Someone ought to write a book on Alaskan darkness. Because, as I stepped naked from the porch that crisp, late-autumn night, I approached a hard line. On the one side was a motion-sensor light’s last-ditch efforts. On the other, total darkness. I tip-toed to the furthest reaches, arcing my urine into the void.

The person renting the cabin and I had just had sex. A lot of houses in remote Alaska didn’t have running water. And hers was no different. So, I was doing what humans had done until about 150 years ago, which some of you reading will realize is basically no time at all, I was going outside to pee.

What I was thinking is a mystery. But, if you’ve found yourself post-coitus with a friend you’d known for years and so written off the possibility of having sex with, that the two of you fell into a vicious habit of flirting that led to your having sex, you’ll have a pretty good idea.

Somewhere in this bliss-baked disbelief, a sudden, inexplicable change took hold. I stared into the featureless black in front of me, feeling fear so pure I can’t compare it to anything. And, for fuck’s sake, I’ve been charged by bears.

As every atom in my body trembled and buzzed, and hair I didn’t know existed stood on end, somewhere, just beyond the safety of the light, something large snorted.

***

I look up a lot of stuff. And yes, I keep lists.

Someone says a word I don’t know? Put it on a list. Fifth person mentions Krampus at Christmastime? Chuck that shit on a list! Then, once I get a little space, sometime down the road, I look it up.

I’ve been told this is a common affliction for men my age.

All of my research often leads to the same confusing result: that, for all of the trust we put into capital-k Knowledge, the truth—if there even is such a thing—is we don’t fucking know anything.

I’d love, just once, to see a TED Talk where scientists in lab coats grab the mic and go, “What we don’t know is…” then launch into some bullshit findings.

There’s this thing that happens when something is mentioned a bunch of times. Our brain goes, “I MUST know what that is.” But the truth is, we don’t. Not really.

That’s one of my lists.

The other day I was looking up hypnosis, Google showed me a bunch of blogs and pdfs and Wikipedia and blah, blah, blah. As I was sifting through, skimming like a good little researcher, I kept shaking my head.

Every article claimed hypnosis was invented at some wildly different time than the next. One suggested the 19th Century. Another, the 18th. Meanwhile, like an unemployed cousin who just took a giant bong rip, AI said, nah, that shit started back in Egypt, dog.

All I wanted was to read some crazy mystical bullshit and now I gotta deal with this?

After hours of scrolling, I finally landed on something that sounded somewhat believable: “Animal Magnetism.”

***

My friend Chris, famously, at a suggestion that he’d unconsciously committed some transgression, unironically answered, “I don’t think my subconscious would do anything without me knowing about it.”   

In 2017, Cormac McCarthy published his first piece of nonfiction. An essay called, “The Kekulé Problem.” I don’t smoke weed, but if you haven’t read it, and imbibe, I suggest a mighty dose whilst asking Alexa to play “Dengue Dengue Dengue” before cracking into it.

The essay opens on a story (Kekulé’s) with a myriad of similar examples throughout history. Where the scientist/musician/artist, hung up on an idea, settles into a nap. And once their brain is given over to the unconscious, they suddenly dream a solution.

What the fuck is the unconscious? McCarthy asks through the essay. How, and from where, does it operate? Is it inside of us? Or out? Is mine the same as yours? How does it store information? Is the unconscious as old as human life? All life? Or much, much older?

And more interesting—and perhaps, more terrifying—for what reason is it guiding and teaching us?

***

Animal Magnetism was a theory posited in the 18th Century by Franz Mesmer. Its central tenant being that an invisible universal fluid influences every living thing. And that “healers,” like Franz, sometimes called magnetizers or mesmerists, while sitting knee-to-knee with a patient, could manipulate the fluid within a person to heal them of their ailments.

Who can say where the inspiration for this stuff comes from?

As time went by, more and more stories of people being cured by Mesmer started getting around. And soon, the physician found himself with more hopeful patients than he could treat individually. So, like any good capitalist or charlatan, he claimed healing in a group setting just as effective as one-on-one.

And his UberX Share for hypnosis was going great, too. That is, until 1784, when, without Mesmer’s requesting it, King Louis XVI appointed four members (one of which being Benjamin Franklin) of the Faculty of Medicine as commissioners to investigate Animal Magnetism and Mesmerism. Not only were they interested in whether the treatments worked, they were legitimately curious whether he’d discovered a new physical fluid.

But, while blindfolding subjects, the commissioners discovered Mesmerism seemed only to work when the subject was aware of it, thus debunking the process and driving Mesmer into exile after their investigations.  

Their findings are considered the first observation of the placebo effect. And whatever benefit the treatment produced was written off as simple byproducts of the human "imagination."

***

Another topic you’d think scientists would have squared an answer on is energy. But, have they?

Fuck no!

You must be thinking, That can’t be true. Energy? It seems so simple. Like a building block all theories take as a given before getting started.

And I would respond: look it up.

Okay, okay. Thermal, electromagnetic, light, kinetic, speed, potential. Are those energy? I think I remember that from school!

The sun! That’s energy, right?!?

Well, sort of.

Those are forms energy can manifest in.

But, seeing as the only thing physicists agree on is, it can’t be created or destroyed, even that big flame we call the sun isn’t creating energy. When it flings a ball of heat through infertile space, the ball isn’t energy. It’s still just a form. It could be energy. But it isn’t.

But, have that same ball of energy hit a leaf. Or have one bright, shiny apple get eaten by a black bear. And now we’re talking.

What is happening fundamentally when that ball of light hits the leaf or the bear eats the apple, is, a thing—potential—is meeting resistance. And, in order for change to happen, resistance is necessary. There’s a reason weightlifting is called resistance training. And, why, when understanding certain information feels easy, you probably aren’t learning.

Growth is fucking hard.

Canadian biophysicist Nirosha J. Murugan has what could be the best definition of energy to date.  She says, energy is the potential for change. And it makes sense, because every time I ever felt suicidally depressed, it was accompanied by a terrible acceptance that things would never change.

What’s different about a person when they die? They still have all the pieces they had moments ago, after all. Arms, legs, kidneys, a brain. So, what’s missing when we stare at our loved one before their casket gets closed, why does something feel “off,” that’s hard to put a finger on?

It’s that there’s no longer a mechanism for resistance within the bag of parts that make up their body. They no longer hold a potential for change.

***

A fellow writer recently said they would get to the bottom of a “trick” I do. Meaning, I believe, there is a slight of hand to my writing. That, somewhere embedded in its mosaic parts, a larger thread is getting passed through your mind. But, like with a magician, whatever you are being asked to focus on is also purposely kept from your perception. So that, at its conclusion, an amount of excitement or giddiness is felt that something invisible was there all along.

I hope they teach me what it is.

***

I’m unfortunately plagued by ideas. Day in, day out. Does anyone else have this problem?

Most shoot through like they’re coated in Trojan lubricant. The only visible register being perhaps a string of drool falling from my slackened face. Others, however, hit different. Are from a separate cloth. They come into my brain and encounter what you might call, resistance.

There’s nothing strange about them. Not on the surface, anyway. And I don’t know why they come to me. Or, from where. But I know why they don’t leave me alone.

Because I don’t understand.

It would seem a drunk toddler grabbing flash cards at random was responsible for the sticky ideas landing on my plate in a given week. Rowing, the Gross National Product, and skinny dipping. Okay, what the fuck am I supposed to do with these?

But, over time, I’ve grown to trust the toddler’s intuition. Because, though I may not understand when I begin, something is connecting the disparate strands. Like, no matter how numerous, or incongruent, they’re all being plucked from the same source.

If you’re kinky, the source could get called “a universal fluid.”

***

Recently, in conversation with the poet, Mathias Svalina, at a point—inspired by god knows what—I told him ideas originate in an enormous pool. Because Mathias is smart, he encouraged me with a nod, which is a great way to keep a lunatic talking.

I’m not sure how we, as vessels, are made conduits to something from the pool. Or how the pool broadcasts them.

All I know, for certain, is that it’s hard.

The best I’ve come up with is this: our brains work like antennas. Which is funny, considering I have no fucking clue how antennas work. I should really look that up.

All the broadcasts get muffled, though. Or staticky. Like our brains are programmed wrong, tuned into a station just to the right or left, or as if we’re hearing them through a dense curtain.

I pointed at Mathias, telling him, the thing getting in the way, the barrier that’s keeping us from unfettered creativity—the curtain, so to speak—is Logic.

He only nodded.

***

McCarthy seemed especially interested in the difference between our unconscious and language. Why, he mused, when the artist/inventor/etc., either in a dream or trance, is given the solution to a problem, it comes as imagery or a metaphor? Why, when the unconscious obviously understands language, does it not just say, “Kekulé, you fucking idiot, the benzene molecule is in the shape of a ring,” instead of having K. Dot dream an ouroboros?

Logos. The word. It’s a useful tool, McCarthy admits. And, true, nowadays we envision “thinking” as the language that goes on in our head. But humans were thinking long before we as a species developed language.

Logic might be a wolf on our brain’s doormat. Language makes us feel smart. But is it really making us smarter?

How does the unconscious know when we don’t get it? So much so, it bonks us over the head with a vision until we do. But two people can leave a conversation feeling understood, when in reality, neither party has a clue what the other said?

I picture you nodding.

McCarthy: “…the fact that the unconscious prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether—even where they would appear to be quite useful—suggests rather strongly that it doesn’t much like language and even that it doesn’t trust it.”

***

A book is only paper. Most day-to-day conversations wield so little power they might as well be pressed wood pulp and ink.

But there could be. Power, that is.

Know what form in our Universe holds the greatest potential? It’s paper with images of dead president’s faces. Know why? Nobody does. And, you don’t need to. What’s important to note is, something changed. The mind said, this thing, is also this other thing. There’s potential there.

If I want to grow a muscle, I need to introduce resistance, right? So, if your goal is to grow creativity in the mind of another, which, basically is the process we call Art, you shouldn’t do what comes easy. Because an easy book doesn’t get imbued with transference. And nobody will give a shit about it.

Picture an author with nervous diarrhea. That’s the one you want. So heavy with doubt as to whether what they’re writing is possible, they go into a trance when they sit down. Getting the good stuff, the pure ideas, out of the pool and through the curtain and onto a page, is like however the fuck we get milk from an almond.

But they do it.

The written word, music, visual arts. These, if done well, are the unconscious sneaking past the curtain. Using language to self-implode Logic. Some real Matrix shit.

A book like that? It’s not pressed wood pulp and ink.

It’s the goddamn Big Bang, baby.

***

I slid across the porch, locking the door and the darkness behind me.

The floor adhered slightly to my feet as I crossed the hall into her bedroom. “Oh, la la,” she eyed me as I entered. Then, noticing my look, that of a schizophrenic puzzling over voices, asked, “What happened?”

I opened my mouth. But…nothing.

I couldn’t logic my way through. Without sound, without sight—without any sensory input—a creature communicated with me.

“I don’t know.”

She rested her head on my chest as I slid into bed.

A deep thump knocked the porch where I’d stood, sending reverberations through the cabin’s skeleton. “Moose,” she whispered. It took two more steps and vanished into the night. The only punctuation was my beating heart, and she moved her hand to cover it.

I felt my mortality like a fire out of control. The fragile weave of my muscles, this body that will die. The fear, the weakness of my blood.

And, yet. There was infiniteness. In this exchange and this person beside me. Like it all could become something else.