Pretty, unexpected things

A few days ago, I was listening to the radio on the way to work (one of the few parts of my life that really make me feel like a grown-up), and heard the intro to a cool NASA story.  The newscaster (probably Renee Montagne) prefaced the story by saying:

You are radiating infrared light.

 And I, appropriately, started tingling all over.   It reminded me of this:

and all that day I thought about how the world would look if we only saw in heat energy, everyone we interacted with a glowing body: borders blurred and ghosts of our breath hanging in the air.  Our signatures left behind in our footsteps, after vacating a chair, dropping your hand from a friend's shoulder.

~~~~
Next.
A friend of a friend posted this on facebook:

I am so enamored with the idea of a one armed sleight-of-hand artist.  And this trick is simple, elegant.  Beautiful.  I recently watched the documentary "Penn and Teller's Magical Mystery Tour," in which the eponymous (and very Vegas) stage pros search for magicians doing traditional legerdemain and performance in Egypt, China and India.  I was struck by how the language of charm transcends.  The flourish and palm, the distraction and bravado seem the same no matter where your silk handkerchiefs are made.   I've always been interested in the skill and perfection with which these feats are presented - it's one thing to make an action look easy after so much effort; another to make an action entirely invisible.

I have a distinct memory of an All-School Assembly magic show in elementary school.  I must have been in the third or fourth grade - old enough for my class to be sitting on chairs brought in for the occasion, instead of on mats on the floor like the little kids.  My friend Sam and I muttered back and forth almost continuously during the show, positing "Oh, I bet it's hidden there..."  "It's in his other hand."  "There's got to be a mirror in it..."  until the student in front of us turned around and said quite levelly (that's really a real word.  I had to check, but it is), "Will you please stop?  Some of us aren't interested in how it's done."

I've... always been interested in how it's done.  But for me, knowing that doesn't take away the allure of the trick.  It changes its tone, perhaps, from miracle to feat, but I can still walk away amazed.  Maybe that's why magic has always intrigued me, but I have no stomach to try performing it myself.  I'm too much of a scientist, and an educator, and a curious cat not to end a trick bowing to applause and then saying, "Okay, wanna see something really cool?  This is how it works!"

Spoiler alert: P and T do indeed show how their version of 'cups and balls' goes.  
If you are trying to maintain a state of innocent awe and wonderment, you may want to skip it.  
For the rest of us, seeing their skill is pretty cool.

Penn and Teller Explain Cups and Balls

 ~~~

Furthermore,  I'm reading a biography of Winsor McCay, oracle and originator of Little Nemo in Slumberland, a fantastic work of art serialized as full-page comics in The New York Herald in 1905.  Those I had seen before, marveled at their motion and framing, their surrealist landscapes.  I was less familiar with his strip of a similar vein, but for an adult audience: Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend.  It was as formulaic as Nemo, the premise of each 'episode' being that someone has overindulged in Welsh Rarebit (approx. 1/4 pound rich cheese, thinned with ale, melted with mustard and cayenne, and served over toast) soon before bed.  And who among us hasn't done that!  The resulting dyspepsia and delerium leads the dreamer into circumstances that become more and more sinister until they wake in the last panel lamenting their dream and promising never to commit such a gustatory sin.

What I love about these strips is that, as they progress, they perfectly capture the mounting dread that comes when a dream becomes a night terror.  Dreams follow their own crooked leaps of skewed logic, without regard for... well, anything.  The most innocent and blasé objects and characters can inexplicably provoke the most suffocating horror.  This is quite unlike Stories, which have an underlying archetypal structure that is satisfyingly unerring, even though the story itself may have many inventive and fresh layers.  (Promethea sits to my left and Morpheus to my right.  She nods, acknowledging my train of thought.  He just sits there, arms crossed.)

I asked myself the other day (and note these are the Thinks I'm allowed to be thinking while walking along the prehistoric irrigation canal while I presumably 'work'): would I rather find myself in a dream or a story?  Time was, I would've been content to journey my way through a good fable.  And I hardly am fool enough to call down a Dream with all its consequences... but I think I would be braver now than in the past if I did have to face monsters that are also loved ones, cruelties and pain that feel strange and sweet, shifts in scenery and fugue accepted without a second thought.  I say that now, but again, no one knows quite how the dream itself will go.


And if you think that all this falderal is just something to put off doing work that might lead me to make a decision about my future... well, sir, you are flat out right.