Sinus Iridum

As it appears in Bad Jokes #3.

“How much more beautiful the sunsets must be from lightless places, incensed with the subtler hues of darkness. And the red of the dawn to eyes more accustomed to invisible things. What warmth they hold for frigid lands, even on winter days; that some small thing may grow in the absence of all else—”

As I watch the day line cross the city below from my window, I consider these words. Scrawled across brittle paper much older than I, perhaps older than all of this, I cannot imagine a hand writing them. The letters are fine, rigid, regular, perfect. They are in an unknown language, are beyond meaning. They are lost like so many things. Wholly gone.
From outside, the white light of the sun has reached me. My head aches at first from the sudden burst of it, but this pain subsides as always. I rise and leave behind this scrap of unknown words, forgotten almost already in the importance of surviving another day.
There is light and dark in this porcelain house. I follow the contours of daylight out into the sun where the thin air has begun to grow warm. The dust is brilliant light, yet the lingering cold pains my feet. The sky remains dark, stars blotted out by the intensity of sun. Below, the city is bathed in day, and a few have taken already to the wide avenues. On the cliffs above, the barrier line of black night recedes along the crags and rocks out into the regolith.
From my home, the highest on the slope, near the place where the vacuum meets our world, I descend into the town, driven by hunger and thirst.
With every step the dust grows warmer, the air denser. I pass my neighbors in silence for words are precious things. They are skeletal figures, tall and very thin. I must be the same as they, pale skin stretched across shards of bone, sunken and slouched, leaning forward down the steep path toward the wells and gardens. There is barely the sound of our bare feet rustling across the surface or the whisper of an exhaled breath.
We enter the city as we do each morning in a mass. We are all there. We have all survived another long night, us outliers. The houses, here too constructed in times long past of smooth porcelain, glisten in the whiteness of day. Not all inhabited. Not as they once were.
Closer to the wells in a wide circle there are one hundred tall and straight trees. They are more sacred to us than words. In the night, one has fallen, its black roots stretched like so many fingers toward the sky, and its frail white bark littering the dust. A terrible omen, there is not even the whisper of breaths as we pass. I picture it tumbling gracefully, the way things do in this empty space. None of us dares to look upward, to brazenly glance at that painful reminder in the space above while this awful sign is so fresh.
In concentric rows inside these trees, tall black grass grows. We pick our practiced way through it with care not to disturb its cultivation, for it ripens delicately in the early light. Beyond in smaller circles, there are some sprouts of fruiting plants and mushrooms. When I was a child, I learned that the very first people in this land created the grove as a gift to us with foreknowledge of our plight. I try to think of these first people working hard to save us, their descendents, but I see only the deep black eyes of my neighbors filled with hunger.
Finally, in the center of these growing things are the wells. Parched from this long descent and still with the long day ahead, we each in turn take gulps of the brackish water pulled from the depths. We make painstaking efforts not to drip or waste. Water is rarer than words and trees.
As a people, we begin to work. The grass we harvest. The sprouting plants we tend to with the nourishment of our wastes, all we have to offer. The fallen tree is mourned by us all before it is carried away to be reduced to some kind of food. The roots leave a wide and deep trail in the dust, as when dragging a sleeping man. It is slow work, hard work.
Away to the side, because they do not know better, some children sit on a hill. They gaze up into the sky at the scarred face of that planet. Some clouds twist around its surface. They imagine, as I once did, that a life stirs there. They shiver with the thrill that down there some awe-struck young one like them is staring up from a warmer place in wonder. And after their hearts pound and their teeth chatter in brief excitement, they return to work, resigned.

PS: Big changes and expansions?

Oh boy oh boy do I have some ideas. Stay tuned.

Dreamin'

Last night I dreamed that I was in Australia, and the cuddly koalas came right up from the eucalyptus, moving so slowly. The sunlight through the trees made them look like leopards. I took some pictures with a soft center focus lens, and for once it didn't look like shit. Almost immediately after, we were all back at my house listening to Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet mixing drinks and acting out like the Kids in the Hall.

Reading List

I don't feel like posting any of my writing. It's been a while.

Here is a reading list instead of things you should check out if you have not already. It is far from exhaustive, I'm sure I will make additions as more come to mind.


The Invention of Morel [Adolfo Bioy Casares]
Invisible Cities [Italo Calvino]
The Aleph [Jorge Luis Borges]

Franny and Zooey [JD Salinger]

Exile and the Kingdom [Albert Camus]

Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Friedrich Nietzsche]

Civilization and its Discontents [Sigmund Freud]

The Iliad [Homer]

1984 [George Orwell]

Hunger [Knut Hamsun]

Blessed Assurance [AG Mojtabai]

The Ascent of Man [Jacob Bronowski]

The Ramayana [Valmiki]

Dracula [Bram Stoker]

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress [Robert Heinlein]

Œdipus Rex [Sophocles]

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym [Edgar Allan Poe]

The Island of Dr. Moreau [HG Wells]

Moon in a Dewdrop [Dogen]

The Death of Ivan Ilyich [Leo Tolstoy]

Things Fall Apart [Chinua Achebe]

Barabbas [Pär Lagerkvist]

King Lear [Billie Shakespeare]

The Declaration of Independence [Thomas Jefferson]

The Elegant Universe [Brian Greene]

These are largely representative of their genres and their authors. And they're all gateway drugs. Get addicted.

Beware: Close reading of great literature will change your relationship to the world around you. Only get into these if you are prepared for that.

The City on the Moon

Sometimes in the middle of the long night a few will rise, and from their regolith waste they stare across the chasm into the face of that scarred planet and imagine--playfully as they dare--that they see some life sprouting like wisps of grass.

And as their hearts pound and they shiver in the stagnant cold they turn away, resigned.

The Cosmonaut

In motionless disconnect, he hung waiting. For a while there was nothing, barely even darkness, barely even silence. He counted seconds to himself and could only imagine they were passing. No breath came to him, and few thoughts crossed his mind.

Have I died? and, Is it over? and after, Will it yet be long...?

The emptiness remained unmoving, and he forgot his weightless limbs. Distantly his heart beat, and his skull buzzed with electrics. The sounds made such a biologic ruckus, he nearly lost his count.

25,032... 25,033... 25,034...

The waves of noise soon slowed and then subsided, and the fluids in his veins felt cold and thick but very far. He hoarded his seconds in their exactness in his brain. Briefly he felt a terrible anxiety, oblivious for a time of anything else.

Was that it? and Could this be all? and again, Will it still be long...?

On and on this awful silence went, until he perceived without seeing or feeling or sensing that a great maw of it was around him. To his horror, he realized it was not closing--would never close--but rather it opened so infuriatingly slowly and always into more of that black infinity.

3,115,524... 3,115,634... 3,115,744...

In a raging fright, he began leaping quickly ahead, seeking some end. He rejected arbitrary weeks from his precious memory. Months passed in muddy clumps of seconds. He felt nothing but the overbearing mass of them now piled everywhere.

It hasn't happened yet. and, I am still waiting. and then, Will it finish soon?

Long after he had calmed and his count retreated to a slow and ordinal march, his mind began to overflow with the names of every number. His skull felt too full to go on. He shaped every second in his trove into an empty piece of nothing, and they floated, miniscule and meaningless, from his grasp into the enduring night--gone. He could not tell now if his eyes were shut or open. It seemed he had been floating there for years as the black space spread around him. For a moment he thought of dizzying color, but it faded quietly away. He imagined himself stretching indeterminately in all directions, flat and enormous as the moment he had metered with his ignorance.

Was I once a living man? and How long is it now? Then finally, I will be dying here forever.

Sisyphus

I lay in the pinstripe street light darkness into the early morning, and my bed did not seem big enough for me as I turned in uncomfortable thought. I strained, but the state of things appeared to me so pitiful that I could not make a sound. All day I had spent working and the day before and before--and forever before, I imagined in horror. My heart pounded as I pondered my terrible mirror future and a lifetime struggle between these two infinities in vain.

I graffitied my thoughts with hope; the red and white word whispered in my mind,

“Escape...!”