The Aether

easier in the evening

I don’t really have a word for this one. So I call it “the Aether”.
Bear with me.

It’s late, and I am writing this to people I will never meet.

I sit here in the dark, setting down words, and somewhere out there, past the wire, are people I will never see and never speak to and never learn their names, and I am reaching towards them anyway.

And some of them, maybe, are reaching back.

That’s what’s always in the back of my mind.
Not the silver, not the wars, none of the things I usually point at.

Just this.

A few years ago there was this small experiment: a researcher in Nottingham got a hold of a London newspaper’s crossword before it ran and handed it to students in another city. Half tried it the day before it was published.

The rest waited a day, and after thousands of strangers had solved it, they sat down with it.

The puzzle did not change a single letter. And still… the ones who solved it afterwards did a little better.

As though the people who went first had left a little knowledge on the page, and then moved on, never once knowing they did.

Something was passed between two complete strangers right there.

Two people who never met, who each believed themselves completely alone, reaching the same far thought.

Newton and Leibniz, each certain no other mind on earth stood where his stood. They both arrived at calculus at the same moment. And then spent the rest of their lives in a cross-Channel fight over who got there first.

Swan in England and Edison in America, both bent over the same thread of light, neither knowing the other was alive. Both had built an identical lamp.

Darwin had sat on his theory for twenty years, when one ordinary morning a letter from a feverish naturalist half a world away described the very same thing.

Each of them thought they were alone.

Though none of them were.

I have never been able to decide whether we invent the best of our thoughts or happen to stumble upon them.

Is “genius” just another term for clairvoyant? Or are the “genius”es of the world merely able to glimpse the shape of things to come and deduce the outlines?

Or is it always just there?

Floating around in the Aether?

The Stoics had a word for the feeling: sympatheia (sideways referenced here: EEAaO). It conveys the sense that the whole of things is woven so finely that a tremor in one thread is felt along all the others.

I said that word once and meant it with everything in me. The cold modern word is ‘global subconscious’.

I think I prefer the older feeling of it. A kind of shared dreaming, a single mind that each one of us is but one small lit window in.

I can’t prove any of it. I have never seen its face. Never seen it in action.

But I have this feeling, like when someone is staring at you across the room and you feel the glare even before you turn around.

That is one part of why I write this stack.

I do not write to be right, or to be read by the ‘right’ people.

I write because I have come to believe that when I work something through and set it down plainly, out in the open, it stays there.

It waits on the page like that faint warmth of a touch just gone. Waiting for someone who comes along later, tired, looking for a way in.

One more square filled in on a puzzle that thousands of us are bent over.

The gentler world I keep dreaming out loud about might just arrive the way the sun arrives in the morning: softly, softly, all at once. When the Aether is ready to be perceived by us.

Some nights I am almost certain of all this.

Some nights I am just alone at my desk, typing into the dark, hoping the dark is listening. I cannot always tell the two apart.

Because every so often, very late, a sentence comes to me easier than I have any right to expect, already half-formed by the time I reach for it, and something in me goes very quiet, and I know.

Someone went first.

Someone I will never meet left a little hint and walked on.

So I leave mine here, for you.