This isn't “Nadja.” There is no mysterious woman sitting in a candle-lit window with red velvet curtains. Breton's Surrealism left a trail of damnation, just as he predicted and I want no part of that.
This is Science. Science from a place where geometries as yet uninvented have merged with the demons of the present through the future. Aura Street never should have existed, but it did. A block North, there is an unremarkable street, sloping up toward the hills of southern San Francisco.
During the day, from the flats up, where there sits a decaying asian supermarket, you can see lovely and soothing dark green trees way up in the clouds. They exist in some cloud dimension that I will never be able to visit during this lifetime. I dare not even dream.
Sunset is the time when things become different and possibilities emerge that I could only imagine in fantasies. There is no fantasia here, no suspension of disbelief necessary, no sublime and no mundane. There is a whole continent of invisible geometries that reveals the hidden spine of a place that cannot be in our world. The romance of the hidden has no place here either. There is no romance in the discovery of something that challenges the very existence of our World in the Cosmos. I wish that the Vedantins had been correct. I wish that there was an all-encompassing illusion that revealed a Divine sport and play. It is much different and far less appealing to logic or desire.
It happened on an October night during a pounding rain and howling wind. It was so cold that I was shivering under layers of warm clothing. I caught a glance of something out of the corner of my eye moving up the hill that made me stop dead in my tracks. The whole street was bathed in a brilliant moving, living violet light. Rather, I should say that it seemed to be an ultraviolet light that became visible to my senses. The same effect was observed by many others, but always with furtive and sidelong glances. Glaring directly at the street produced nothing at all. No strange light or even anything outside of a common interurban street. There was also an instinctive fear of that light, as if it held a warning against venturing too far into the phenomena. I suppose the investigators of unidentified flying objects have similar experiences with their Men in Black warning them off going any further. There were no men in pancake makeup, stetsons and outdated double-breasted suits here. Just a light that should not have existed where it had no reason to be. I thought about it long and hard and finally decided to take a chance on the street. I finally noticed the name of the street. It was odd that I had never really looked for the street sign and the name of the street that is set into the concrete of the sidewalk on all San Francisco streets. The reflector sign on black pole said that this was “Laura” street. I looked down and realized that the “L” in “Laura” hadn't taken hold in the wet concrete and that I was staring at “Aura” street.
There wasn't a single soul anywhere on that late October night. It was cold but clear and the Moon was just about full. I walked forward on the left-hand side of the street with my eyes completely closed. I knew that a leap of mind was required here and that vision or any other of the senses would just botch it up. I was right. I opened my eyes and I was no longer there, yet I was clearly there. It was something like what the Grail stories call “Chapel Perilous.” This was a place where all assumptions were upended and there was no core of inherent existence that I could hang on to, in order to save my ego from being swallowed up into nothingness. All I could do was to ride the wave as the assumptions of my life, of reality, of sanity and of physics receded somewhere very far away.
Space and time cannot be separated, nor can they be divided into discrete experiences. Their continuum is so all embracing that you would expect that one could hang on to that as a lifesaver. Not the case. Outside of time and space, there is Nothing. It is not a thing but not not a thing. It has no up or down or in or out. It is painful, torturous and funny, all together.
It is not that there are no “people” on Aura street,either. They are there in the form of implied presences that can be slowly deciphered and read if one cares to spend a few years. The lack of manifestation is symptomatic of the whole experience of the Street, which is a living being in its' own right with no sub tenants possible. The whole experience is best described as “shattered.” Much like glass shatters in radiating circles and fractures, Aura Street encompasses the shattering of space and time in a particularly painful and horrendous way. It is deathly silent, so that I wonder if it is not the land of the dead and the guild of the merchants of death, but the silence is so overwhelming that I have never been able to penetrate its' depths and heights.
