, so I kept going. Meanwhile, the fireworks were getting underway behind me.

I was well into the walk when I realized half the sky was on fire over my right shoulder. Unfortunately, I was walking in the other direction, so I kept having to look backwards, but it was a show-stopper all right. The sun had set the clouds ablaze in shades of hot pink, an effect that only increased as the sun slipped further down behind the horizon. The sunset reached so far across the sky and was so intense that it made me think of the Northern Lights, except it was the wrong color and featured no psychedelic undulations, only a breathtaking blaze of color.

I did end up cutting my walk a little short since the light was fading. I turned down a different street than I usually do; it was tree-lined and stately, and I admired not only the elegant perspective from one end but all the individual houses with their lights turned on for the evening. It was like turning away from a Technicolor explosion into a scene painted by Thomas Kinkade. There was a bracing smell of woodsmoke in the air, and whether or not it was intentional, the street exuded a peaceful, welcoming ambiance. I decided to look at it that way, because sometimes it's better to take a break from the news of the day and just live inside the brightness of a single moment.

I finally turned west and was walking along, thinking, yes, this will probably end up being my blog post, though it doesn't seem like much to say, the idea of living in the moment so that the glow of a sunset doesn't pass you by. Everybody knows that. Of course, now that I was walking in the right direction to have a good view of it, the sunset had shaded into a moodier combination of dark clouds and smoldering pink, as if I were looking at the after effects of a volcanic eruption. I'd had to crane my neck to see the best part of the show, but the somber afterglow was in plain view all the way home, with the evening star shining bright and solitary high above the fray.

I'm reminded of the game I used to play as a kid, when I would sometimes imagine mountain ranges in a mass of clouds, a habit that can alter your view of the landscape dramatically if you hold the picture in your mind long enough. A volcanic eruption isn't something we're likely to see here, so my mind was busy for the rest of the walk in imagining the fiery peak that seemed to be barely hidden behind a bank of clouds. I'll admit, though, that it was nice to get home without encountering either lava flow or rain of fiery ash. Sometimes a thing imagined is better than the reality.

Several hours later, I'm remembering the fire in the sky and how dramatic it was, but the details are already fading. What remains most indelibly is the image of that solitary star, a grace note in a tumultuous evening and a counterpoint to the changing effects of cloud and light below. Now I'm thinking of Keats, which is taking me in a different direction altogether. If I had to choose between being the sunset and being the star, I think I would choose to be the star. What it lacks in drama, it makes up for in steadiness and luminosity.

Manhattanhenge

I read an article just before Memorial Day weekend about Manhattanhenge, the twice-yearly phenomenon in which the setting sun lines up with the east-west streets of the city and turns the thoroughfares into canyons of light. It's a charming notion, to me at least, to think of those busy New Yorkers stopping in the streets to turn their faces west, transformed for a minute or two into quasi-sun worshippers amid traffic, skyscrapers, and all the trappings of urban life. This year, the spring event coincided with Memorial Day, lending real star power to the day most Americans consider to be the true start of summer.

It's kind of a slow week here, but I've had the image of Manhattanhenge in mind ever since I read the article and saw the very striking photo accompanying it. You may be thinking, jeez, what is it with you, Wordplay, if you're not talking about the moon, you're talking about the sun. Are you some kind of astronomer or something? The answer is no, I'm not, but at least the sky is still one place you can look that's free of advertising and marketing efforts, except for an occasional Goodyear blimp or low-flying plane--and you've got to expect a few things like that.

At any rate, I was taking a walk a few evenings ago that was blessed by a relative absence of people on the streets, as pleasant a June evening (weatherwise) as you could wish. I had made my way through the neighborhood and turned toward home on an east-west street when I noticed how gorgeous the sun looked going down, fiery round and orange-red over some trees and the edge of a building. It had set a bank of clouds glowing in shades of lavender and seemed to me almost as good as Manhattanhenge. I glanced at a leafy lane to my left on which an early streetlight was burning, its glow muted by the daylight that still hung in the air. It looked homely and inviting, even though I'm not particularly fond of that street.

A few steps more, and a slight breeze caught the corner of my camp shirt. I looked at the almost tropical-seeming sunset and felt, for a few seconds, a rush of summertime ease. With a little imagination, I could almost believe that the street I had just passed was the last row of houses before the dunes and that I was now walking on the beach, a sea breeze in my hair and a relaxation in my step that wasn't there before. Even my clothes felt looser. The illusion was probably helped by the fact that I'd been seeing some unfamiliar birds--attracted, no doubt, by the newly engineered watercourse in the neighborhood--that resemble sandpipers in both their movements and their calls. Seeing them run across the pavement with their quick steps, calling to one another with shrill cries, has the capacity to turn even a land-locked parking lot into a shining expanse of sand.

I breathed in and enjoyed my mini-vacation, which was over with very quickly. As I turned away from the sun and passed the stadium, some loud popping noises that started up out of nowhere resolved into fireworks being set off at the back of the lot, attracting a bit of a crowd in the process. There was nothing else going on that I could see, so perhaps someone from the city was practicing for the Fourth of July. The display was modestly impressive, but the noise broke up the last of my beach reverie, and I was unmistakably back in the neighborhood with a number of people milling around.

That little dab of beachiness will no doubt last me for quite some time. I've tried, on my last couple of walks, to recreate the experience, but due to the timing being off and one thing or another, it hasn't happened again, and I doubt if it can be repeated in the same way. However, the night it happened was also the night I saw the first fireflies of the season twinkling above the grass on my street, a sign in Kentucky that summer has unquestionably arrived, no matter how far away the beach may be. Greetings, Manhattanhenge. Greetings, fireflies. Finally, we have summer.

Road to Damascus

What a difference a single detail can make in how you perceive things. The other evening, I was coming into my building when I happened to notice that a house across the street had its porch light on. I don't know whether the owners had changed to a different, brighter bulb or whether they usually have the light turned off at that hour, but the change noticeably altered the appearance of the house. Suddenly, it flashed into my mind that the whole setting--the still bright sky above, the house and trees silhouetted against the light, and the darkening street--looked remarkably like René Magritte's painting, The Dominion of Light, which I have written about before.

In the many years I've lived here, that thought had never occurred to me previously, and I don't know that it would have except for that porch light being left on. The view across the street is a pleasant one, but there is nothing in it that has ever made me think of Magritte. If it's a cosmic joke, it's a good one, because one of the dominant characteristics of Magritte's work is its surrealism, the way it takes the ordinary and gives it a fantastic twist, blurring the boundaries between ordinary consciousness and a dream state. I take Magritte's surrealism as an invitation to look at things more imaginatively, to realize that the seemingly solid appearance of things often masks another reality.

When you have experience in looking at things from the perspective of myth, the idea of seeing beneath the surface becomes second nature, but even I was startled by the sudden change in perspective. I have always found the views of the rooftops and trees in my neighborhood to be charming and reverie-inducing, particularly at sunset, when they show to best advantage against the changing light. There is something pleasing about the solidity of the houses and the varied angles of the roofs set amid so many tall and shapely trees. The scene is comfortable and established but somehow leaves the door open to the imagination, possibly because your eye is drawn up toward the liminal space between earth and sky, away from the traffic and the street so noisily present below. You can imagine Mary Poppins sailing in over those rooftops with her umbrella or perhaps sailing over them yourself one night in a moonlit magic carpet ride.

More than anything else, this episode makes me realize how important the detail of the light is, not only in the scene across the street but also in the painting. It's the central image in the The Dominion of Light, literally and metaphorically, standing in for, as I interpret it, the spark of consciousness that's alive and observing in each of us, the point of connection between spirit and matter, the awareness that's awake even when dreaming and that sheds light in the face of ambiguity. It's not a blinding light that forecloses any possibility of nuance or complexity but rather a soft, steady light that neither overwhelms the dark or retreats from it.

The other thing that impresses me about this incident is how quickly one's view of something can shift with the addition of a single element, like a piece of a puzzle falling into place. That light coming on so suddenly seems to say, be ready, because even something as familiar as the intimate scenes you look on every day holds something in reserve. There's always something unknown even within the known, always more to know than we realize at the present. If you think you know as much as you'll ever want to about a given subject, person, place, or thing, get ready: an increase in consciousness can be life-altering. In the face of uncertainty, plant your feet, turn your light on, and wait.

Shakespeare and Alice

I once read a novel called Mythago Wood in which a forest was a sort of otherworldly zone from which mythical figures occasionally emerged into the everyday realm. The main character saw this happening and kept trying to cross the barrier that kept ordinary humans out of the mythical space, which turned out to be a tough go. The idea of the forest as a sort of zone of the unconscious is a familiar one to most of us, so the existence of a patch of woods next to our local arboretum may help explain why walking there is often such an imaginative exercise.

Then, too, I've seen a number of Shakespeare plays produced in the arboretum in the past, which probably helps explain my penchant for peopling the park with his characters. I once had the idea that it would be fun to have a free-roaming theatre company enact scenes in various parts of the park instead of on a fixed stage, so that playgoers would stroll from one scene to another. Since the idea occurred to me, there's been no looking back. I'm sure this would entail a lot of logistical headaches, but just think how much fun it would be.

You might stage the beginning of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the parking lot to represent Athens, then move the bulk of the action to the park itself, with lovers, fairies, and rustics continually stumbling onto one another under the trees. Think how magical it would be on a summer's night to eavesdrop on the fleeing lovers in one leafy corner of the park and overhear Titania quarreling with Oberon in another, as the fireflies winked and the moon rose over the trees. I've been living with this idea for so long that I sometimes stage scenes in my head when I'm walking, picturing the mortals waking up in this particular grove, Puck flitting about behind that oak over there, and the rustics enacting Pyramus and Thisby using that low wall as a prop.

And why stop with A Midsummer Night's Dream? There's an open grassy area in back where I occasionally imagine Richard III stumbling about, calling out for a horse. That quiet corner with the arbor would do admirably for Friar Lawrence's cell, while the gazebo works for Juliet's balcony and bedroom. A patch of hilltop trees sheltering a shaded path translates in my mind into the gloomy corridors of Macbeth's castle, and over there, behind the hedge, is Ophelia's pond. That bowl-shaped meadow is plenty big enough to represent Agincourt and the meeting of Henry's army with the French. The garden, with its series of outdoor rooms, is the perfect spot for staging Much Ado About Nothing, while Julius Caesar could meet his murderers on that narrow walled court down by the roses.

Probably, the nature of the park itself--an open space of trees and fields shaped by human hands and filled with paths--situated next to a small but thickly wooded forest--contributes to my tendency to see it as a stage. It's part nature and part human and has, as a place set apart for no purpose other than leisure, a bit of a liminal feel. Your mind wanders as your eye roams over broad vistas punctuated with many intimate spaces, and there are numerous ways to explore aside from staying on the main path. Paths into and out of the woods provide access to a deeper imaginative realm. It's a writer's and an artist's dream.

The park tends to be well populated these days (see my post "Is That Really Necessary?") and much noisier than it used to be. It strikes me that the increased noise works to decrease the park's liminal qualities, making it harder to imagine Athens, Rome, Verona, or the English countryside. It's more of a neighborhood circus many days than a "thin place," but if you cultivate mental self-containment, it's still possible to have stolen moments of reverie, which gives walking there a sort of fitful charm.

I often encounter rabbits in and around the park, which takes me in a different but related direction, making me think of Alice drowsing on her river bank on a summer day--a subtle reminder that the world of the imagination is never far away, if indeed, there is really any distance at all. (Alternately, it's a reminder that any time spent in a public space these days, from the park to the shopping mall to social media, carries the possibility of falling down a rabbit hole--but let's accentuate the positive.) With the busy outside world surrounding the arboretum on all sides, the park still manages at times to fill the important function of providing room for imagination and untrammeled thought. For that, I thank it.