‘Sunlight is drunk!’
That was my realization last night after chatting with a friend. We had briefly chatted about phenomena that are observed to follow a statistical pattern called a ‘random’ or ‘drunken walk’ . When something takes a ‘drunken walk’ it bounds all over the place with no apparent preferred direction, if and until—and this is critical—it hits a ‘wall’. Thereupon, though innately no direction is yet preferred, there is no direction to go—except away from that wall.
Picture somebody totally blasted in a bar and staggering around without a clue. Two steps forwards, one more step forwards, one step backwards, three more steps backwards, one more step backwards, three steps forwards—got the picture? (I’m keeping the ‘staggering’ front and backwards to keep the example simple.) You’re wondering, well, if this person does somehow manage to stumble out of the open bar door whether or not they’ll end up the twelve steps further in the street’s gutter. Everyone else in the bar is cocksure if the person gets out the door that he’ll soon take the gutter dive, but you’re not so convinced.
Eventually the drunk provides you the opportunity to observe. Out the door he goes, stumbles about, and then into the bar re-emerges to stumble some more. In and out, in and out, almost like a kid playing in a revolving door, but with episodic stumblings about of various durations in between going back and forth.
Everyone who had made a bet with you that once the drunk walked out the door that he’d soon end up in the gutter probably would end up paying up. Why? Because the drunk’s ‘drunken walk’ has no preferred direction—and twelve steps outside the bar directly to the gutter is a long, long way to go for someone inclined to change direction every step or two or three…(with more consecutive steps there is a significantly decreasing probability of a continuing occurrence).
But, if once outside, the door is locked so that the drunk can’t stumble back in, the likelihood of him ending up in the gutter are much, much greater. Why? Because his random meanderings are now constrained and the ‘wall’ will have the effect of eventually skewing his staggering gutterwards. There is, in the long-term , no other way to go.
So what does this have to do with sunlight?
I’ve mused quite often before about sunlight—it’s forever transcendent qualities:
Where is the darkness in daylight? I can't see it!
But I know that it is there, so near. It can't be seen yet is a mystery, hidden-ness... cosmically, comically touching and massaging me.
Need I beam more radiance to expose it? Magnify sunlight? Burn a flare? Declare it an Appolonian affair--worthy of skywriting on a cloudless day?
Or should I simply slow time to a crawl and watch the photons intermittently pulse with packets of darkness dispersed in between? And see the dark promise of fulfilled desire in your smile's gleam? 10/20/2001
Yet forever bathed (macro-metaphorically) in sunlight
I find the world restored.
This planet is now my lover.
I won’t treat her like a whore (no more). 3/17/2002
Sunning, I suspect, is truly occult, in the sense that its more profound effects are hidden and unseen. Whether one just innocuously lays on a rock to grab a simple ray or partakes in an elaborate ritualistic outlay tantamount to sun-worshipping, surrendering to sunlight may actually be the lightest and brightest occult activity humanly possible.
So what is it that’s hidden, what’s unseen? If one were to observe a girl topless and laying facedown on the beach sunning with just barely a thing called a thong on, one might come to the conclusion that the only things unseen are the other side of the cloth of that thong and her two breasts rubbing a towel into the sand.
Ahem— that’s a —er— natural outsider’s perspective. But what really is transpiring in her psyche as the sun flares its intensity down upon her? What transformation of the spirit visits? What healing repairs occur by this intermediation of solar incandescence? 7/8/2002
But what I never realized until after my chat last night is that sunlight, too, takes a random, drunken walk after it’s creation in the sun’s core. (For a technical explanation, read the physics here . ) And the implication of this is that the sunlight that bathes you and me is a mix of variously-aged photons—some perhaps just hours or days in journey, but many perhaps years, even thousands, even millions of years upon a sojourn to bring us light! Yes, the sun is drunk! And some of the sunlight that might warm your cheek or tan your hide may have been birthed even before the advent of mankind. Sunlight is our energetic connectivity with times immemorial: an elixired blast from the prehistoric Mesozoic, perchance.
So if you ever find yourself in the gutter someday, waking up with the sun in your face after having been tossed the previous night out of the bar, take heart that some of the photons that caress your mug have ended up in the same gutter with you after a similarly-destined drunken journey that began...
...One Million Years B.C.
<-- in the hierarchy of mass universal destruction.
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