Well of the Invisible

Well of the Invisible

by John Nizalowski

Photo by Robert Knapp

I
During the pandemic’s first summer, when the midnight sky was clear, I would go outside to watch Jupiter’s bright orange eye rise from the Grand Mesa. Scorpio’s hook hovered over the eroded shale hills that flow in great waves from Colorado’s Grand Valley forty miles south to the junction of the Gunnison and Uncompahgre rivers. Westward, toward Utah, the lion called Leo would be settling into the shadowy Uncompahgre Plateau. To the north, the Pole Star, as always, shone through the outer branches of our backyard mulberry tree. To complete the horizon’s circle, I would face east to view the slow ascent of Jupiter’s imperial light. While the Olympian king’s planet was the only one visible in the midnight sky, I knew that occulted beneath the Grand Mesa’s geometric edge, Saturn’s yellow-white orb was drifting upward, awaiting the gaze of those who dwell in the three a.m. darkness. And thus, in that moment, Saturn was part of the unseen, the invisible reality hidden from our limited perceptions.

                                                                

II
The I Ching is perhaps the most detailed and eloquent expression of the unseen, charting as it does the spiritual energies that flow within and around us, hidden by the material world’s mask of appearances.
        Also known as the Book of Changes, the I Ching is an ancient Chinese philosophical and divinatory text based on the Taoist belief that the dance of universal opposites—yin and yang, shadow and light, acceptance and action—shape existence. Around 2000 B.C.E., an anonymous Taoist sage divined the foundational material for the I Ching, and in the 6th century B.C.E. Confucius and his disciples completed the text. Sixty-four hexagrams, each consisting of six lines, form the core of the I Ching. A hexagram’s solid lines represent yang or light, while the divided lines symbolize yin or shadow. The book’s extensive commentaries interpret each hexagram. A person consulting the I Ching about a current problem or upcoming decision performs a complex process that uses 50 yarrow stalks to generate a pair of interconnected hexagrams. There is also a simpler system that uses three coins. By describing the causal and energetic relationships that envelop the situation in question, these hexagrams provide guidance to the one consulting the Book of Changes.
         For half a century, I have found the I Ching to be extremely helpful, providing valuable advice from the invisible forces of the Tao. However, in the early 1980s I became obsessed with the Book of Changes. During those years, instead of using it to resolve only the most serious dilemmas or simply reading the text for its wisdom, every morning I would pull out my yellow hardcover copy of the Wilhelm-Baynes translation, throw the coins, and study the resulting hexagrams for advice on the coming day. As a result, the six-line structures became the center of my consciousness, their divided and undivided lines constantly hovering in my mind.
        Back then, I lived in a Civil War-era farmhouse in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and when I took walks along the abandoned road that led from my home into a dense deciduous forest, I observed the hexagrams sublimated in everything around me—the hickory leaves rattling in the wind, the water pouring over the ancient shale streambed, the remarkably long blacksnake sliding under a dense stand of rhododendron. And when I looked up, I would see the day’s hexagram briefly but clearly imprinted on the blue air.
        Therefore, I believed the I Ching had flung open the gates of perception, revealing the universe’s invisible machinery, beautiful and awesome in its interlocking patterns. However, since I would take no actions before consulting the oracle, this experience of metaphysical insight transitioned into a feeling of profound constriction as the months wore on. Instead of a guide, the I Ching became a deterministic trap.
        Finally, the day came when I moved away from Virginia, and I went on an extended road journey to determine where I would live next. Before departing, I placed the I Ching in one of the boxes my brother would send once I had chosen a new home. As it turned out, it would be six months before I settled in Santa Fe, and this long break from the oracle ended my dependance on it. While I continue to occasionally turn to the I Ching for guidance, I no longer use it to steer my daily existence, and I have never again witnessed visions of hexagrams superimposed on the blue skies.

                                                                
III
Twice a year, the U.S. Army allows the public to visit Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was tested in the Second World War’s final days. To get there, you must enter New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, a weapons testing area that straddles an arid valley called Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead, a name inspired by the lethal raids the Apache inflicted on the Spanish colonial settlers heading north from El Paso.
        To reach Trinity Site, you turn off US 380, pass through the military checkpoint at Stallion’s Gate, and drive south twenty miles on a narrow paved road to the McDonald ranch house, where the final assembly of the first atomic bomb took place. Finally, you pass through a gate in a wire-mesh fence decorated with yellow “Caution: Radioactive Materials” signs and head for an obelisk made from dark, roughly finished volcanic stones. This is ground zero, the very place where the bomb went off. The obelisk, which protrudes from the bottom of a shallow crater covered in sparse grasses, has a bronze plaque that reads: “Trinity Site—Where the World’s First Nuclear Device Was Exploded on July 16, 1945.”
        On my first visit to Trinity, I stood at the obelisk for a time, studying the tourists milling about with their cameras. Most of them had bored expressions, as if they had expected something more dynamic than a stone monument and an unremarkable grassy depression. Finally, wanting to avoid prying eyes, I set off toward the perimeter fence away from the dirt track between the gate and the obelisk. Out there, away from any trails, I searched the dusty ground. After maybe ten minutes, my quest was fulfilled. There, between two clumps of sideoats grama, a dusty green-grey piece of glass formed in the world’s first nuclear explosion glinted in the October sun. Trinitite.
        There are warning signs all over Trinity Site about the dangers of Trinitite. While prolonged exposure to this atomic-fired glass can cause radiation burns, the flecks of plutonium imbedded in Trinitite are what make it truly hazardous, for if even a microscopic grain of plutonium enters the body, it could be fatal. Despite the risk, I picked up the glass lump.
        Its warm, pitted surface stirred images of that morning on July 16th, 1945, when an atomic detonation brighter than the sun fused the sand into a sheet of glass, a part of which I now balanced on my palm. To produce that blaze, a set of wedge-shaped explosives ignited inward, crushing a hollow globe of plutonium nested within an alchemical mix of other key elements. The collapsing globe released neutrons that split a critical number of plutonium atoms. When these fractured, a part of their mass transformed into light, radiation, and more neutrons, which split more atoms. This process is invisible until the chain reaction goes critical, creating a nuclear fire so intense one would have to return to the Big Bang that birthed the universe to best it.
        As quoted in Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, physicist I.I. Rabi described the first atomic explosion as a terrifying event that bordered on the transcendent: “Suddenly there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever.”
        Holding that shard of trinitite, I remembered Rabi’s description of the monstrous energy released by a nuclear device. And I thought, too, of the risks posed by the unseen particles of plutonium locked in that innocuous, green-tinged stone. And so, instead of dropping the trinitite into my shirt pocket, I slipped it under a tuft of grass, covered it in sand, and walked away.

                                                                
IV
Before the pandemic, my oldest daughter, Ursula, lived in a one-bedroom house made of corrugated sheet metal, concrete, and glass. Off from the second-floor bedroom, a deck wraps the south and west sides of the house, and Siberian elms that surround this deck form an opening to the sun and stars.
         One evening, after watching Vast of Night, a movie about an alien visitation to a small town in the New Mexican desert, we stepped out onto the deck to discuss the film. Stars filled the sky. The dazzling suns of Lyra hovered overhead, Ursa Major was imperceptibly sliding toward the northwest, and the house-shaped constellation of Sagittarius, which holds the galaxy’s core, floated above the Grand Mesa’s southern rim. The night was pleasantly cool and filled with the sounds of crickets and distant traffic. While we talked, our backs against the deck’s steel rail, we spotted a satellite sailing smoothly from south to north. It passed in and out of sight—sometimes flaring when it caught the thermospheric sunlight, sometimes vanishing altogether. The movie’s sinister spaceships had colored our perceptions, and so the vision of the satellite was both enigmatic and unnerving.
        Later, as I was driving home, my phone buzzed with a text message from my wife, Brenda. In order to read it, I pulled over on the empty, midnight street. And there, illuminated by my headlamps, tucked into the curb under a fallen arm-sized branch, stood a western burrowing owl. For a minute or two, this diminutive creature peered at me with angry, predator eyes before disappearing with a blur of its grey-brown wings into the darkness of a nearby Siberian elm.
        And in this way, the yellow and black gaze of that hand-sized owl deepened the night’s mystery.

                                                                

V
Brenda and I were sitting on a thick orange blanket mere feet from the rim of a canyon that carves through the Uncompahgre Plateau’s upper reaches. The blanket rested on the white Navajo sandstone that forms one side of the canyon; in front of us a great emptiness opened out, backed by rust-colored cliffs and rose-tinged bluffs. The far wall was gentler than our sheer vertical one, and ponderosa pine and blue spruce covered its slopes. Scrub willows, their bright green leaves flashing in the wind, lined the streambed below. But soon our gaze lifted to the birds maneuvering in the riptide air. First, we watched the cliff swallows, slate-green and white, as they dove and darted over the dizzying heights, feeding on unseen insects in the shining space. Next, several ravens drifted past on steady, solid paths, only to dive abruptly at the jagged rock rubble at the far cliff’s base, pulling up at the last moment, like stunt pilots showing off to an airshow crowd.
         And then, a kettle of six turkey vultures floated up from the canyon’s depths.
        Cruising on the air currents that rose up the canyon walls, they appeared like silent spirits out of the very sandstone on which we rested. The westward sun illuminated the great birds as they hovered level to the canyon’s rim, their expansive brown and tan wings fully extended in the buoyant air. They were so close we could see their dark pupils surrounded by golden irises and the black ridges that decorated their strange, red-pink heads. But when they began to gyre in grand spirals, their bodies, flashing gold and silver in the sunlight, gradually transformed into dark glyphs, which finally disappeared into the white sky distance.

                                                                
VI
In the Book of Changes there is a hexagram named “Ching / The Well.” According to the Baynes-Wilhelm translation, this hexagram describes an inexhaustible pool of nourishment or wisdom that can be hauled up from the unseen depths of the earth into the light of the surface. As an image of the universe’s never-ending source of creation, “The Well” parallels the Celtic myth of the Cornucopia, for both concepts evoke the rhythms of nature and the metaphysical—water rising from the well and returning to it through the rains soaking into the ground, the womb of the earth bearing its bounty of plants and animals which return to the soil in death. In these cycles, the invisible becomes visible and then vanishes again—moving from mystery to realization to occultation, only to be reborn into the cyclic journey.
        And in this way the earth moved along its solar orbit during that first summer of the pandemic, and the evening arrived when I stayed awake into the pre-dawn hours so I could witness Saturn rising above the Grand Mesa. I waited through that long dark night in a lawn chair, occasionally spotting a high-altitude jet’s wing lights as it traversed the sky or a meteor’s bright flash cutting across the stars. Once the night turned cool, I started a fire in my chiminea, and occasionally dozed off, warmed by its fiery orange coals. The distant blue-white suns of the Summer Triangle—Vega, Deneb, and Altair—gradually crossed the zenith and started their descent, while Scorpio vanished, and Hercules rested his club on the western horizon.
        At last, Saturn’s yellow-tinged white orb emerged from the Grand Mesa’s straight line, and I trained my six-inch reflecting telescope on it so I could see its strange and astonishing rings, which the naked eye cannot perceive. At first, the planet eluded the circle of the scope’s field, but finally it slipped into view, a small white blur, which I brought into focus.
        And there, uncovered by a simple instrument of glass and steel, floated Saturn’s yellow-white sphere with its mysterious disk of bright rings—the unseen revealed—the universe’s hidden reality in all its wonder and terror, momentarily made manifest before being concealed again by sunrise and the eternal play of shadow and light, spirit and matter.