Sean Sullivan: ILS paper

This is a paper I wrote for ILS-7 "The Imagined Landscape" during my first few weeks at college. The assignment was to describe one's favorite landscape and compare it to what one sees on a walk during the writing process. I feel it captures the flavor of my philosophy.

I believe that most people would scarcely notice the abandoned construction site behind my apartment complex in Florida, or at best see it as a flaw in the land to be shunned from the mind. The earth was cleared for foundations never laid, and now all that remains are decaying PVC pipes rising at crazy angles from the sand. Under the glare of the sun I would agree with a despairing judgement, but it is of the depth of night that I wish to speak. This sandy field can only be seen in its full glory by moonlight and starlight, when the black silence is enveloping and the mind is stilled.

Over a span of four years I visited this place sometimes in the hour before morning twilight to reflect, experience, integrate. Walking along the streets leading to the field I felt like an interloper, for if queried how could I even hope to explain the purpose of my journey on these deserted streets at four in the morning? Stepping from the glare of the streetlights out into the darkness was a kind of liberation, liberation from a state defined by purpose to a state defined by being.

The air was filled with the chorus of frogs in the drainage canals and cicadas in the trees, a song of nature content with the night. The fresh wind blew in from the ocean, mixed with a vibrant sulfuric scent from a nearby lagoon. The black silhouette of the treeline gave form and outline to the gray-blue sky, subtlely tinted by the glare of the waning gibbous moon. The hard brilliance of its light glinted off the sands with subtle grace and gave texture to the land, a land shaped by frogs and cicadas to encompass and flow into the heart of the mind. Away from the sight of man the habits of society were shed, identity became meaningless and the fabric of reality integrated with the core of consciousness, unmediated by any words. I was I, but now I was also the wind and the blue-gray sky and the stars, and these were me.

I first walked upon these sands in the winter of 1986 to witness the passage of Halley's Comet. It was my first experience of silence, of solitude, of the night, of the universe. The art of simple existence and experience is too often forgotten as we grow up, and it was here watching Halley that I reclaimed this lost portion of my soul. Coupled with this acute awareness of the moment was an equally acute awareness of eternity, for the stars measure time on scales beyond our comprehension. It is perhaps evident that in our focus on tomorrow and yesterday we forget about today, but we also forget about the future and the past. Antares and the Pleiades make this clear.

Superimposed on this perception of eternity and the moment was a perception of a lifetime, not as a temporal sequence, but in its totality. I first ventured into the night only a month after I had witnessed the disintegration of Challenger high in the frozen January sky. Seeing the debris falling into the Atlantic brought questions of purpose and hopelessness, of life and death, to my mind as never before. As Halley receded into Corvus, freezing for another revolution of the Sun, another lifetime, my dreams turned to 2061. I imagined myself at age 90, when I hope to see again the light of the comet that first brought me into the night, the comet that marked the beginning of my philosophic and spiritual quest. What will I think and feel looking back upon the life completed, the life beginning in those months? Standing in silence with the frogs and the cicadas, content with the night, this reflective perception of the future has been an important element in developing a way of mind for perceiving the present and acting in the world.

On this morning I awoke to witness the transformation of the dawn. When I began my walk from Stearns, only the conjunction of Venus and the crescent Moon foretold the rising of the Sun. In the athletic fields I stood upon the dew, in the dew, and listened to the unfamiliar sounds of New England nature as the stars faded from sight. I walked into the woods as Rose Madder erupted along the Eastern horizon, and settled among the ferns as flaming gold appeared through the woods. Beneath the canopy of trees thought silenced and I understood the crows calling to each other, near and unseen. For a time I enjoyed the morning from the perspective of a fern, but with the brightening of the sky it was time to return to Amherst. The red star was upon the edge of the mountains as I emerged from the woods, and in the bright rays I walked visible into society, focused on a simple task: to retain in my heart, in the busy and confused light of the day, the silent lesson and paradigm of the night. Silence and reality.

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