The first place I remember looking for an answer was in the sun. The answer came, though its real significance may never be much appreciated. It was the blue silhoutted figure of a man, against the glowing yellow of the solar orb. What was he doing there? Who was he? Who was I? It was such an early stage to be looking, to be asking, but i was inquisitive. Nothing's changed after all this time. Here we are, surrounded by the mysteries of our existence, some of us pretending to know why and how, others of us too bewildered to ask, and I'm still staring at a hot, glowing sun as it rises in the morning east.

The night is about falling down, then flying. It's stepping in mud up to your hips, reaching for something that's not there, getting lost, breaking a sweat trying to get away from something or somebody you scared up.
There was never any first night, or first time. It was always the same night, after a certain point. The eternal night. The primordial night. The night of the father, sons, and all the ghosts you'd care to shake a stick at. At some point, there's nothing gained in being separate from the night, or the ghosts. We become the ghosts, we inhabit the night.

Later it would be magical, but still terrific, to glide down the trace of a path through the forest, the breeze gentle in the treetops, our passing tracks immediately obscured by the dust and leaves blowing at our feet. Where were we going? Unclear, or unspoken...maybe raiding or reconnoitering, or just travelling. Who is leading? It is momentarily irrelevant, watching the man in front out the corner of my eye as I scan the forest and marvel at the speed with which we move on. So we go, like a ghostsnake sliding through the grassy, cool night. Was this really night, or just a dream of it? Where did it begin, the night? Not at the end of the day. The night was always there, just that we were not always in it...

There was some road we went on once. Later I went there myself, alone, and it was still there, mostly, but some of the places were changed, and a few were seemingly gone altogether. I drove around and looked, and stopped and pondered the surroundings. The tree where my friend got sick was still there. I knew it was that one, because I looked at it a good long time on that day when it happened. I thought he was going to die, but he kept saying he was alright, then he'd go back to making like it was all over. He was real pale, and sort of clammy-looking. Nothing unusual there, except he never got sick drinking, and now he was. Strange. He was the champion of the tequila-drinkers, and had even outdrunk red-blooded Mexicans in their own territory, but here he was, going belly-up.

One of the locals stopped by in his pickup truck.
"You boys alright? He don't look so good...say, you fellas ain't from here, now are you?"
The guy acted like he was gonna get out, but apparently my pal did something that told him to keep going. Anyway, he sort of shook his head and stepped on the gas and hightailed it. I wondered if I should just bury the guy if he did die, or if I should stop on the way back and tell the sheriff where he was buried, or just how it ought to play out. The funny thing was, I was convinced that this place was really it for him. It held some attraction, some pull. Like it'd pulled him all those miles we came to be there, without him even realizing it, and now it was exacting a tribute, which seemingly would be paid up with his life.

Now, all these years later, I was wondering if anyone else had ever had such an experience of this spot. Maybe the place had a name. What would that name be? I wondered if down in the gulley that led to the creek, there might be scattered the remains of a hapless cowboy, or maybe a road worker from the old days.

The sound of tin scraps being drug across a galvanized trough....that's how you might describe the ruckus of the machine. The machine didn't really do much, except serve as the focal point of our existence in that particular place. We were there to feed it, to nurture it, to keep it happy, which meant that it should be making us all miserable. The motors had to be running, and the mechanisms lubricated and aligned, and there was required a constant stream of material into and through the beast. That was the feeding part. Putting in nice clean, happy raw material, to make paranoid, misshapen metal crap come flying out its asshole.

It was some sort of karmic debt, apparently, that we owed to this thing. We were just there until such time as our respective or collective atonement had been completed. Some of the guys pretended to like it, but it was clear, the machine didn't respect them, and it didn't make their work any easier. Some of the less reverent among us could at least labor on without having to come up with nice names for the stuff being produced, which was of course just what it looked like, crap. No matter how you box it, label it, pile it up, or sell it, crap is crap. And crap that comes from such a torturous thing as the machine, well, that's aggravated crap.

It was rough being stupid. There was just no way to comprehend what those boys were talking about. I'd showed up too late, and I was never gonna catch on. I'd wandered into an advanced civilization from the looks of things. They must've thought I looked like some overgrown little brother that was half-deaf to boot. To think of it now, it was like trying to watch a movie with one eye shut and a pair of dark glasses on. What was the deal? On top of being exiled into existence, I was in a sort of limbo state with these characters. I could hear them, but I couldn't understand them. I could talk to them, but really they just heard it as noise. Not much point in looking at them for too long, especially since they were prone to momentary spells of stinking.

At least they weren't mean, or particularly disrespectful. They just weren't in the same place is all.

What is fear? Is it being in the front seat of an old car with a whacked-out nut who doesn't even know he's loaded? Is it wondering if you'll be headed the same direction five minutes from now? Five seconds? Or if he'll accost someone else, or pull his gun out and start shooting stuff...The fear of the moment is one thing, but behind that is the fear that if you dare leave, you'll miss something. It could be your own funeral, but it could be interesting too.

When I met him, the closest we'd come to doing anything that might be considered "dangerous", was on the order of recycling fireworks into half-ass booby traps or maybe stealing a case of beer or two off a delivery truck. What was immediately clear was that we'd been totally little league, while this fool was in the majors when it came to being a fuck-up. That was clear the first time he sold us some drugs. He didn't sniff little tidy piles of it like we did, rather, he melted it down in a spoon and plugged it right into his arm with a syringe that looked like it was retrieved from some Chinese latrine. We knew we were high, but he was way up there. Incomprehensibly so. This was apparent when he got up off the ugly little bed that doubled as his sofa, desk, and dinner table, and pulled out a sawed-off shotgun that measured all of 20 inches. One minute we're just talking, albeit with clenched teeth, next minute he's waving around this thing and ranting about cops and narcs and we're all just shitting ourselves. One of my pals actually fell off his chair and then low-crawled around the corner into the kitchen. I don't guess he'd ever even seen a gun.

What about going to California? Was that proposition guaranteed to fail? Was the grass greener, or did everyone have to pass across some version of Death Valley in making their way to the promised land?
"Yeah, there was this other guy from Texas that showed up here not long ago. He seemed like a nice guy, and he even rented my parents storage shed for a while, got a job mowing lawns, and went to church. Then one day, I don't know what happened...it's like he wasn't the same, and then he had to leave. I'm not sure where he went. Maybe you could find out, and just head on down that way."
Oh yeah, sure I could. Where were the open doors and the smiling faces? There weren't many. This wasn't the place where you show up and stake a claim on some stretch of the creek. No. This was the place where you show up with nothing, get nothing, live with nothing, and probably die out on the street. And do it all knowing that you are Strange. No matter how much you think you have in common with anyone, you are indeed very strange.

Driving south one morning, with the sun coming up. For what reason? To escape the load? To see if things look different upon return? To taste the water? There was no explaining anything. The scenery was flat, and it all just made me want to drive even faster. The town names weren't recognizable, and when I got to each new town, it seemed more drab, more depressed than the previous one. What happens down here, I wondered to myself. Thoughts were not happening. My mind was trying to overtake the moment, but was losing. Having the resource of speed, of travel, and seemingly having enough time to go all the way, none of these really mattered, and in the end I felt like I could've accomplished the same thing driving around the block seven thousand times. Then it was noon, and the futility of it all was hammered into me by that beating sun. There was not only not a point, there was a point of negative realization, which is to say, this was coming directly out of my hide, out of my non-replenishable accounts. The face in the rearview mirror looked strange then, like someone I'd seen around, but didn't really know. I got out and wore that face into a store to get some gas, cigarettes, some beer, something to eat on the way back. It was such a relief that the checkout lady was talking to the butcher in the back. The thought of speaking was too much. The words had sunk to the bottom of my stomach, and just rattled there in dim stupor with so much else. If I'd had a horse and not a car, I think I would've just headed south across the desert there.

Oklahoma had a familiar feel to it. It always seemed like maybe around the next corner would be some Indian you knew, or some old girl from the past. It was so shocking to see people driving around in motor homes, pulling boats on trailers, staying in motels with signs advertising television and air-conditioning. Up here was the Indian Territory, and not some tourist trap. And anyway, that Territory stuff was just a late ploy by the fledgling Honchos. What were they thinking? My last trip to Oklahoma, I turned off on a one-lane dirt track for no good reason. A few miles later I saw a bobcat sauntering along into the brush by a fenceline. So for all the things I hadn't seen around the corner, here was one I did manage to catch a glimpse of.

Someone came in, and they must've sensed the something of the moment, because they left immediately, without saying anything.

It made me wonder, what was it that was going on all the rest of the time, when it seemed like we were from totally different places? She, the same one, the girl I'd known all these years, and I, myself; how could it be so fleeting, our sense of togetherness? I started to remember then how I'd thought before that maybe we'd been close in another life, and that in this one, our moments together were supposed to be fewer and farther between. Still, it was clear, in those perfect moments, I was closer to her than anyone else I'd known, before or since.

Thinking of light was not always such a complicated thing, although at an earlier age I began to grasp some of the features of the sun's illumination. I became interested in photography, and attempted a lot of generally inadvisable photo feats with an old kodak my folks had lying around. I was frustrated by its lack of exposure controls, though I didn't really conceive of it in quite these exact terms at the time. At some point I set about to modify the shutter release in such a manner as to allow long, timed exposures. I got one or two pictures taken like this before the camera was completely broken. Unfortunately they weren't much, these shots, but it was an important event in my progress as a photographer, or even as a heliographer.

Related to this, and more important perhaps from the heliographic standpoint, was my early exposure to navigation techniques, including using the compass. I began to think in terms of cardinal directions, and sought to maintain my orientation, no matter where I was. At some point I became aware of the seasonal differences in the arc of the sun, its rising and setting points. This evolved into the further observation of all the characteristic nuances, the morning light, the winter light, the northern light...the difference in the noon light on June 21 and on December 21. Sometimes I try to take all this into account in planning my movements, through the days, across the land. And sometimes I see how others might've done the same thing, to plan, to plot, to try and align things some way with this solar track. Maybe it's when I'm walking down an old street at 4 pm and see the perfectly straight shadows cast by the lamp posts, or maybe it's more complex, but there is something organically right about trying to maintain the proper relation, the proper orientation, to the sun. To observe, and to act on these cues, maybe that's what is at the bottom of heliography.

The cypress mill must've been a long time ago, back before this life. It couldn't be this one or the next one, or really anything else. It was a place we went to meet up and to organize our little escapades. It was always a destination, down in the cool, soft river bottom, there by the big rocks, amongst the trees. Nobody paid us any mind there; perhaps we didn't even really exist for them. It was probably the same river where the old family house was. The one where I showed up once, years later, on an early morning, with one of my pals. I found the house we'd lived in during my childhood. The roof was all gone, and there was really nothing left except the walls and the chimney. I wandered inside, and scuffed about a bit in the ashy gray dirt that filled over where the floors had been. There I unearthed a small chunk of metal, an old frame that held a tintype. Even though the image was gone, and there was nothing to look at, I knew what I'd found, and I showed my friend this picture from the old days.

Some people used to say "different", but I know better.

Zzzzzzttttssspplooooff!

Color!