Waves in the Darkness

Stars glisten around us, silent and unmoving across the sky, as we listen to the night. We’d heard there was a supernova in Beta Carineas, out there off the shoulder of the constellation Andromeda. If you knew where to look you could see it flicker from night to night as the star went through its final convulsions just before it collapsed. Out here with all the reflections and the hint of a wind, the flicker couldn't be seen, but we could sense something was happening.

The first ripples move past in little rocking movements, the murmurs of space in the background. Not a sound really, but a motion deep and slow that we feel up our spines and inside us. Such an odd feeling, like some truth that we had once known but forgotten over time, and we stare outward feeling the endless years and planets and atoms, all the pinpoints of stars living and dying spread across the sky like the blood lineage of the galaxy. The waves are coming and the break will be here when the front hits – who knew how far out it was, with its deep smooth hollows flowing through the night? It could be across the solar system for all we know, but if we’ve judged it right, we’ll feel when it’s close. So we float out in this huge expanse, and wait.

There are imaginary sounds like distant waves on a beach, or the far off emptiness of a deep gorge cut into the earth’s bedrock. Sound without echo, the incessant hands of a primordial river working powerfully and distant somewhere at its bottom, lost in the darkness. The memories of its waters tug and push us. Motionless in the void, our thoughts hang as if disconnected from their substance. It’s not really like the ocean breathing with each swell, more like the expectation of a tremendous flood, like the prophesy of a vast river pouring from the darkness in all directions and sweeping us away.

Threads of disbelief twine through us. Our presence in the darkness seems strange, silent, and the quiet pulse of the stars begins to unnerve us. I remind myself it's always like this, the hugeness, the swells which you can’t see but only sense, a pulse close and then falling away as the black presses against you and receeds, its weight soft and formless, without edges, without warmth. Half formed questions melt into the darkness – how did anyone ever figure out how to do this, much less make it possible? To exist out here and feel these things and think these thoughts?

Smooth black swells lift us and flow past, and we tense for what will come, feeling the power of a tidal wave sucking the water out from the beach – a lull as the landscape is exposed and the entire horizon looms forward toward where we float. We can only wait as the endless blackness slowly drains away life and reality. I look at the dull glow of my watch and half-imagining, think I see the passing numbers slow down and speed up to the gravitational pulses. I see the supernova erupting far away, hundreds of years ago and only now seen and felt, its ripples moving outward from the first collapsing of the outer shell of the star’s surface, as the last of its hydrogen spent itself and the nuclear fire went out. And then in a flash it’s gone, a cataclysm mushrooming silently into space.

I remember arguments about the instantaneousness of gravity and smile slightly, we wouldn’t be here if it was instantaneous, would we? There would be no waves. All those theoreticians, arguing about black holes and the fabric of spacetime, they should just come out here and take a ride. String theory and Grand Unified Theories of everything – what a joke. They had nothing to do with reality. They got nothing on my board or on Jerr’s surf shoe. The cosmos is fluid, and the infinite swell and ebb of time are the words it speaks. Anybody who doubts that only needs to come out here once. Then they’d know.

“Here it comes!” yells Jerr. His voice sounds harsh, tense and thin, like it’s come through on the crackle of a radio from far away without any air to carry its vibrations. And then I can feel it – space building and rising around us. So calm and smooth, velvet in the blackness, sky surrounding us bejeweled with red giants and hanging nebulae, clouds from the atoms of stars that have lived and died, iron and carbon and oxygen and all things heavier than hydrogen atoms, forged in the heart of nuclear flame and spread out like dust to form a planet and living beings. Behind us, hanging somewhere out in space, the sun. So far away and hidden, it might be just another star in the cold blackness, lost in the Milky Way which shines around us like a shower of bright points across the sky.

But what of all that? What kind of perspective could you hope to have by placing yourself into the heartbeat of time? What kind of understanding do you get from watching the uplift of a mountain, feeling the soul of a river, the infinity of an ocean, the darkness of space?

Death is rigid, Life is fluid, and the truth of this is clear as I stroke into the wave that now fills the darkness around me. I’m up and the board sings underneath, cutting and coasting, carving down the black rushing wall of gravity. We slide into the depthless hollow of the trough; there is no bottom. Jerr and I can’t see but we each know the other is out there, somewhere. The trough – it must be millions of miles across, and the crest of the wave is millions of miles high – a vast convulsion coming at the speed of light in a shape that we know but can not grasp.

It’s no matter. Nothing else matters but this moment, in this place where the future and the past collapse into each other. Wrapped in it, we rush endlessly and powerfully on, swept away on waves in the darkness.

***