The following serves as the addendum and closing argument of Visitors from the Red Star, published one year ago today
That whole summer I was stuck in a cramped spacecraft. A spacecraft that was slowly heating up, like it was engineered to the wrong atmospheric specifications: the sealant wasn't supposed to get this hot, the bolts weren't supposed to rattle this much.
In this small and isolated space, I could feel parts of my mind atrophy in real-time. Every week was tempered by the desire to just get through the week—if I could just make it through this one, I'll be okay—a desire which refreshed itself the following week. The air in the craft felt recycled, badly so, and close. Each morning was a facsimile of the last with its edges slightly worn; each evening a degraded image file saved too many times.
People stayed inside, and people thrashed in the streets. I stayed inside, and was very ill, and I was watching everyone through small windows. All the food I ate made me nauseous. The skin between my eyebrows flaked off in sallow, waxy patches. Doctors dismissed me with kind shrugs and no drugs and people baked bread. I landed my craft in a business park and tried acupuncture under a sickly, subtly flickering light.
I left books on meditation unread and every morning my right hand hurt from scrolling the news. Out of my tiny, moldy kitchenette window, I'd watch from above as police cars thundered toward the protests in terrifying phalanxes. I watched a video of a woman take a nonlethal round to the face and saw her eye dribble out of its socket like forked gelatin.
I was not only trapped physically but temporally. It was like my craft was generating a time loop to keep me stuck. Time loops, if such things existed, wouldn't be observable from the outside. But from within, its prisoner would feel a strange blend of inertia and momentum, like sitting in a car and getting sick: implied global movement felt in the body jutting up against bone-souring stasis.
Even so, my day job continued without a moment's pause. I was paid to edit the grammar of educational cartoons depicting canonical lawsuits, which were then watched by law students too lazy to study their texts. Every day I edited twenty of them. Despite the varied subject matter, the tone of the cartoons was completely homogenized. Dry corporate malfeasance, beheaded rapists, fish factories suing grocery stores, children left in hot vans—they all collapsed into one bureaucratic, violent tumor, at once the law and the past, now relics to be forgotten. I was the chronically ill version of the angel of history, glimpsing it all at once, unable to turn around, eating a lot of yogurt.
I couldn't write poems in these conditions, not that it really seemed to matter anymore. Every poet that had once stirred my soul now seemed like they were on a completely different planet. Like I'd been forced off-world and shoved into my little time prison ship while they handed each other awards for Ashbery caricatures and odes to TV shows.
Was I escaping? Or was I exiled for the crime of caustic bitterness? I peered through my shuttle's porthole as the whole world receded into the black distance and turned away from me at a glacial pace. I received occasional transmissions about friends breaking up.
In this black period of my life I perceived but one interesting thing floating by, mysterious and colorful and sheepish. I wanted to write about it, but the time loop craft ensured I couldn't find a way in. Progress requires an exchange of time, and all of mine was bundled up in fear and illness, force fed to me again and again. I walked the same old paths in my room and wrote the same kinds of lines I always wrote and read all the wrong things and my first drafts were like dead fish on the page, and not in an interesting way.
One day, bored, I clicked a Google Drive link in the bio of a random Twitter user. It led to an archive of UFO-related material new to me: stories culled from obscure 90s Polish paranormal websites, pencil drawings of goofy beings drawn by witnesses, taxonomies of ships in neat little grids, untranslated snippets of interviews from books long out-of-print. It was all meticulously organized by someone named Fernando, whom I imagined drifting by in his own little ship.
This serendipitous discovery became a turning point. I sat down every single day at the same time, and I drank lots of green tea and I churned through it all. By the propulsive thrust of this project, my shuttle's long and lonely sojourn caught the orbit of the poet planet. I landed and reacquainted myself with its inhabitants and started wandering again amidst the groves of language and stories and mystery. In the end, it doesn't really matter to me if any of this stuff is real or not. It felt good to write it.
***
And so I feel a desire to explain myself more directly, yet the prospect of doing so makes me nervous. Poetry requires a sense of mystique to work, a kind of distance; a great poem is an untouchable thing in the fog that can somehow whisper in your ear.
Then again, if a hybridized approach makes me feel uncomfortable and vulnerable, maybe it's worth attempting. Indeed, there's something about the UFO phenomenon that disrupts those binaries that we cling to for structure: technology/nature, internal/external, physical/psychical, objective/subjective. So here I add another binary to disrupt: prose/poetry. And here I will try to provide a fresh entry point for you to approach this book.
Poetry and UFO encounter stories share an important fundamental quality: an oddly warped relationship to truth. When someone reads a poem, their first question is never, "Did the events in this poem actually happen as recorded here?" Any poet will tell you that the verifiable truth of the matter on the page is far beside the point. The poem, borrowing the language-texture of experience, creates its own truth, like a little planet with its own gravitational field. In that way, poetry can lightly bend reality towards itself; our experience of reality is mediated by language, and language finds endless new forms and modular connections in poetry. This is why we don't organize poetry into a fiction vs. nonfiction dichotomy; the medium transcends it.
The parallels to UFO encounters are fairly obvious. These moments of paranormality "can't" happen, and yet they do. People's experiences are very real to them, and their lives are forever altered. Reality bends, truth is newly produced. To ask an experiencer, "Did this actually, physically happen?" feels like a loaded, even false, approach, without the possibility of a satisfying answer. It can't happen, yet it did.
More broadly, literature feels well-suited to exploring subjects that exceed the grasp of science and religion. Mercia Eliade, a Romanian historian of religion and philosophy, said that folklore and other kinds of literature might "constitute authentic instruments of knowledge" which can "disclose some dimensions of reality that are inaccessible to other intellectual approaches." This particular passage I came across in a book by Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, a scholar of religion, who goes on to describe how some of Eliade's personal paranormal experiences found expression in his fiction as opposed to his academic scholarship, with clear intentionality.
Why would Eliade write about his real experiences in a fictional mode instead of folding them into his religious scholarship? It could be from a fear of breaching subjects deemed taboo or too weird for serious thought, but it could also be because these experiences gain a certain power when they're allowed to avoid an interrogation of scientific credibility, itself a shaky lens with which we prod the manifold nature of the human spiritual experience.
The idea follows that not only is there a literary dimension to people's incredible and highly strange experiences, but that these experience are themselves a kind of literature, that these intense moments are when, as Kripal writes, "the physical world becomes a text to be read out and interpreted," where meaning arises not out of matter and material but out of the sudden appearance of symbols and stories stemming from the deep structures of our thought, ferrying us momentarily beyond our reality into a surreality.
This subject is indeed surreal. That's a word that's been hollowed out to simply mean "weird" in the modern parlance, but I've always liked the French poet Andre Breton's original definition: the surreal as surplus reality. As too much reality. Where every single thing is so heavily imbued with patterns of symbolic meaning, it's almost unbearable to our minds. Instead of approaching reality as the result of simple and measurable cause-and-effect, Breton saw in dream life, in automatic writing trances, and in poems a viable alternative to logic and religion: "Like science, like philosophy, poetry is a means of knowledge; like politics, like medicine, a means of action."
I like to think a living Breton would be equally taken in by the contours of the modern UFO field which can be seen as vindicating his beliefs and literary theories. My own studies of surrealism felt like a natural foundation for interrogating the UFO phenomenon. What surprises me the most is this: the book you're holding started as a desire to better understand the paranormal through poetry. It had the opposite effect: I now better understand poetry through the paranormal.
These subjects have been an interest of mine for as long as I can remember. As a child, I was really into aliens and even identified with the figure of the alien: odd, ambiguous, somewhat silly. I had a green stuffed alien companion named Aillie, and in kindergarten I'd talk endlessly about some fabulous imaginary place of my origin called Planet Cuckoo Clock. Where all that stuff came from, I've no clue.
Even now, these motifs materialize in my dreams with frequency, and I greet them with ecstasy. So in a way this book feels like a completion of a long-held bundle of thoughts, something that has shaped my attitudes towards myself and the world.
Unfortunately, I've never seen an actual UFO, nor have I communicated with any type of extraterrestrial. I have had a couple of paranormal experiences, and some of those moments have found their way into these poems. But none of these UFO encounter stories are mine.
I do have one strange and related memory from my past which I've always considered an invention of my overactive childhood imagination. In truth, it's not really a memory, but more of a singular, crystal clear image. It's night. I'm peeking through my bedroom window on the second floor overlooking our family's backyard, replete with carport, basketball hoop, apple tree, and various play equipment. I watch a stereotypical "gray" shamble awkwardly towards our house, flailing its upper limbs in haphazard fashion, smoothly sliding along the ground like a frictionless video game model.
In the image, it's interesting to me that the creature is not moving towards our house's backdoor, which is located below my window and to the right, but is moving towards me, or more accurately, towards the kitchen window directly below mine. The light in the image is noteworthy in its brightness and silvery-blueness. My father was a professional photographer at the time and the light reminded me of the lights he would use in his studio.
I don't think this image is a memory and I'm not claiming to be an experiencer. I think this is something that I conjured to scare and titillate myself at night. But after hearing the words of many experiencers, I've accepted that many elaborate and strange paranormal experiences started off as fragments of memories, as singular images tucked in dreams, as shards of some forgotten night returning to the mind suddenly and without warning, shrapnel emerging from the flesh of a long-healed wound.
***
My story is not really as interesting as the stories I've read and heard from others. I'd estimate at least 5% of the people who I mentioned my book project to end up telling me about an experience of theirs or an experience had by someone they know: "My grandpa saw a flying saucer in the 1970s. It flew right over him while he was working on a powerline, and he's been a member of MUFON ever since," or, "I told my dad about your book and he brought up something he's never talked about before: a triangle-shaped craft he saw deep in the woods. He followed it for a while until it disappeared at ridiculous speed," or, "My uncles saw three luminescent green orbs dancing over Lake Superior for hours one night," or, "My parents tell me as a child I kept predicting the coming of a mothership. Then some weird lights were in the sky for a while," or, "I went to a mountain that was a UFO hotspot. I saw a huge glowing orange sphere. It turned and looked at me and the other people there. One guy started screaming."
Airline workers, job interviewers (I didn't get the job), acquaintances at wedding receptions, late-night strangers at the back patios of bars, other artists. People from all walks of life relate their stories and theories with such relish and joy. The activity of sharing them has the tinge of danger in a way that feels like sharing a personal secret. Not everyone is receptive to these ideas, so it takes a certain boldness to talk openly.
But listening to them, and to the sincerity and wonder with which they're shared, I can sense that these stories hide behind the scaffolding of many people's mindscapes. They really want to talk about this stuff—anything to briefly pull our collective gaze away from the cruel world of politics, from climate catastrophe, from our alienating day jobs, from the burning grotesqueries of the here-and-now, and toward a horizon of possibility.
Then there are the eerie things I've heard. At a conference, I attended a talk by a mysterious and credentialed chemist who claimed intimate involvement with a federal UFO project. His talk was fascinating, but it raised a lot of questions. Later, my friend was busking around the conference for more information and heard a strange story about another federal official briefed by this chemist. After the briefing, all the official could mutter for days was, We're property, we're property…
I've scanned the chilling ramblings of paranoiacs, occultists, and mystics connecting UFO stuff to all manner of interdimensional demons and ancient Egyptian magic rituals and nefarious astral aberrations. These people write with such fanatical conviction, deep textual exegesis, and moral urgency that it can cause one, in a late and unguarded hour, to wonder if they're truly on to something.
I recount these threads of the story here to once again emphasize the formal ambiguity of the whole thing. Think of it as a caution sign: anyone who claims to have it all figured out is probably trying to sell you a meditation app. This phenomenon is by its very nature impossible to pin down, elusive, rolling from the focused center of one's vision to its tantalizing periphery. It reminds me of that old Mitch Hedberg joke: maybe bigfoot is blurry.
Quite like, again, the forever elusive poem, the poem which refuses to be pinned down and explained. A friend who studied under the great Slovenian surrealist poet Tomaž Šalamun once quoted him as saying: "The poem wants to do everything. It wants to fly and it wants to swim."
Yes. The poem also wants to pass through solid objects. It wants to radiate colorful beams of light. It wants to read your mind and it wants to force images into it. It wants to scare you and it wants to heal you. It wants to know your childhood memories and it wants to fuel your transcendence.
And briefly, sometimes, your reality bends around it. And then it disappears.
-- August Smith is an artist in Austin, TX. You can interface with his songs, games, and even more UFO poems at: http://augustsmith.net/
illustration by Chris Harnan