Aliens
Maybe, like everything, we don’t find aliens because we’re only looking where we expect them.
I will just say this: there was no spacecraft. The word “space” doesn’t seem relevant, and “craft” even less. We have come to understand the universe through the concept of space—that is, time—but as with the intimacy of two discrete thoughts, there is connection that knows no space. No, nothing like a spacecraft, only a situation, you might say, both familiar and unfamiliar. With me. And them.
I say “them,” not knowing if count even applied. Why do we always think of aliens as plural? Simple—because we’re plural. Just that. There’s comfort in numbers. They say the reduction of gods to God was a civilizing move because it more accurately mimicked a head of state/subject relationship. Which is why only “one” alien feels too deistic—a little off-putting.
I didn’t feel put off. So I’ll just say “they.”
And I’m only following convention anyway in saying “aliens.” A word that can only mean distorted versions of ourselves. If we want to seriously consider aliens we have to be prepared for something beyond words, beyond space, beyond conception. And how do you conceive non-conception? You don’t. You just have to be there when it comes. I have no idea what “alien” means, or if there is even such a thing if it does mean something. People claim to have been abducted and probed—I’m aware of all that—but those stories are only variations of people and their devices and conveyances and, as I said, my experience had nothing to do with such things.
I can’t say how I got there—honestly I can’t really tell you anything about “there.” I have no memory of anything immediately before—no memory of transportation. I was so simply there I might have always been there.
You could say I was “in” something—some kind of enclosure—but not physical, not a room or a cell or a box—let’s just call it, as I said, a situation. A situation where I knew that everything about me was being observed, measured—anticipated. With my thoughts, it was just like being alone—only with somebody or something in on it. Unmistakably something else. Something intelligent—so intelligent it shared everything I felt or knew—and I didn’t know what beyond that. Whatever more there was, it started where I ended. And whatever had been—and God knows I had my cedar chest of eras—was an abstraction. A field of possibilities. Here, there was only this.
Patterns emerged from the start. I felt known, but not imprisoned. Maybe the feeling was like being in the womb. Everything was taken care of for me. I was only my emotions, my ghostly memories. That’s crude, but I don’t know how else to put it. I felt no worry, no anxiety. I was not only free to feel, I was encouraged to feel. And whenever I felt something good—something remembered as love, something sublimely funny, the bolt of something original—they liked that. The more vivid, the more they liked it.
How did I know? There was only the communication between us—not a sense that it was coming from something, but was the something. Not mediation—not language—but presence.
What was their motive? Why would they go to the trouble of being here without a reason? Was it a lark? Some kind of retro holiday? A frat-boy drug trip, surfing on human emotions? Or some unfathomable need or desire? An accident even. Whatever it was, was more like a shadow of our dimension, one thin line over.
They were there with me. Not malignantly, like a parasite, or aggressively, like an invader—but benignly, in expectation. I was being encouraged to imagine—anything, really. They delighted in imagination itself. They pushed me to feel strong emotions. Not fear, but terror. Not happiness, but bliss. If I could have imagined them a paradise, they would have loved me forever. But how do you imagine bliss? I discovered you can’t really imagine something you haven’t experienced. You can only experience the longing for it or dread of it—and boy, they ate that up too.
They wanted me to build something. I could almost hear the plea, “Build us a place!” So I started with a man in a beguiling but unfamiliar landscape of gentle hills and meadows. I only knew he was traveling, looking for something, trying to reach something. Yes, I imagined women, but I understood it was not the physical experience of sex they lusted after, but the emotional. And when features of the landscape, features of people, the texture of experiences, especially discovery, or living through desperate times and prevailing, moved from idea to image in my mind, they were deeply gratified. The more vivid my fabricated world—the closer it grew to real from imagined—the more they delighted in it. We worked together like that for a timeless time, and at last I stopped and thought: the force that makes you feel things to know them. They are the Muse! We gave each other a world.
Eventually I felt them probing for my deepest dread (being buried alive—shhh!). I tried so hard to hide it from them. But it turns out that trying not to think about something makes you think about it. So suddenly there I was, in the actual hole—no room to move, the smell of earth—unbearable! I willed my heart to explode, a burst of indescribable pain!—then drifted up, into the light and air—and their gratitude was almost too intense to bear. Yes, of course I died. But what is death but the final move in whatever story you are living? I had died and knew I was something else now. I didn’t know what—but you never know that. You just are it.
Apparently that was enough.
I can’t say it was “sudden” when I found myself back in this realm—more like falling back to sleep than waking up—and it was the familiarity that was shocking—that and the disappointment, feeling again the weight. Of the body, the mind.
I’m writing this down while it’s still fresh. Which I think it will always be, but I don’t know. I can’t say how I came back, or how long I’d been back when I realized I was back. It wasn’t like it all came flooding back—it all just piled up on me like layers of wet clothes. Smothering me like the earth—because the experiences of this life are lodged in our essence with the weight they carried, and they are us.
We think in hierarchies of intelligence or acquisition or development—but that’s an infinite line—wherever you are on it, there is something beyond, something before. No experience is greater than the fact that you had it. There is nothing greater than to be. That, and not the timeless evolution of technology—not more information at all, not more clutter. If you’re not this be, you’ll be some other be. And you’ll still just be. There is nothing more.
They were gone—but not far. Like “space, “gone” didn’t really apply to them—like they’d warped back to Zarduk or something. No, they simply slipped back into their dimension. Right here.
I know I gave them something they loved. And I knew they were grateful. As was I, infinitely.
They broke down the levee, a painstaking work of my own hands, inside me.
December 26, 2023