A Field in Summer

The breeze died down, right as I reached the middle of the field. Startled from my thoughts, I became aware of the sun beating down on everything around me. I shuddered as my surroundings were hammered into distinction, each tree becoming a glinting statue, each leaf a cruel shard. Nature glared at me, and my thoughts withered; all a sudden I felt ill-defined, indistinct, as if I did not belong. I was being called into question, as the hard-edged world around me asserted itself.

Burnished blades of grass and razor-sharp leaves beset me on all sides, flashing menacingly, like spearheads of a phalanx—yet I did not know my crime, did not know the reason for my being singled out. The only thing I knew was that judgment was upon me. I was no longer a part of the world, but alienated from it, isolated not only in the field but in a much greater, more total and terrible sense.

I felt the malice of the trees and the grass, felt them preparing to strike out at me, to destroy me, under the heartless gaze of the sun. My fear gave way to rage, to contempt, not only for the field but for each and every thing, for the entire world and its implacability. I despised this conspiracy to alienate and destroy me, to strike me down where and when I least expected it.

The field held its breath, in an attempt to stifle and suffocate me. Not a single blade of grass swayed, and the few clouds of moments before had been snuffed out, callously erased, as if by a sweeping hand.

I felt crushed by the dead air, and in the stillness I realized that my lungs had stopped. The breath had been sucked out of me, and along with it, my willpower. Weak, I fell to my knees; the anger seeped out of me, into the earth. I began to lose track of my body—bone by bone, limb by limb—and before long, I had lost all connection to it. All sensation had evaporated. True, my vision remained, and my mind persisted, but the rest of me had been smothered. I had been reduced to a witness, witness to a non-event, to an indeterminable pause.

Without movement, without incident, there was nothing to mark the passage (or non-passage) of time. My mind, freed from its flesh, began to move faster and faster away from my body, like an escaped convict. What was I bearing witness to, besides my own undoing, my own powerlessness? Maybe that was precisely what I was intended to witness, my own pathetic and infinitesimal existence. If I could have laughed, I would have, because the pathetic quality of my existence was something I had often pondered, possibly to an unhealthy degree. The notion that this episode could be a cosmic act to humble me was ironic, absurd. I already had the humblest opinion of myself. How could I justify any ego in this day and age, an age of astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and machine learning? To think that any modern person required a heat stroke to induce an existential crisis was enough to make me laugh.

Unfortunately, my last ounce of humor was burned away by another surge of heat and light, as the entire field flashed at me. In unison, every blade of grass and leaf angled themselves to reflect the merciless sun directly at me, and the last thing I saw was ten thousand spears of light rushing towards me. I was struck blind.

Blindness was not dark, but bright, unbearably bright. Dizzy, I spiraled in a radiant void. There was nothing to hear, nothing to smell or taste, and my limbs were impotent. My exile from the world was complete. Thus robbed of its last tether to reality, my mind contracted into a particle of excruciating density. Time passed, then stood still, as I struggled to maintain myself, my mind floating through the void, slowly dissolving.

In some perverse way, I began to enjoy it, like a drowning man enjoying his own sputtering consciousness—but I did not drown, and soon the sea, the radiance all around me, began to diffuse and dim. Bit by bit, the void gave way to something else, as my mind’s eye squinted against the ebbing light.

An image revealed itself to me. It was the field, or rather, an impression of the field, of the trees and grass and expanse of sky. I recognized it at once as an afterimage, burned into my retinas. The colors were all wrong, inverted into bruised purples and ominous blues, yet the scene was recognizable, distorted yet familiar.

I clung to this impression, fixating upon its every detail, hoping to find some explanation there for what was happening to me. Yet there was nothing extraordinary about it; the scene in my mind’s eye could have come from a cheap, throwaway postcard. The trees huddled together haughtily in twos and threes, the grass evoked a pastoral lethargy, and the sky hung like a sun-bleached tapestry. Despite all this, something was off, something missing. I felt I was looking at an alien landscape, not extraterrestrial, but foreign nonetheless, a scene from an imaginary country, one that ultimately fails to inspire any feelings or memories.

As I focused upon the distorted image, I realized what was missing. It was me—I was absent from the image, erased from the scene. This made sense, of course (I could not see myself, thus the afterimage could not contain me), but in my delirious state this omission struck me as profound. With a deranged sense of rebellion, I imagined myself in the scene—and there I appeared, before my very eyes!

The irony of seeing my own blind self did not escape me, but the effect was no less revelatory. There I was, in the scene, kneeling in the dirt, my skin baking under the sweltering light. Upon seeing this (for seeing and imagining had become one and the same) I felt that same skin stretch over me like a membrane, circumscribing me once more and orienting me within the void. Before I could rejoice, though, my newfound skin sizzled, and my mind despaired as it found itself locked back within its cell. I made to cry out, and became aware of my mouth, a crevice immediately filled with stifling air. More sensations followed, carried by beads of sweat racing down the nape of my neck and along my spine. In this way I regained my body, as rivulets of sweat painted my torso and limbs back into awareness.

No longer did I feel like a disembodied ghost. I felt my knees in the dust, and my hands crumpled in my lap. I was overwhelmed with relief, but before I could get my bearings, I was struck by a furious blast of sound. My hearing has returned! I thought, even as I wished again for deafness, against the devastating noise.

This is serious, I thought. This is no mild stroke, if I am starting to hallucinate. I could very well die here in this field; then again, perhaps I am already dead. These phenomena could be the death throes of consciousness.

The more I rationalized, the louder and more defined the sound became, until it began to resemble a voice. As if to stifle my thoughts, the voice then began to multiply; one voice became two, two became four, until I felt crushed in a vice-grip of voices, the sound resembling the crashing of a thousand cymbals.

My will proved too weak; logic collapsed beneath the din as my thoughts were drowned out by the cascading voices.

Any transcription would be misleading, insufficient. The best I can offer is a crude translation. The voices called me by name, and asked why I persecuted them, why I sought to banish them from the world. Their questions rang out in my head without pause or variation, reverberating into every nook and cranny of my being. My re-embodiment was agonizingly complete, my bones rattling.

To say the voices merely spoke to me would not suffice; they pierced me, just like the light which had blinded me. The voices condemned the afterimage, condemned its bruised purples and ominous blues. It was not a remnant of reality, they said, but rather an illusion, an illusion which they encouraged me to banish.

Their message became clear, in a bracing crescendo. In exposing the afterimage, they sought to convince me of its illusory nature. My alienation and affliction had been necessary, in order to break down my rationality. Only the absurd could expose the illusion, an illusion which I then clung to, in desperation.

Now that its message was complete, the hard-edged world wanted me back. The voices, the trees and the grass and the sky, all urged me to return to the scene which was not a scene, but reality, the bright summer field in all its glory.

But I refused to yield to the voices. Their plan had backfired: I held the field and everything in it in contempt. After all, was it not the field that was persecuting me? They had accused me of wanting to banish them, yet was it not the trees and the grass and the sky that had banished me from their world? The voices had stolen my own thought and then tried to turn it against me.

There’s no doubt about it, I thought, I am being persecuted, singled out for some reason. I resisted invoking the divine, but the thought did occur to me, that I was being judged, by someone or something. This explanation was ludicrous, of course, and did nothing to quiet the voices or restore my sight, but it did provide me another way in which to apprehend my experience, which was beginning to feel like a trial. Rather than suffering a stroke, could I be having a so-called religious experience? 

My mind reeled with an intellectual nausea, struggling to reconcile this heretical question. Spirituality was completely contrary to my nature; to even entertain the idea of the mystical or the divine ran counter to everything I believed in. Thus I grappled with the idea that I was experiencing something beyond reason, something extraordinary. Had some dormant faith been ignited within me, like dry tinder by a flame?

Maybe my jumping to supernatural conclusions isn’t illogical after all, I thought, but in fact a very logical reaction to such an experience. Just like that, I performed a sort of mental acrobatics, reframing the spiritual within the rational, the divine as the rational delusion of a rational mind, when faced with the unexplainable.

Meanwhile, the voices had continued to drone on, yet I sensed they were waning. As their grip loosened upon my mind, I seized the chance to assert myself, rousing from my stupor into a cold lucidity. No longer content with intellectualizing, I sought to act, without yielding to my persecutors. What I wanted was to silence them, to snuff them out forever. Instead of banishing the so-called illusion, I would embrace it, and relinquish instead that which had alienated me.

The light, now warm and welcoming, reached out to me like a host of hands, to pull me out of blindness and back to reality, back to the field in summer. But I rejected them; instead of letting them lead me back, I concentrated instead upon every detail of the afterimage. I hammered the bruised purples and ominous blues into a distinction all their own, the trees and the grass and the sky flattening into one all-consuming shadow. With each stroke of my will, the voices wavered, their laments blunting and breaking upon the walls of my new reality.

My lips spread into a smile; my lungs inhaled a gasp of air as the breeze resumed its breathing, scattering what remained of the voices. Yes, I could feel the dust, the heat, and the light, but they were outside me, no longer a threat. Safe and sealed within the boundless darkness, I stood up, blind yet sensible, struck down but not deceived, to begin my stumbling return to the defeated world. Blindness, it turned out, was not bright, but dark, impenetrably dark.

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