From My Notion template

What It’s About

A weird collection of observations that bounce back and forth between fact and fiction

How I Discovered It

I like the band the author is in

Thoughts

It was definitely mixed and somewhat repetitive. There were several interesting insights to be found though.

What I Liked About It

I like Weird Fiction – and observation that bounce back and forth between fancy and reality

What I Didn’t Like About It

It was a tad repetitive

Highlights

Much of this book was inspired by my own hunting and dreaming while foraging in the wilderness of dusty books, vague notions and the endless trails of our great Internet.

What a quiet world that would be! Everything governed by the softest movements of the littlest things. In the stillness of a grove of trees — what great orchestral melodies might finally be revealed?

Mary Sweeney, the Wisconsin Window Smasher, may have lived in just such a world of secret revelation. In the 1890’s Mary was arrested more than a hundred times for attempting to smash plate-glass windows in various small towns across the state. She was a wife and mother, a former school marm, who periodically ran away from her family in St. Paul, boarded a train for Wisconsin and then would be caught again, “indulging in her wild sport” according to The Badger State Banner. Mary’s method of smashing windows was a strange one. She would repeatedly throw her satchel at a window until it shattered and she was often caught before completing her task. It’s as if she had no plans to smash a window, but had simply gotten off a train and then, upon being confronted with a pane of glass, became so upset she could not help but throw her bag again and again at the terrible sight.

Our tendency is, of course, to believe that Mary was simply delusional. What, though, if the opposite is true? Consider for a moment that we may all be ‘sane’ simply because we are blind. Are there things inside a pane of glass that we are blessed not to see? Would we all stop in mid-sentence and begin throwing things at the very air if our blinders were suddenly removed? Such is the experience of larvae born deep within a tree trunk. Some larvae actually tunnel for years within the dark wood, gradually changing shape as they travel through the tree, heading outward toward light they have never seen. How amazed such creatures must be when, at last transformed into beetle or moth, they emerge into the air and spread wings they never knew they’d grown. Can you imagine your own world suddenly made shining, weightless and stretching infinitely in all directions?

It’s a mercy that most of us remain as blind to such things as the larvae lost within their dark world. Those cursed to peer out beyond our tree trunk before they’ve grown wings may resort to tin foil hats and the smashing of windows in an effort to forget what they have seen.

Those who hear and see too much may end up like the shining trout thrown back to the river after being hooked and pulled into the air. This sad fish can never return happily to the waves. Such fish tell fabulous tales of another world directly above the water. They speak of a hell-realm of suffocating brightness where their once-weightless bodies suddenly sunk and flopped upon the dirt as enormous demons pricked and pulled at them merely for sport. Alas, these hook-scarred Cassandras are doomed ever to speak the truth but never to be believed. We swim away from them into the comforting darkness of our muddy pond and do our best never to catch their eye again.

The wolf got along fine with dogs and with a house full of cats. Still, however tame and friendly this ‘husky’ was, other dogs knew at once she was not a dog. They might eventually accept her, but their first glance at her was often tinged with the same shocked alarm you and I might feel upon spotting a Neanderthal strolling through the supermarket.

It is scary because it is transcendent and other-worldly — it offers entrance into a larger, more mysterious realm waiting just outside the window. The white wolves are emissaries from a lost empire beyond and surrounding ours, completely forgotten to our waking selves but still accessible if we dare to take the leap into the branches outstretched within our dreams. Poor little Serge was too frightened to leap and his cowardice haunted him for the rest of his sad life.

Consider this: what if the big, bad, black wolf has also been trying to draw you out into the wider world all these years he has chased you? Has he been huffing and puffing all these centuries not to blow your house down, but simply to get you to come outside and look at the stars? Does he long to gobble you up simply to give you a chance to finally see through his eyes the dark forest full of shining light?

And so, dear reader, as you live out your allotted time inside your lonely cage of flesh as I do in mine — can we believe beyond the three minutes of our favorite song that we run together across this arid plain?

Does it bother the turtle that it will never see its own shell? Or does the turtle simply take it on faith that it is born into a world where invisible help is always at the ready?

John Audubon, in fact, killed thousands of birds in order to find perfectly-shaped corpses to pose for his famous water-colors. Once you realize this truth his work is ruined. All you can see in those finely-detailed illustrations are the limp, oddly-bent necks, the empty eyes and the frozen wings all pulled into a terrible facsimile of life with wires and sticks.

Audubon once buried a dead rat in a flower pot with only its tail protruding from the dirt and presented it to a friend as a ‘rare flower’. That’s the kind of joke you can only laugh at, I suppose, after you’ve killed at least a hundred birds. I don’t feel like laughing about any of this.

Termites build nests that are narrow, mound-like structures. These nests can, nevertheless, rise as high as twenty feet tall. Considering the size of these little creatures such buildings are the human equivalent of a 180-storey skyscraper built by hand, brick by brick—yet termites only live about two years.

Termites can communicate with each other by banging their heads on the floor of their tunnels, but they also have a far more deeply-felt level of communication that is somehow transmitted through their queen. Scientists actually call it a ‘group soul’. Deep within this teeming maze of non-stop activity, the queen lies motionless in her dark bower yet somehow without moving a muscle she orchestrates all movement around her.

Even Thoreau, who wisely said that the mark of a man was his ability to leave things alone, still felt the need to write a great deal about all the things he was thinking about leaving alone. Where are the Thoreaus that keep silent? Where are the ones who simply let the light of the moon fall upon them without feeling the need to comment on its beauty? These sages may be all around us, but they leave no trace save for a few stray footprints in the dirt.

suspect then that the reason I find the shark’s glance so frightening is not that it triggers some primordial fear of attack, but rather that the shark’s face reminds me of something I’d rather forget — that this world is by nature a world of hunters and prey, where all are born to be eaten by something else. Our world may be a bloodthirsty place, but it is dispassionately so and thus neither good nor evil. That’s what’s so unsettling — realizing that good and evil are concepts that don’t mean a thing when it comes to a turtle eating a snail or a snail eating a flower or even a shark eating a person.

There’s a good book written on the subject called, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. You might say it’s one of the most irrational books ever written given that it is written specifically as a self-help book for the newly dead.

The gold that these mystics dreamed of isolating from baser materials like lead and copper and quartz was not physical gold, but a golden state of purity from which they believed all things emanated. This invisible, perfect, prima materia, was called the Philosopher’s Stone.

Alas, the salamander is deaf and none of these little creatures will ever hear a Blind Willie Johnson song save by pressing their skin against the speaker and letting the vibrations fill their small bodies. I have never caught a salamander doing such a thing and so I have to believe that either they only listen to music very late at night in houses that are burning down or that they have found other ways to transcend pain besides listening to the Blues.

Rabbits only dare venture out at dusk and dawn because at those half-lit times they are best camouflaged and can still hopefully see a predator approaching. Even so they are constantly watching in all directions as they eat their grass and clover. They’re right to do so. Most rabbits die in the jaws of something.

I was so excited to spot these little creatures that I got out of my car and tried to sneak towards them. Of course they all immediately dove underground. It’s a strange but sad fact: one of the best ways to watch wildlife is by staying inside your car.

Is this why dogs run away during lightning storms? Is this why moths gather around a light bulb? Is this where the astronauts were taking me when they carried me from my bed as a child?

We have, in fact, a long history of saying otherwise about the crow. Our opinion of crows is so low that we call a group of crows a ‘murder’ and a group of ravens an ‘unkindness’. Groups of owls, on the other hand (a bird far more deserving of suspicion) we insist on describing politely as a ‘parliament’.

Think back again to the plague doctor in his crow mask and remember: it was medieval Europe’s penchant for killing cats (they suspected the whole species of devilry) that left an unchecked rat population to spread plague-infested fleas wherever they went.

Crocodiles have survived as a species for at least one hundred million years. They are actually one of the few creatures alive now that once shared the earth with dinosaurs. What legends do they tell among themselves of those ancient giants and of the mysterious cataclysm that turned an empire of titans into a pile of bones?

Others assumed that those with blonde hair were living ghosts, unnatural phantoms not meant to walk the earth.

It is sometimes the case, for example, that a person found dazed and disheveled at the side of the highway remembers only an owl swooping in front their car right before they crashed the car into a tree. Only under hypnosis does the confused victim suddenly recall a flying saucer that had disabled the car engine with a beam of light. They remember now being levitated skyward and examined by aliens with strange machinery before being returned to their car with some four hours of missing time and a false memory of a swooping bird stuck in their head.

The Jains, however, don’t make themselves miserable over the unavoidable suffering their survival must cause — from the things we kill and eat to the bacteria destroyed by our guts and the viruses fought by our blood. Instead Jains focus on feeling empathy with the hunger that drives all life — the lust that has driven the world ever since the first one-celled creature divided itself in two and suddenly found itself facing a delicious looking stranger.