With news of destruction raining down on Biblical lands, and tastes of heat, drought, and dry thunderbolts here, my thoughts turn, as many other people's, to intimations of Apocalypse. Yet August is the warm quiet doze of the year, the sleepy afternoons of sizzling insect noises and dry open skies and golden sunlight, and at least in my own little circle it seems that nothing will happen, at least nothing has happened yet. Every day I say that. Nothing has happened….yet.

I look up into the sky, seeing the Great Summer Triangle of Vega, Deneb, and Altair directly overhead. This geometry precedes the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star just before dawn, which gives its name to the "dog days" of summer. I look up into the clear, dark August night, and so far I have seen only the familiar Moon and planets and stars. But what if, just over the horizon, some phenomenon of terrifying brilliance impends, ready to surprise me and shatter the familiar sky?

I am always looking up at the sky, watching clouds by day, stars or clouds by night. I wait for lightning to the west, rain to the east. And on many occasions, I feel the nearness of that "non-ordinary reality" I was talking about in my set of essays last month. I will go out onto my terrace, or peer out the window, and instead of seeing the usual, familiar, friendly things in the sky, I might see a huge, strange moon, the size of a grapefruit at arm's length, hanging in the sky where nothing was before. Or I could see a supernova suddenly blaze out nearby, brighter than the full moon. Or I might see a comet stretching across half the sky, or a flaming bolide exploding across the heavens. I imagine seeing these things. I have not actually seen them, at least in "ordinary reality."

Yet I have seen, on rare occasions, things that come close. I've seen more than one larger meteor rip silently across the sky, often in bright green fire. One such apparition was so brilliant I thought for sure that this was It, that a missile was falling. But nothing happened, no explosion, not even a landing; it was just a momentary celestial firework. I searched for confirmation of a fireball at that time on the Web, but no one seemed to have noticed it but myself, since it took place at around 2:30 AM when normal people are asleep.

The inexorable seasonal cycles do not reassure me; they tempt me to expect more of the same, in a peaceful, circular round of events. The late summer crickets sing, the harvests are ripening, the goldenrod is in bloom. The catastrophe, the cataclysms, the apocalypses, interrupt that cycle, and punch a hole in it which will not quickly be patched over. Today, August 6, is the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, out of a clear, dry, sunny blue sky.

Posted at 2:53 am | link