I spent a good part of last Halloween Night 2001 alone and locked in a full-moon’s lit cemetery. I could not have been higher, as I was well-provisioned with a backpack containing my laptop with wireless uplink for mobile blogging, a flashlight, and beer. Two words can aptly describe that experience: surreal and serene.
I entered while the cemetery was yet open during daylight—around 3 in the afternoon (knowing it would close at
As it grew later in the afternoon, the swarm of visitors began to thin. By 5 PM, it was clear to me that those then happening to pass near my hidden nook on the western face of a well-landscaped hill in the middle of the park were heading for the exits posthaste. How easy it was for them to play during the day. But the prospects of a spending a Halloween night tight with the dead….well, most of them sped with dread from that quickening eventuality. Oh, I’m sure, that most didn’t consciously “flee”. Rather, they had “something else to do”. Hand out candy. Go to a costume party. Go make dinner. Not me. I had only one thing to do. Wait. And watch the sun set in front of me in the west. Then let the rising full moon cast its soft pallor upon my still living flesh in this transform of lost caresses…
Nightfall. No unlost souls remained. Perfect calm. Ghosts? Not a one. So pacificly fearless was I feeling: as ready to live as I was ready to die. I felt pre-historic as if in
Until I ventured halfway down the hill and discovered a certain grotesque half-shriveled juniper tree. Half as in left-half only entirely devastated—the right-half was superbly unblemished and endowed quite luxuriantly. It had the look of evil—half alive, half dead. It had that look. And then quite unexpectedly…it besieged my head. My inner mind was overwhelmed by an endless blather of incomprehensible imagery. And I swear, I had to use all my willpower to resist a summons to climb onto the decayed boughs of that tree. Why? “to rest, to dream, to sleep”. Did I fear it? No. “then climb, then climb into death’s sweet succor” it chatted wordlessly. Like a ship within a hurricane, so did I find myself swept up in a dark energy begging, seducing, demanding my surrender. From the vantage point of this world’s space and time, I was losing and had lost my mind. And mindless before it, I stood glaring. At the Enemy, the damnation of all eternity, and I shivered from toes to head.
Yet the calmness of the cemetery was otherwise undisturbed. And reflecting upon that, I realized that the souls of all the bodies here placed had fully transcended on:
There are spirits of spirits, you know. And spirits of spirits of spirits, and on and on and on....
There are ghosts who dream they die only to become ghosts! And there are just such merely dream ghosts who themselves dream of even more nether selves.
And on...and beyond. It's so gentle at it's final unravelment. Like a skeleton key turning in a bedroom door lock just before going to bed. And such dreams from which one never awakens.
They had lived, they had learned, and were gone. They weren’t any more interested, if even anymore aware, of the darkness of this park than you or I are of some baseball-sized asteroid hurling through the far reaches of some yet-undiscovered spiral galaxy. And it was my reflection upon this transcendental serenity which allowed me to break my gaze and turn away from that surreal tree-sprite purveying my vitality.
So down the hill I pranced, dancing from one grave to the next, free as free can be. Stopping here and there to read an epitaph or two in the moonlight’s glow, take a piss, and re-emerge (by hopping the gate) into *reality*. What was the reality way back then? Remember the War on Terror? Yes, the same war that today has carried eight more Americans to and yet beyond the “darkness of the park”. Terror and its war: the essence of true living fright/flight/fight in the night.
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