Trepanation Explanation

Why did I drill the small auroral hole in my skull?
Ask the moon, ask the tremor in the tide-pool of my blood –
for I cannot answer without unscrolling the whole
chronicle of the self I abandoned like a ship too long in port,
its ropes frayed, its hull barnacled with yesterday’s uneaten hours.
I dropped out, yes – dropped outward, I should say,
as though the world were a shell and I were tunneling back
toward the first seabed of thought.

Turn on, turn in, turn the key of the vertebrae –
and there it was: a new life unfurling like phosphorescence
on a night shore, a trembling alphabet of light
rising from each wave-crest of sensation.
The drugs – oh, those tiny chemistries,
those alchemical insects humming the scrollwork of the invisible –
lifted the floorboards of perception,
and suddenly the quotidian corridor
filled with wind, with thunder, with the blue-violet candescence
of things as they are before we bury them in names.

I reached there: the inadmissible plateau,
the upland where the mind stands unhelmeted under its own stars,
chanting the private liturgy of pulse and filament.
Was it crazy, or what –
this decision to open a skylight in the bone?
No, love, no: it was the sanest thing, the dearly sane,
the one act that felt proportionate to the hurricane within.

But it required obstacles to be wooed,
difficulties to be courted like shy beasts at the edge of a glade.
There were nights when the drill’s imagined whine
echoed in my skull before metal ever touched it,
and I had to steady my breath against whole genealogies of doubt.
There were days when I rehearsed the incision
the way a monk might rehearse a psalm,
mouthing the syllables of courage to no one.

Yet still, the aperture.
Still, the opening like a secret harbor
in a coastline I had long mistaken for unbroken stone.
And through it – what?
A slow pressure, that ancient stranger of the blood,
slipping outward just enough
to redraw the inner cartography.
Some claim it is madness to grant the brain
a second window onto the world,
but I found myself calmer,
as though the storm-cloud had been given
a pet door through which to prowl.

Afterward, I tried – fumbling, earnest,
ridiculous in my missionary zeal –
to bring these discoveries to the public square,
to hold up the soft lantern of my experiment
like a lighthouse flame for others lost
in the opiate fogs and bureaucracies of their own minds.
But how do you persuade the unbroken-headed
that the breach is a blessing?
How do you explain that the skull, too,
must learn to breathe?

And so my later life became
a long, shimmering attempt to understand
what the operation had truly altered –
a review of days like sifting sands,
each grain a memory of thought clarified,
or passion unsealed, or sorrow passing through me
with a strange new tact,
as though grief itself had found the new doorway
and bowed politely on its way out.

I do not yet know the final judgement.
Perhaps no one ever does.
But I walk with the quiet sense of a lighthouse tender
who has finally entered the lantern room
and cleaned the last occlusion from the glass,
letting the beam pour out
over the black, beseeching waters.

And if you listen –
if you hold your breath just long enough –
you may hear in my voice
the faint sigh of wind through bone,
a little weather system of the soul escaping,
whispering its slow chromatographies of dawn
through the smallest, most deliberate
star I ever carved for myself.

Lynx in the Glass

Working in a museum grants one an unusual relationship with animals. Most people encounter wild creatures as fleeting presences. I spend part of my week within sight of a lynx preserved in perpetuity, its gaze fixed somewhere beyond the concerns of both curator and visitor.

Children approach it with delight. Adults tend to pause. The lynx carries itself with the self-assurance of a creature that once moved through forests according to its own inscrutable agenda. Even in taxidermy, it retains an air of private knowledge.

Perhaps that explains why the folklore of British big cats continues to thrive. 

For decades, people across the United Kingdom have reported encounters with large felines lurking in hedgerows, crossing moorland, or watching from the margins of woodland clearings. Witnesses describe black cats of improbable size. Pumas gliding through bracken. Panthers melting into evening shadows. Every county seems eager to cultivate its own resident phantom.

The skeptical explanation arrives promptly. Distance distorts scale. Light plays tricks. A domestic cat strolling across a field can undergo remarkable enlargement when viewed through rain, mist, memory, or excitement. Human perception carries many gifts. Precision at several hundred yards is seldom among them.

Yet the story refuses to die.

Part of its endurance arises from an inconvenient fact. Exotic cats have genuinely appeared in Britain. A puma was captured alive in Scotland in 1980 and spent the remainder of its life in captivity. Lynx have surfaced on more than one occasion. Jungle cats have met unfortunate ends beneath passing vehicles. Caracals have entered the narrative. These incidents provide the folklore with a small but potent ration of reality.

One escaped animal transforms a thousand impossible sightings into something merely improbable.

The timing also matters. The Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976 altered the landscape of exotic pet ownership. Britain already possessed a quiet tradition of eccentric animal keeping. Country houses contained private menageries. Wealthy enthusiasts acquired creatures whose suitability for domestic life had perhaps received insufficient consideration. A leopard cub appears charming at an age when it can fit comfortably inside a wicker basket. The arithmetic changes considerably after a year or two.

It requires little imagination to picture a handful of privately owned cats slipping into the countryside during those decades. Such events undoubtedly occurred. The question concerns what happened afterward.

Experts remain unconvinced that any breeding population of large cats established itself in Britain. Evidence capable of surviving serious scrutiny remains elusive. Hair samples dissolve into ambiguity. Footprints acquire suspicious dimensions. Photographs arrive carrying all the visual clarity of a Victorian séance.

And still the reports continue.

I find this persistence fascinating.

The British landscape seems especially hospitable to hidden presences. Vast wilderness is unnecessary. A surprising amount can vanish within a patchwork of fields, woods, abandoned quarries, railway embankments, and neglected estates. Anyone who has watched a roe deer emerge silently from vegetation knows how much life escapes casual notice.

Then there is the older layer of the story.

Long before newspapers began printing reports of phantom panthers, Britain possessed its own feline mythology. Medieval Welsh literature tells of Cath Palug, a monstrous cat whose reputation exceeded even its claws. Folktales from the New Forest speak of a strange lion associated with Boldre. Rural traditions preserved accounts of extraordinary cats wandering through landscapes already crowded with saints, ghosts, spectral hounds, and other tenants of the imagination.

The modern big cat inherits this territory. It prowls through the same mental geography.

What intrigues me most is the emotional texture of these stories. The witnesses rarely describe terror. Their accounts often contain wonder, bewilderment, even a kind of gratitude. They glimpse something impossible beside a hedgerow and carry the memory for years. The encounter acquires the shape of a secret.

A black form crosses a distant hillside.

The observer freezes.

For a moment, the world becomes larger.

Whether the animal proves to be a panther, a Labrador, or a particularly ambitious tabby scarcely matters afterward. The spell has already taken hold.

Museum collections teach a similar lesson. Visitors often arrive expecting certainty. They seek labels, dates, classifications. Yet every collection contains mysteries. Provenance vanishes. Specimens accumulate rumors. Objects acquire stories that cling to them like dust. Facts illuminate much, though they seldom extinguish curiosity.

The lynx in our museum embodies that tension beautifully. It stands as evidence that wild cats can indeed find their way into unexpected corners of Britain. At the same time, it reminds us how eagerly the human imagination enlarges a possibility.

Do I believe a thriving population of secret panthers stalks the British countryside?

Probably not.

Do I think every witness simply mistook an ordinary house cat for something grander?

That seems equally unsatisfying.

Tyrannosaurus Time

One of the most counterintuitive facts in paleontology concerns time itself.

We often link them together in the ancient theater of our minds - two titans locked in a timeless, dusty battle, just as Walt Disney's Fantasia painted them long ago.

But the truth is a far more haunting ghost story.

The fierce Tyrannosaurus rex walked the earth roughly 66 million years ago, just before the stars fell. Yet the Stegosaurus, with its quiet crown of armored plates and heavy spiked tail, had already been sleeping in the stone for 150 million years.

Between the last breath of the Stegosaurus and the first footprint of the T. rex lies a vast, silent ocean of 84 million years.

In other words, T. rex stood closer in time to human beings than it did to Stegosaurus.

The mind instinctively groups dinosaurs together. They occupy a single compartment in our imagination, a lost world populated by giant reptiles. Yet this convenient category conceals a staggering temporal reality. "Dinosaur" describes a lineage that endured for well over 165 million years. The duration separating some dinosaur species exceeds the interval separating us from the last dinosaurs themselves.

Facts like this expose a limitation in human temporal intuition. We navigate daily life through years, decades, perhaps centuries of recorded history. Deep time operates on a scale so immense that distinctions collapse. Eighty million years and sixty million years both register simply as "a very long time ago." Geological time compresses itself into a kind of cognitive haze.

Philosophers have long wondered whether this limitation reflects something fundamental about time itself. Aristotle treated time as inseparable from change, describing it as a measure of motion and succession. Augustine shifted attention inward, locating past and future within memory and anticipation. Centuries later, Newton imagined time as a vast and uniform container through which events pass, while Einstein folded time into the geometry of spacetime, transforming it from a universal backdrop into part of the physical architecture of reality.

The contrast between T. rex and Stegosaurus invites a deeper question. What exactly separates two moments in time? Eighty-four million years feels enormous because so much happened within it. Entire ecosystems appeared and vanished. Mountain ranges rose and eroded. Oceans advanced and retreated. Evolution reshaped countless lineages. If every process in the universe ceased, if every atom, star, and living thing entered perfect stasis, would a million years still pass? Or does time derive its meaning from change itself?

The ancient debate remains unresolved. Some philosophers argue that time exists independently, like an empty stage awaiting actors. Others contend that time consists only of relationships among events. According to that view, asking whether time passes without change resembles asking whether a dance continues after every dancer has frozen in place.

Deep time gives this debate a peculiar texture. Looking backward across millions of years, the distinction between events begins to blur. The gulf between Stegosaurus and T. rex appears vast, yet from the perspective of a four-billion-year-old planet it occupies only a narrow stretch of history. A hundred million years can seem impossibly long or surprisingly brief depending on the scale from which it is viewed.

Perhaps that is the most remarkable lesson hidden within the fossil record. Dinosaurs are often presented as creatures of another world. In temporal terms, however, some of them occupied moments closer to our own than to other chapters of their lineage's history. The familiar picture of a single "Age of Dinosaurs" dissolves into a succession of worlds, each separated by spans of time almost beyond comprehension.

The fossils remain where they fell. The rocks preserve their sequence. Yet the true marvel may be the intervals between them. Time itself, far more than any predator or extinction, was the great architect of the dinosaur era.

Mothman and the Grammar of Darkness

Every monster belongs to a landscape.

The vampire belongs to the threshold, the werewolf to the wild, the sea serpent to the abyss. Mothman belongs to a beam of light.

Again and again, the accounts from Point Pleasant return to illumination. Automobile headlights sweeping across abandoned roads. Flashlight beams probing fields. Searchlights of attention cast toward the derelict expanse of the TNT Area. Above all, eyes - two red disks burning in the dark like signal lamps suspended in flesh.

One might imagine darkness as the natural habitat of monsters. Folklore suggests otherwise. Monsters emerge where darkness encounters light. A shape glimpsed. A movement caught. A reflection mistaken for a presence. The monster occupies the interval between obscurity and disclosure, arriving at the precise moment when perception begins to believe it understands what it sees.

Mothman inhabits this interval with singular elegance.

The historical circumstances surrounding the legend possess an almost theatrical quality. Point Pleasant in 1966 existed amid the residue of industrial modernity. The abandoned munitions complex known as the TNT Area sprawled across the landscape like an archaeological site from a future already forgotten. Concrete igloos sat among weeds. Rust advanced with botanical patience. Pools of stagnant water mirrored fragments of sky. Technology had receded, leaving behind its architecture of absence.

Such places generate peculiar optical conditions. Light behaves strangely among ruins. It ricochets. Fragments. Elongates shadows. Converts ordinary geometry into ambiguity. A heron standing motionless beside water acquires an impossible stature. Reflections multiply. Distances become uncertain. The eye, eager for coherence, begins composing narratives from silhouettes.

Vision itself is a fabulist.

This insight reaches deep into the history of Western thought. Philosophers have repeatedly enlisted light as a metaphor for truth. Plato imagined enlightenment as an ascent toward radiance. Medieval theologians conceived divine knowledge as illumination. The Enlightenment transformed brightness into an intellectual virtue. To know became synonymous with seeing. Clarity acquired moral prestige. Obscurity inherited suspicion.

The metaphor achieved such dominance that it became invisible.

Yet every metaphor conceals a rebellion within itself.

Light reveals surfaces. Meaning occupies depth.

The distinction appears trivial until one begins examining phenomena that resist immediate interpretation. The witness sees the red eyes. The witness sees the wings. The witness sees the shape lifting into the air.

Sight occurs.

Knowledge hesitates.

The entire mythology of Mothman unfolds within this hesitation.

Particularly fascinating is the recurrent motif of eyeshine. Several skeptical explanations for the sightings invoke a perfectly ordinary phenomenon: reflected light. Animal eyes, struck by headlights or flashlights, return illumination toward its source. The effect transforms creatures into living mirrors. Owls possess it. Herons possess it. Deer possess it. The darkness suddenly gazes back.

The image borders on the metaphysical.

Human beings have long imagined themselves as agents of observation, creatures who direct vision outward and harvest understanding from the world. Eyeshine reverses the relationship. Illumination returns. Observation folds back upon the observer. The darkness acquires pupils.

Something watches.

Mothman emerges precisely at this reversal.

Its famous red eyes function as more than anatomical features. They operate symbolically, transforming the creature into a paradoxical source of illumination. Yet the light they emit communicates nothing. Ancient lighthouses guided sailors. Signal fires conveyed messages. Stars provided navigation. Mothman's eyes generate visibility without orientation.

They glow.

They signify.

They refuse interpretation.

Semiotically, the creature resembles a word whose definition has vanished while its emotional resonance remains intact. Every encounter produces significance without certainty. Witnesses experience meaning before explanation. The result resembles what the philosopher Rudolf Otto identified as the numinous: an encounter characterized by mystery, fascination, and dread occurring simultaneously.

One does not so much understand as feels understood. This inversion may explain the creature's enduring psychological force.

Birds traditionally occupy a privileged position within symbolic systems. Their mastery of the sky grants them an intermediary status between earth and heaven. Ravens carry omens. Eagles embody sovereignty. Owls preside over wisdom. The Mothman narrative assembles these ancient associations and subjects them to distortion. Flight remains. Meaning fractures.

The wings continue speaking.

The language dissolves.

Even the chronology of the legend exhibits this structure. Following the collapse of the Silver Bridge in December 1967, retrospective interpretation rushed into the vacuum created by catastrophe. The sightings acquired prophetic significance. The creature became an omen.

Human cognition possesses a profound allergy to coincidence. Tragedy attracts narrative with gravitational force. Events seek constellations. Patterns crystallize. Connections emerge.

A bridge falls.

A monster was seen.

The imagination constructs a corridor between them.

What matters here is neither the factual validity nor invalidity of the association. More revealing is the speed with which disaster transforms ambiguity into revelation. The unknown creature becomes retrospectively legible. Meaning arrives after the event and travels backward through time.

Prophecy often functions this way.

The owl of wisdom flies at dusk, wrote Hegel.

The omen arrives afterward.

The symbolism of light undergoes a subtle transformation at this point. Throughout the modern world, illumination has expanded with imperial ambition. Streetlights erase night. Satellites survey continents. Screens radiate perpetual visibility. Vast systems of information promise unprecedented transparency. Humanity surrounds itself with mechanisms designed to banish uncertainty.

Yet uncertainty proliferates.

The brightest century produced conspiracy theories, mass surveillance, information warfare, and epistemological fragmentation on a scale previously unimaginable. Visibility increased. Consensus diminished.

Mothman appears uncannily prescient in this regard.

The creature belongs to an illuminated age haunted by interpretive darkness.

Its habitat includes roads, power lines, industrial sites, newspaper headlines, and television broadcasts. Electric light saturates the mythology. The monster emerges from a world already flooded with visibility. Consequently, its significance cannot reside in concealment. The legend stages a more troubling possibility: revelation itself may generate mystery.

A flashlight sweeps across a field.

Two red eyes ignite.

The observer receives more information than before.

The observer understands less.

At its deepest level, the Mothman myth concerns a crisis of legibility. The creature occupies the fault line separating perception from comprehension. It dramatizes a discovery as ancient as philosophy and as contemporary as the internet: seeing and knowing belong to different orders of experience.

Darkness, within this framework, acquires unexpected dignity. It ceases to signify ignorance and begins signifying possibility. The dark preserves multiplicity. The dark postpones closure. The dark shelters alternative interpretations from the tyranny of immediate certainty.

Mothman therefore dwells within a uniquely modern sublime. Its red eyes punctuate the night like commas in an unfinished sentence. Every sighting interrupts reality without completing it. Every witness confronts an excess of significance.

The creature never quite arrives.

The explanation never quite arrives.

The meaning never quite arrives.

And so the legend endures, because the darkness itself learned how to look back.

Morning Walk, Basement Calls

Halifax at seven in the morning, before the offices unlock and before the harbor begins performing itself for tourists, has the look of a place briefly relieved of its obligations. The heat is already there, waiting. Not the dramatic heat of noon, but a low, ambient pressure, as if the day has been preheating for hours without anyone noticing.

Walking to work in that kind of weather creates the illusion that one has chosen a simpler life than one actually has. You move through blocks of old houses and convenience stores and buses idling at intersections, carrying only a coffee and whatever private inventory of concerns you've packed into your head. The city seems arranged entirely for your passage. Every other pedestrian becomes a character whose plotline has not yet intersected with yours.

This morning I found myself thinking about stories, which is perhaps unsurprising when a story is about to leave your possession and become somebody else's. Basement Caller will be published on July 1st in Flash Phantoms. The piece has already completed most of its actual life – the writing, the revising, the second-guessing. Publication is just the moment when the private object becomes public weather.

Grace and I doing well. Thanks to my association with her, I was featured recently in a small fashion event, of all things, which remains one of those experiences that feels slightly more plausible in retrospect than while it is happening. 

Maybe that's what these early walks offer: a temporary sense that life's various threads are not competing with one another but travelling side by side. The literary ambitions, the ordinary employment, the relationship, the strange little public moments, the private anxieties. They all accompany you down the same sidewalk.

By eight-thirty the spell is gone. The city resumes full volume. Emails. Deadlines. The heat.

Little Devils

They swarm in corners, tiny claws on bone,
a whispering legion in the pulse and skin;
each one a mirror of the mind’s sharp ache,
collecting every tremor of my own,
and gnawing quietly where hope had been.
They squat upon the chest, unseen, obscene,
their murmur presses like a tide of flame,
and every thought I lift becomes their prey,
a festering delight they shape and claim.

I feel them crawl beneath the hair, the nail,
a thousand judgments filed against my name;
their wings beat hot against the hollowed brain.
They chant of error, folly, slow travail,
of wasted hours that only stain remain.
Each breath invites them further into vein,
and yet, perverse, I lean into the hive,
for every sting confirms I am alive,
and every prick reminds the mind to strive.

Monster Outside the School

Horror functions as both an affective experience and a cognitive practice. It organizes anxiety into perceptible structures and allows the subject to inhabit those structures long enough to learn their contours.

My recurring nightmare illustrates this process. The dream takes place in a school during winter. The building stands isolated within a landscape of snow and darkness. The heating has failed. Cold saturates the hallways, classrooms, stairwells, and gymnasium. Fluorescent lights cast a weak illumination across linoleum floors. Lockers extend in long rows toward vanishing points that seem to recede as one walks. Every room appears occupied by absence. The architecture remains familiar, yet familiarity itself becomes a source of unease. Recognition offers no security. It merely confirms that one has arrived in a place from which departure remains uncertain.

The dream imposes a simple condition. Something waits outside.

The narrative never fully identifies this presence. The dream withholds concrete description. It provides no stable image, no definitive anatomy, no reliable account of motive. Yet the entire environment organizes itself around the assumption of its existence. The cold itself appears to announce the creature. Frost gathers on windows. Exterior doors resist movement. Wind presses against the walls with intermittent force. The school becomes a shelter, but shelter gains meaning only through reference to what threatens it.

The structure of the nightmare reveals an important feature of horror. Fear frequently attaches itself less to an object than to a horizon. The monster matters because it occupies a position beyond perception. It resides at the edge of available knowledge. Every creak in the building, every shift of light, every glimpse through a frosted window points toward a possibility that remains unresolved. Consciousness fills this uncertainty with anticipation. The imagination works continuously to complete an image that sensory evidence never fully supplies.

The cold monster outside the school therefore represents more than a predatory being. It embodies a particular relationship between the self and the unknown. Cold strips environments of comfort and vitality. It slows movement, reduces sensation, and threatens the boundaries of the living body. Within the nightmare, the monster appears as an extension of these qualities. It expresses a universe that proceeds without concern for human needs. It resembles winter itself elevated into agency. Snow falls whether anyone survives. Darkness arrives on schedule. Temperature declines according to indifferent laws. The creature gives these impersonal processes a face, while preserving their essential remoteness.

This dynamic helps explain why horror often generates fascination alongside distress. The nightmare establishes a bounded arena in which confrontation with radical uncertainty becomes possible. The dreamer explores corridors, opens doors, peers through windows, and listens for distant sounds. Each action increases vulnerability while also increasing knowledge. Fear heightens attention. Attention produces discovery. Discovery encourages further exploration. The experience sustains itself through this feedback loop.

Many works of horror draw their force from similar arrangements. They position human subjects within environments designed to produce meaning, then expose those environments to forces that exceed their explanatory capacities. The resulting tension generates both terror and wonder. Terror arises from the recognition of vulnerability. Wonder arises from contact with something larger than established frameworks can contain.

The nightmare of the frozen school condenses this structure into a stark image. Inside stands warmth reduced to its final reserves, memory arranged into corridors, knowledge preserved within walls. Outside waits a presence carried by snow, darkness, distance, and cold. The dream never permits direct encounter because direct encounter would resolve the tension. Horror depends upon the continuation of uncertainty. The monster remains outside because it belongs to the horizon itself.

The question therefore persists: what cold monster lies beyond the school?

The nightmare offers several answers simultaneously. The monster is death. The monster is isolation. The monster is the indifferent universe. The monster is the future approaching through darkness. Most importantly, the monster is the form assumed by whatever consciousness cannot yet know but cannot stop imagining. Horror gives that unknown a shape. It places the shape beyond the window. Then it invites the dreamer to keep looking.