The unprecedented solar storm
Yesterday I had a wide-ranging three-hour-long coffee shop conversation with a good friend, the first I’ve had in far too long, the kind where you’re never sure where you’re going until you get there. These conversations can be incredibly clarifying, because the unpredictability and surprise of the affair prevents you from trotting out well-worn opinions, from saying things you already know to be true. Instead, you’re forced to react, and those instinctual views often challenge what you thought you knew.
When combined with another person making those same judgements in real time, some alchemy can happen, and you can get somewhere you were never able to approach on your own. Or sometimes, a little bit below alchemy, you get a chance to call yourself on your own bullshit. That happened for me yesterday in a couple of grand directions, which was wonderful and illuminating and all the rest, and then one not-so-important one that’s relevant to today’s post.
I started this newsletter to share poetry, because I thought that artistic exchange was what I was after, or was what mattered to me most. But while talking about what we’ve been writing recently, I realized that more or less on accident this has become an essay newsletter with a poetry problem, rather than the other way around: while I do start with a poem, I tend to wait to write a post until I have one that allows me the opportunity to call forth one of those well-worn opinions, like the poem is just a vessel for some carefully crafted thought.
When done right, poetry, like those coffee shop conversations, can surprise you, can take you somewhere you didn’t know you were ready to go. Other times, it can end up going nowhere at all, but blossoming the whole way there. That’s what happened with today’s poem: while trying to write a simple reflection, I recognized a pattern of my own behavior and then, instead of trying to explicate it, just let language take me away. I could probably spend a few hundred words explaining the implications of my realization (that I avoid great things for fear of disappointment), but instead I’ll just let the words simmer, let you take from them what you will.
I realize this little intro probably counts as an essay, too, and maybe that’s what this newsletter will continue to be. But, at least for today, I wanted to try posting a poem without trying to untangle its whole underlying ideology: this is just a poem about missing the aurora borealis this weekend. I like how it turned out, and I hope you do, too.
The unprecedented solar storm I often miss out on superlatives because I’m so afraid of failing to be awed by the best that will ever be and then having to accept that nothing will ever satisfy the terms where I demand the world to be more than it is. Tonight while the north glowed, I chose to take a walk instead of a drive into the country, letting the bright pollution overcome me, wasting the light show, preferring to be christened by the city’s fire of phosphorescence: the sprawl’s slow glow that revives with the night, that old cloying yellow of the sodium lamps which still rule this inner-ring suburb, cruel experiments on how accurately color must be rendered for the human eye to tell the brain it’s alright. Outside, it’s just ordinary weather, so I stay in- doors and watch the streetlights gently set below the horizon of my dying eyes. Maybe I’ll catch the next one and my friends and I will take a picture.