July 24, 2010
Dear Clusterflock
“Something just told me to jump out of the way.”
I imagine all of us have had those moments when an unexplained knowledge leaped into our minds–an emphatic warning heeded, a sudden peace arriving spontaneously in a troubled time, a story of some other past brushing our own view of an object or place…. Please speak of such an experience.
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I like this question so much I wish I could think of an answer that directly related. the only thing that comes to mind is somewhat tangential; when I was in college my grandfather came for a visit and we spent an evening talking: grandfather, father, son. I heard family history and personal anecdotes — reasons for choices made long ago. that night, after everyone had gone to bed, and the extended family had left, I was in the kitchen getting a glass of water — there was a sound I couldn’t quite figure out, a repetitive, almost meditative, cyclical looping. I paced all parts of the kitchen trying to figure it out. finally I opened the microwave and found — it’s hard to describe now because I don’t know if they still make them — but a battery powered gyroscope type of thing a cousin had set to spinning and placed inside there — too quiet to hear until everyone had gone away.
Jesus Jesus Jesus that’s beautiful, Deron. I mean Damn. People fuck with poems for years and don’t get this close to what speaks.
Deron. My god, this is beautiful.
oh! — well thank you.
One New Year’s Eve we drove downtown to Old Sacramento to watch the fireworks over the river. I was probably 20 and Alicia sat next to me in my 1976 Chevy Vega, my friend Marc was in the back seat. Driving home through Downtown I stopped at a red light. The light turned green and I took my foot off the break but something made me put it back after I’d rolled a foot or so forward. As the car stopped again another car came through the red light at 60 or 70 miles per hour.
I have no idea what made me stop but I’m sure I saved at least 3 lives.
wow.
Also, I don’t drive on New Year’s Eve anymore.
Deron, that’s more or less what we said.
I can’t tell it just now, from the iPad. Andrew and I just hauled Danny’s ass up to bed. We’re in the garage, cause it’s raining just now. He’s working on something for Lucy. I’m working on this comment. It has been a good day, in my estimation. But it is time for bed.
Michael–I’m so glad that impulse came to you at the right moment! I have some of those kinds of moments too. One that has stayed with me happened when I was 16 and was spending all three days at the Lewisville Pop Festival. Lots of people dozed on blankets all around the place, waiting for it to open, and I was there when a crazy person decided to distribute full cans of beer by tearing them off the six-pack and throwing them anonymously to people who were 40 yards away. One came my way before anybody had even noticed what was happening, and my back was turned. For some reason I put my arm up behind me, with my palm flattened–and the can of beer hit my hand instead of my head. In cases like this though, I suppose it’s a matter of us actually perceiving more than we actually process (usually) because we screen a lot out. Cindy and I have other stories that are much harder to explain, but I’ll stay out of the way for a while and then come back. But again–we are very glad that you are still with us, Michael!
Some of y’all know that I’m some kind of a witch, in that I know things are going to happen before they happen and I can read minds. I joke about it, but the truth is that, for much of my life, I really wondered if there was something wrong with me. I now think that some of my perceptions are simply a bit outside the edges of the general human spectrum. Much the way dogs can hear sounds that we cannot hear, I sense some things that others cannot. Ergo, I am a dog.
So, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s stuff like this:
1. We’re about to leave on a trip and I zero in on a tire, ask Daryl if the tire’s okay. He checks it out, says it’s fine. That tire blows out 5 hours later in the middle of desert.
2. When Flannery was a very small child, I would think songs and she would begin to sing along. (Yep–she inherited it. It’s like Tabitha on Bewitched.)
3. Some asshole was at our house once and Daryl mentioned that I could read minds, and he said that was ridiculous, so he asked, “What number am I thinking?” It was something like 493. I said it. He turned pale (and I was glad, because he was an asshole. Earlier I’d almost kicked him out of the house because he said that Wallace Stevens wasn’t a real poet because he dictated some of his poetry to his secretary at the insurance firm. He said that to me in my house. Sonofabitch.)
Well, there are lots more, but Daryl just brought in a bowl of sliced mangoes and the New York Times, so I’m out.
Not quite what you asked, Daryl, but something that reminds me of the question.
A friend moved to D.C. from Alabama, something she had always wanted to do. Odd, menacing things kept happening to her. For instance, we were sitting at dinner one night. She was across from me. To my horror, a huge brass coat stand began falling straight for her, the heavy ball at the top aiming for her head. Someone sitting next to her saw me lunging trying to reach for the rack and held up an arm protectively and kept the ball from hitting my friend in the head. The woman’s arm was hurt, but not broken. These things kept happening.After the following happened, my friends and I sat and discussed it and were floored. It was as though she had been warned.
Two weeks after the coat rack episode, as my friend was driving to a Christmas party, a car rocketed across a meridian and hit her, causing her car to strike a bridge. The driver had passed out due to a diabetic condition. My friend was wedged in the car. She had to be cut out. She was taken by helicopter to the nearest shock trauma ER. The troopers told her apartment complex manager she wouldn’t make it. She did, but it was touch and go for a while.
She got out and began the long recovery process. Her dog disappeared. She moved from the suburbs into D.C. She got another car. It died. She was mugged, twice, near her house in a lovely section of D.C. near the zoo. I had never heard of anyone getting mugged there. She also was pick-pocketed in the Roy Rogers in a crowd of children and parents.
She finally got the message. A city hated her. She moved back to Alabama, where the awfulness stopped.
Confederate troops never did make it to D.C.
…actually, my friend thought the city hated her. I thought maybe it was just saying “not a good idea for you right now, my dear.”
Also, Cindy, I’ve been called a bit witchy too. I am not a witch, repeat, not not not. Somebody once said I was like a sponge, taking in everything. So maybe these things are a matter of perception, intuition. There are so many things I do not know and can never know in the area of logic and reasoning. But sometimes I just know things and can’t tell you why. If you get me, and I’m guessing you do.
Meeting you is going to be fun.
No telling how many hexes still cover this place, Shelia. I shudder to think on it.
I tend to be sensitive to the past lives of places, although I suspect that as much as anything this is something that emanates from me (in the Blakean sense) and not something that I absorb.
In the area of Chicago’s South Loop where I lived for several years in the late 1990s, I lived in the years just before World War I much of the time. It was mostly quite pleasant.
My one and only experience of an ‘all-inclusive’ resort vacation, a disappointing week at Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic, produced visions that were, however, eerie and unsettling. One evening, as I sat out on the porch of our rented cottage gazing toward the sea, blood began to saturate the ground and rise and rise. Casa de Campo is built on land once occupied by a sugar plantation; the Fanjul family still operate sugar plantations adjacent to the resort.
Oh, Carole, I get you, all right. Informed intuition, I call it. And you’re right, we are not witches. Not sure what it is, but, like you, I have no doubt that it’s something.
And, Sheila, I’m with you on the lives of places. I remember being struck by how good your house on Dutton felt. There is such a thing as house karma, and that house has the good kind.
I was once overcome with a sense of dread in a little park in far west Texas. When I mentioned it to our companions who frequent the area, they explained it had been the site of Apache raids.
That shit happens to me all the time.
There is a wind-storm and I am probably sixteen or seventeen, driving along a single-lane country road in my Ford F150 truck. It’s been windy for a few days, by now, and this road is elevated slightly, with a drainage ditch on either side, but no brush. Farmland. A single row of telephone poles are on the left side of the road, and I am probably driving too fast — the wind is pushing against the truck, which somehow makes me feel not only invincible but impossibly cool. Even though I know the road is deserted, I look behind me in the driver’s side mirror and think “That is so odd, the poles are sideways.” I realize that they are falling and I look up and see them begin to fall in front of me and one is about to hit my car. I turn the wheel sharply and start driving over the tilled soil. For some reason it doesn’t occur to me to slow down. I drive to the edge of the field, and get back on the road. Other cars are here now and they’ve stopped. The road is completely blocked, back for a ways since as one pole started to fall it brought all the others with it.
Cindy, I have dreams about things before they happen. Sometimes years before and I don’t recognize the place. I had a dream once about sitting with people I didn’t know, a long time ago and once I got to Clusterflockstock I recognized the moment when it happened. Sometimes I see about two seconds of what will be, and then when it happens I could almost say what the person is going to say next, or I just know what they’ll say and I feel so eerie. My roommate through college believed in this too, and said it happened to her. She recalled one dream that hadn’t happened yet, A girl with red hair running past a trophy case, and then down some stairs. She said she’d know it when it happened. Sometimes I think about calling her and asking if she’s seen it yet.
I love these, Amanda Mae. And I do the same with dreams. I also dream things that I’m pretty sure are happening somewhere else, having nothing to do with me.
Space and Time.
I’ve had the anticipatory dream thing all my life; I am open to the possibility my mind is playing tricks on me — but it is the most tangible example I can think of that time and reality are not what we think.
I inherited it, indeed. I also have the “place karma” thing, and can instantly tell whether a place is happy or sad. I often describe it as the feeling you get when you walk into a room where someone has just had an argument — that heavy feeling of tension, regret, sadness that lingers for a moment afterward. If it’s strong enough, it can stick around for decades. This makes house hunting pretty difficult for me.
I also know when someone is lying to me, which is not always an advantage.
Here’s one story: About a year ago, I went with some friends to a “haunted” hotel (the Hotel Lawrence in Downtown Dallas). Something about this place just turned something “on” in me. Everything was familiar; I knew my way around the hotel completely. I entered one of the rooms and immediately knew someone had died there. I didn’t see it happening, but it was almost like I was reading about it in a newspaper — a series of journalistic cliffs notes. A woman. 1940s. Suicide. Window. That window. We talked to the hotel staff and they showed me the article from the mid 1940s about a woman who had committed suicide by jumping out the window of a room on the 10th floor. No one had ever confirmed why she had jumped, but I know why. I also know she was wearing a red scarf.
Hey Flannery–when have you ever bought a gift for your mother that she didn’t guess ahead of time, even when you went out of your way to make it something she could never guess?
Also, I love your story of the hotel. Even though I’m an athiest, I have never felt that that means everything is either known or it doesn’t exist. Seems to me, though, that weird stuff with dimensions overlapping is more plausible than Big Guy in the Clouds Jacking with People.
My sister used to be preternaturally gifted at finding lost objects. I would tell her what it was that was lost, and she could find it within minutes. I can’t remember her failing to find an object.
I have innumerable stories like these, none worth repeating since all the good stuff seems covered, but let me tell you: the number of times I haven’t died is incalculable.
Yes, Christmas is difficult in the Scroggins household. Like that damn Floria Sigismondi book. Goddamnit. She never should have guessed that. Now I just get you good liquor every year, and we all get drunk.
Andrew, dear man–I’m glad for all the weirdness that went into saving your skin!
Flannery–yes, good liquor is good even if you see it coming.
Gifts. I possess something between good luck and a sixth sense when it comes to gifts, especially if the occasion is last-minute and rather than dash about shopping, I grab something of my own to give.
Example: Last Christmas I had neglected shopping for gifts for members of Jon’s family, so a few hours before driving to Chicago to a family gathering, I swooped up books and other belongings of mine, matched them to people based on some unarticulated and intuitive sense, wrapped them up, and distributed them that evening.
For Jon’s nephew Nick, then a sophomore at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I had chosen my almost-pristine copy of Taryn Simon’s collection of photographs titled An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. Dunno why. It just felt right.
After opening his gift in private, Nick came up to me and said something to this effect: “I think Taryn Simon is right about the most important things in America occurring in secret. A couple of days ago, when I was still in Boulder, I saw a TED video featuring her.”
This kind of thing happens a lot. People almost never guess what I am giving them, but there is often a spooky kind of synchronicity in evidence.
(I apologize for saying ‘synchronicity’.)
No apology needed–synchronicity is the least of our worries in a post like this! I mean we could be getting “Dead Uncle Frank keeps farting out in the hall.”
Whew!
I positively cannot hang onto a copy of No One May Ever Have The Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory 1915-1935, published by The Museum of Jurassic Technology. It is a compilation of “letters written to the observers at Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935 by people from all walks of life and the world over expressing their idiosyncratic understandings of the universe.” I have given it away time and time again.
The diatribe against “lying Gravity” is alone worth the $9.95 cost of this little book.
I don’t have a copy at present, but I will probably buy yet another before long. You’ll need to wait a while before I give it to you.
Ghost farts. Farts from Beyond.
One more and I’ll quit: Once (more than 20 years ago) I had cancer and was getting chemo therapy. I often couldn’t sleep so I would stay up writing. The drugs made me sort of frantic and caused borderline hallucinations. Anyway, I wrote a story about a solitary almost homeless woman who spent long nights in a storeroom at a church, making doll clothes to sell. One night she begins to play at making something different, even though she knows she can’t afford such frivolity. I was up all night writing it. When I went in and woke Cindy that morning the first thing she said was “I had the strangest dream. It was like I was right there, in a place I have never seen.” Then she told me more about the dream–and it was the story I had just written, recounted in astonishing detail. Here’s a link to the story, “Issue from the Grotto of the Street Hermit Saint.”
Say, I’ve read that story, Daryl.
That is a wonderful thing to learn, what you’ve just told.
I love that story in particular, among all your stories I love. I love them all.
This isn’t quite the same, but a man prophesied about me once. Ravi, an Indian preacher (dot, not feather), told me on January 29th, 2003 that he would see me again 8 years later, to the day. It will be interesting to see if he was right.
[...] Flannery Scroggins: Here’s one story: About a year ago, I went with some friends to a “haunted” hotel (the Hotel Lawrence in Downtown Dallas). Something about this place just turned something “on” in me. Everything was familiar; I knew my way around the hotel completely. I entered one of the rooms and immediately knew someone had died there. I didn’t see it happening, but it was almost like I was reading about it in a newspaper — a series of journalistic cliffs notes. A woman. 1940s. Suicide. Window. That window. We talked to the hotel staff and they showed me the article from the mid 1940s about a woman who had committed suicide by jumping out the window of a room on the 10th floor. No one had ever confirmed why she had jumped, but I know why. I also know she was wearing a red scarf. posted by Deron Bauman in anecdotes, history, memory | * | comment [...]
Great thread, sorry I’m late. Like Amanda Mae’s sister, I’m strangely good at finding things. It’s a knack that mostly gets used for mundane things like locating things family members have lost, but sometimes it’s spooky and surprises even me.
Once, after half a day of hanging out with friends at a park, one of them noticed that his ring had slipped off somewhere. We’d been tearing ass all over the park for hours, and he had no idea when he lost it, just that he had it when he got there. A dozen of us hunted all over the park for over an hour, to no avail.
We gave up finally, and sat on the picnic tables, bumming out on the end of our fun day. For no particular reason, I got up from the table, closed my eyes and turned around a bit, pointed in the direction I was facing, opened my eyes and walked 14 steps in that direction. I looked down, and there was the ring, in the grass.
Some of the people there thought that I had planted the ring, and some people were kind of freaked out about it, but it felt completely natural and easy to me, like I just tuned into something inside me. I didn’t even need to concentrate, I just needed to NOT block something that said “there” and “14.”
That’s great, Robin. It fits in with something like water witching. In this case it makes me think that just as a metal detector can find old burried coins, perhaps minds can “not block something,” as you say, and an unlikely sensation arrives.
When I was in my early 20s, I was living in Brooklyn but working in White Plains, which is in Westchester County just North of the City. That meant I reverse commuted about 45 minutes every day. I did various combinations of train and car pools. During the summer months, I would often wear shorts and a t-shirt to commute and change into my work clothes once I reached the office. On one such day, I was riding in the front passenger of my car pooling colleague (whose name I don’t think I could remember even if large sums of money were attached) with the window open and something told me to close the window, so I did. Less than half a minute later, the entire window exploded all over me and I felt something hit my arm. I looked in the foot well of my seat, and there was the center hub of a bus with a long bolt sticking out of it with a nut on the end. I feel sure that if I hadn’t put the window up, it would have hit me in the head and certainly killed me. But the impact of the window caused it to only glance off my arm. I was covered in glass and had a throbbing bruise on my arm that would, in the days to come, turn all shades of purple and green. But I was never so happy that I listened to that impulse to put the window up.
Kate–I seem to have said this several times in the thread, but I am very glad that you had that feeling and acted on it.
[...] Deron Bauman When I was in college my grandfather came for a visit and we spent an evening talking: grandfather, father, son. I heard family history and personal anecdotes — reasons for choices made long ago. that night, after everyone had gone to bed, and the extended family had left, I was in the kitchen getting a glass of water — there was a sound I couldn’t quite figure out, a repetitive, almost meditative, cyclical looping. I paced all parts of the kitchen trying to figure it out. finally I opened the microwave and found — it’s hard to describe now because I don’t know if they still make them — but a battery powered gyroscope type of thing a cousin had set to spinning and placed inside there — too quiet to hear until everyone had gone away. posted by Daryl Scroggins in anecdotes, beauty, consciousness, dance, family, humans, memory, poetry, sound | * | comment [...]
A friend in Boston was leading us on his wonderful tour of the city. I had never been before. We were looking over the harbor, walking through what he said was the second oldest graveyard in Boston. I was blithering on about my ancestors, the name was French, they were disinvited from that country, though, ha ha, and spent a few centuries in England and Ireland before making their way to the colonies. A professor who researched the name and wrote a book said most went south “to be slave traders, the rest were in a ship that blew way off course and ended up in New England where they distinguished themselves as horse thieves.”
Then I looked down. By my foot was a grave that read “Elijah Corlew” — early 1800s. My friend has the grave on his tour.
The horse thieves and slave traders remark was the professor’s attempt at a joke during a big family reunion. Although where there’s smoke…
[...] Robing Lane: Once, after half a day of hanging out with friends at a park, one of them noticed that his ring had slipped off somewhere. We’d been tearing ass all over the park for hours, and he had no idea when he lost it, just that he had it when he got there. A dozen of us hunted all over the park for over an hour, to no avail. [...]
[...] Kate: When I was in my early 20s, I was living in Brooklyn but working in White Plains, which is in Westchester County just North of the City. That meant I reverse commuted about 45 minutes every day. I did various combinations of train and car pools. During the summer months, I would often wear shorts and a t-shirt to commute and change into my work clothes once I reached the office. On one such day, I was riding in the front passenger of my car pooling colleague (whose name I don’t think I could remember even if large sums of money were attached) with the window open and something told me to close the window, so I did. Less than half a minute later, the entire window exploded all over me and I felt something hit my arm. I looked in the foot well of my seat, and there was the center hub of a bus with a long bolt sticking out of it with a nut on the end. I feel sure that if I hadn’t put the window up, it would have hit me in the head and certainly killed me. But the impact of the window caused it to only glance off my arm. I was covered in glass and had a throbbing bruise on my arm that would, in the days to come, turn all shades of purple and green. But I was never so happy that I listened to that impulse to put the window up. posted by Deron Bauman in anecdotes, memory, travel | * | comment [...]
[...] Carole Corlew: A friend in Boston was leading us on his wonderful tour of the city. I had never been before. We were looking over the harbor, walking through what he said was the second oldest graveyard in Boston. I was blithering on about my ancestors, the name was French, they were disinvited from that country, though, ha ha, and spent a few centuries in England and Ireland before making their way to the colonies. A professor who researched the name and wrote a book said most went south “to be slave traders, the rest were in a ship that blew way off course and ended up in New England where they distinguished themselves as horse thieves.” [...]