Off the Frame


The night train was not really a train and there really was no night. Night was something from the Book of Earth, receding into mythology now on the space colony of Ash Fork. Imagine that it is a million light years away and you’ll never make it, not in a million years, but imagine it occupies the same point as the familiar overlay of the everyday, and there it is.

At first the collapse of time was viewed from the other side, where time was distance; how long would it take to drive to the moon? It was looked at this way by people who were stalled in L.A. traffic, talking in real time to Bangkok on an iPhone. Distance was collapsing like a drunk mime, and Space travel was being reevaluated. For example, this question was posed in a song by the Times Nothing Band, which had turned evolution into a religion.

“What if there is a civilized universe out there in which the advanced intelligence instantly discards the idea of physically traveling around vast stretches of nothingness?” This became the theme of the Church of Evolution. Space travel, Luther said, is not going to be done in organic bodies. William Burroughs described this idea of evolving into space in organic bodies on space ships as the same thing as fish evolving onto land in aquariums.

When the shift came, the view was from the other side, where distance had collapsed. The people who didn’t shift — as is always the case when the shift comes — were functionally insane. Those who made the shift had to move their house off one foundation and onto a different foundation. The move was from truth to justice, from which it had become separated under the weight of selective evidence.

It was easy to see the intent of evolution in retrospect, but it always is. Narrative had begun to break down into scenes, and then the scenes began to shift in time and weave together. Children began to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder at the same time they were given computers with multiple processors, and organic computers were in the research and development phase. With organic computers, there is a marriage between evolution that takes a million years, and a conscious evolution driven by design.

Attention began to disperse, so people would be holding more than one conversation on an I.M., watching a movie in the corner of the screen, and explaining how the car got a crease in the fender. Identity was shifting from the physical plane to the cyber plane, and it was ruled by very few laws. The first law was that the system with the widest parameters is the controlling system. No linear pattern could be the controlling system because it can be contained in a symbol, and the symbol can be contained in a mandala, and a mandala can be contained in emptiness.

The controlling system, and this even logic had to admit, was emptiness, and her lover was sentience. The adventure into Space was a walk across a high wire with a balance beam, with emptiness below and all sentience focused into perfect balance. On the other side of the canyon time collapsed, and there was the entry to the Western Lands, the lands of Spirit, where traveling to a different world is more like tuning a radio than traveling from point to point in an organic body.

“What are you thinking?” Willow asked. “You glazed over.”

He brought his senses back to the sounds of the highway. He was in the back of a bus with WIllow Tang, the best rock and roll drummer he'd ever heard. The bus had been converted into a living space. In front, Hawk Caleya, half Mexican and half an unknown mix which included Seminole and Irish, was driving the bus while wearing headphones. This was not considered a safe practice but Hawk insisted he had the volume so far down it didn't interfere with his hearing. The rest of the band, and the hitchhiker, were asleep. He shook off the dream about Ash Fork and accepted the coffee Willow was offering.

Willow’s face was flattened, as if to stop wasting space, and her eyes were as sure as cameras of what they were seeing. “You have a great face,” he said.

“Really? What’s great about it?”

“The Chinese thing, the flatness of the features is like a mirror you can fall through, and be in love like somebody falling into quicksand, and no matter how they thrash around they can’t save themselves, and the last thing you always see is the safari helmet floating on top, and the caption, ‘His lingering kiss gave her time to trace the call and she has his number.’”

“Oh, that. That’s nothing. What if I turn on the lights?” He felt like something knocked him backward. It was a force that came through her eyes.

“How do you do that?”

“I feel it.” She smiled and tucked her secrets behind a mind which hadn’t a need to decide on an answer. She didn't agree or disagree with opinions, she just photographed them for reference. “So where do you go when you glaze over like that and your eyes roll up like you’re dead?”

“I was on a train of some kind,” he said. “All I remember about it is that it was going to Ash Fork.”

“That’s where we turn off the Interstate. So, what were you doing? Were any of the rest of us on the train with you?”

“It wasn’t really a train. I don’t know how I knew this, but it was like I knew everything I thought about. You know, like in zen archery where the release and hitting the center of the target is one thing? It was like that, and I knew it was actually a work of art, but instead of standing off looking at art, I was inside of it.”

“Hmm. Like being in a movie maybe?”

“Dreams are always like being in a movie, but sometimes you aren’t separated off from it, you’re inside it and you’re awake.”

“Lucid dreaming.”

“Sure, it’s lucid. The thing was, this was actually a space ship.”

“Dreams are like that. When you think about them they seem to make sense but you start to talk about them and you hear all the logical problems, like something running on a track being a space ship.”

“It wasn’t running on a regular railroad track, it was running along on top of a road made out of flowers.”

“A train running on top of flowers,” she repeated. “That’s a strong image of masculine energy on top and feminine energy on the bottom.” She looked sly. "Imagine that."

"I did imagine it, I guess. In the dream I knew there wasn't any distance to cover, so the train was part of an elaborate system of artwork, and that's when I realized the art had come off its frames."

Posted: Sat - February 24, 2007 at 12:58 PM