"The pathways of the millenniums revealed themselves as in sheaves of light..."

Night sky, Wapiti, Wyoming, September 20, ‘24. Photo by author.

Once in a while an idea comes by and introduces itself; not too often, and once in a while. I’m happy for the company, not seeing too many people these days, living in a straw-bale cabin near the end of a dirt road in upstate Wyoming.

When I stepped outside the cabin last night the sky did wonders for me, black and blue and light gray backlit by an almost full moon. 10pm or thereabouts. The sky wasn’t performing, it wasn’t gaslit by human malfeasance, it wasn’t ostentatiously displaying itself, a pyre stacked with falsehoods while floating down the North Fork of the Shoshone trying to grub around for a few electoral college votes. No, I was looking up at a wild dark sky, changing and changeless, neither good or bad, right or wrong, and listening to the murmurs Wall Creek makes when it’s making its way down to the river. 

Looking and listening while standing beneath the Wyoming sky, it wasn’t an idea that had come to visit me; instead, it was a concept: that tragedy often exists for me as comedy, the way Samuel Beckett exists for me as a writer of fiction. It wasn’t much, it wasn’t even an idea, and the source of it came from another writer. But it was something, a small something that applied to all the reading, looking, and thinking I’d been doing the last few weeks in Wyoming.

(Quote above from The Death of Virgil written by Hermann Broch).