Fog

The fog just arrived, descending rapidly over an otherwise sunny day. In the late afternoon the air was overcast, an hour later it was distinctly foggy. Before long, a deep and mysterious fog had surrounded every object within perception. I stepped outside to blanket myself in the silence.

The mercury vapor lamp that illuminates the farmyard after sundown had switched on, and had become a moon, casting a frosty, crystalline light into the dense air, and limning the inky dark branches of a nearby walnut tree with surfaces of bluish glow. Stepping slightly to one side, so the light was behind the tree trunk, increased the spectral effect. Inside the bowl created by the branches was a luminous spherical glow of steely cold, yet oddly comforting light. My own private moon dog, I thought.


Behind me, the spring house lay crouched into it’s bank, like an ancient building slowly sinking into a Irish bog. On either side, two huge walnut trees reached upward, their branches like a thousand arms eerily reaching toward a dark sky, like hundreds of devils at worship, but frozen in time. The fog carries sound extremely well but no sounds came, making the silence a deep cavern of acoustic space. The bluish glow in the background replaced the familiar detail of trees and bushes sitting on the rising hill behind, which had the slightly unsettling effect of pushing the powerful trunks and grasping branches forward yet keeping them flat, in silhouette.

The fog became still denser and it seemed, more quiet. Behind me was the pond and I turned, and walked toward it. By this time the fog had painted out the entire background including Shade Mountain, the nearby hills, the fields in front, even our own fields. The treeline just beyond the pond just barely be seen, against a hazy deep blue urple backdrop. It was as if everything further than 100 feet was replaced with an out of focus curtain.

The trees became mysterious and important. The water was still and glasslike. My imagination conjured beauties behind the curtain, and imagined that ghosts and flying wraiths could come flying up towards me, like a scene from Harry Potter. I felt odd emotions.

I love the fog here. Day or night, it always profoundly alters perception. It seem that subtracting the background or obscuring it, changes one’s perception of things nearby. It creates a new context for the familiar, one possessing both more depth and less information.

To balance and fill this void of visual information the mind seems to activate, and within foggy scenes, people seem to sense beauty, or threat, or insecurity, apparently dependent , Rohrshach-like, upon their psyches.

It is tempting to think of fog as a metaphor for ignorance, and a clearly lit day as a correlative metaphor for clarity of perception and vision. Yet this leaves out an important function of the mist, for fog, like mystery, engages our imagination. The crisp clarity of sunny daylight turns the world into a knowable, measurable, apprehensible mass of detail. We lose all the magic.

Conversely, when we’re presented with a mystery (or a partial truth surrounded with confusion) with a tantalizing promise of answers just around the corner, we are drawn into conversation with it. We yearn to solve the mystery. We supplant the missing information, meaning or understanding with myths and symbols of our own invention. And if we cannot solve the mystery we worship it.

In November 2006, Wired magazine devoted an issue to a subject they termed “The New Athiests.” In the lead article, “Church of the Non-believers,” author Gary Wolf presents the argument that logically, religion makes no sense. There is a simple clarity to this argument that appeals to me. Yet like the flattening snapshot quality of a bright day, something deeper is missing.

It might be possible to be satisfied intellectually with an argument that dispenses with the idiocies of religious dogma, ritual that mainly serves to elevate and distance the priest from parishioner, and blinding obsession that has led to more human death and misery than any other source. Even so, the argument doesn’t explain the process of imagination and the function of creativity. I feel the need for a more deeply satisfying engagement with life, and a way to admit the mysteries of origin, perception and awareness.

Imagine a Mass, being said in a large, ancient cathedral. Censers swinging slowly, dispensing incense, the priestly group advances to the altar. Mysterious words and concepts beyond understanding float into the space, which is adorned with impossible images of perfect creatures and angels, with reflective gold glints, and scintillating bits of colored light streaming in through a rose window. The contemplation of such rich pageantry is somehow satisfying on a non-verbal level, perhaps because the twinkle and pomp engages both the sub-conscious and the imagination.

When the mind is deprived of a complete and full answer, the imagination goes into gear. When the fog shrouds familiar objects, or when snow obscures the once familiar road, our subconscious supplies answers.

Similarly, when out of place information is added to a scene, especially light, it triggers emotional and sometimes spiritual responses. Light rays (formed by openings in the clouds) become known as “God’s rays” and confer a kind of majestic blessing over an otherwise ordinary scene.



“Imagination and “subconscious” are similar but not interchangeable subjects —I think the imagination is a conscious view screen of the subconscious process. It is the method of the sub-conscious to float visions and symbols, word fragments, emotional sensations and bits of taped experience to stimulate response, stimulate instinct and suggest solutions. We see this cornucopia through the imagination, and sense it through emotion.

When presented by a view of the pond that differed from the “norm,” and my imagination began throwing up ideas about flying ghosts, it would have been tempting and “normal” to put such thoughts out of mind, to suppress them. This time however, I did nothing and instead of pushing them away I tried to open and embrace them. I allowed images, emotions and ideas to flow through me as water passes under a bridge. Looking at the blue-violet mist, I simply enjoyed the show and laughed inwardly at myself for the crazy things the mind sometimes does.

After a bit, the purplish haze behind the treeline simply became a purplish haze. It wasn’t possible to clearly focus on the trees, so I simply enjoyed their arborescent mass as a bristly brushstrokes against the background. The pond was glass smooth and only reflected more of this out-of-focus impressionism. The gentian landscape fused into a unity, and seemed peaceful.

That’s when I think I saw it most clearly.