Issue #37

For Now We See Through an iPhone, Darkly

I’ve been waiting forty years for this. Not with bated breath—more like with a small sigh every now and then when I see my dream realized by friends who post their good fortune on Instagram.

The dream began sometime in the 80’s with the movie Local Hero, still a favorite of mine and well worth the $1.99 to rent on Prime, especially if you are in need of silly humor, beautiful scenery, quirky Scots and a possible mermaid.

Charming but never sappy, the movie tells the story of “Mac” MacIntyre, an ambitious oil company negotiator from Texas who’s sent to a small fishing village in Scotland to buy up the rights to build an oil refinery. But the real purpose of the trip, at least as far as Mac’s deranged boss Felix Happer is concerned, is to keep an eye on the night sky for anything unusual occurring. Happer, played by a magnificent Burt Lancaster, is an amateur astronomer who wants to discover a comet to name after himself. Every evening Mac calls Happer from a red phonebooth outside the local pub to give his celestial report. (You can guess that Mac will fall in love with the town and townspeople.)

What set me in pursuit of my dream is the scene where a drunken Mac sees the Northern Lights for the first time and tries to describe it to Happer.

My dream was long delayed because seeing the Northern Lights requires not just good luck, but persistence, planning, and patience. Fortunately, my friend Renee has those qualities in spades. Together we’ve sat in parking lots and fields, hoping to see our first aurora borealis. We always left disappointed. When we no longer lived near each other, Renee would send solar flare alerts. More than once, prompted by her text message, I’ve set the alarm for 2 a.m. and trudged up the driveway to look at a sky that was mulishly uneventful.

So a few nights ago when she texted me about yet another opportunity to see the Northern Lights, I was not hopeful. I was, in fact, in bed. But given that it was a warm September night, and hope springs eternal, I headed over to a dock that would afford me an optimal view, should this night be The Night. The air was so still that music from a wedding across the lake sounded much nearer than it was, and I walked alone in the dark accompanied by the rousing beat of “Come On, Eileen.”

Settled on the dock, I looked up. Most of the sky was clear, but across the horizon, just under the Big Dipper, sat a wide swath of milky white. Was that it? I held up my iPhone camera, and all was revealed. The white wasn’t actually white—it was a mountain of emerald green. The Northern Lights, at last!

As thrilled as I was, I had to admit mine was hardly the equivalent of Mac’s experience in the phonebooth. He saw the pinks and aquas of the Northern Lights with his naked eye. I had a smart phone between me and my experience—and even more dispiriting, the smart phone was creating my experience—too much like everyday life.

I wanted to feel the bigness of the universe, not watch the bigness of the universe reduced to the size of my phone screen. I put the phone down, lay back, took it in. Occasionally I’d hold up my phone to make sure I was still looking at the Northern Lights and not just a cloudy sky. I stayed there for the duration of five or six songs from the wedding across the lake, feeling wonderfully small and wonderfully solitary.

Maybe I’m making more of the underwhelming light show than warranted, but a strong sense of the true nature of the universe came over me. A sense of hidden beauty. Beauty hidden. What looked ordinary to my limited vision was in reality a spectacular display of color and movement. And this spectacular display, I’ve come to find out, is going on all the time, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. But it can only be seen in the right place at the right time.

What other luminous events are happening right at this very moment, under our workaday feet, in front of our unfocused eyes, in the hearts of people we overlook? What beauty lurks beyond our unseeing?

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Whistle a Happy Tune and No One Will Suspect You’re Afraid

If you’re feeling extra anxious these days, Jeff Tweedy of the band Wilco has a suggestion.

In an interview with the New Yorker Radio Hour Tweedy discusses singing as an antidote to fear. If it reads a little disjointed, it’s because he was talking off-the-cuff.

Because I can't be scared when I'm singing. . . . it's like a lot of people would say the same thing about laughing. . . .But I do think that's true because it grounds you in the present. It grounds you in the moment. We borrow a lot of fear from our imaginations. . .. So, overriding that and trying to use my imagination to, again, reject that and hopefully make something that I can keep singing.

His thoughts on the somatic benefit of singing away fear reminded me of that powerful scene in Casablanca, where the bar breaks out in the French national anthem to drown out the singing of the Nazi officers. Previously cowed by their overlords, the crowd gains strength in singing together.

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