Summer Lake

    After long abstention from that home remedy for late-night boredom, I fired up google maps and began perusing places I’d likely never see or go. But before landing on far-flung Mumbai or some stream flowing into lake Balkhash, a sight closer to home caught my eye. No more than a straight-line mile from where I live is a very ordinary shopping center. There isn’t much to say about it, being the usual retail medley packaged in uniform gray vessels. But if you sneak behind the supermarket in high summer, you’re suddenly transported into the New York Philharmonic of peeper frogs. Far in the distance you hear uncountably many, likely tens of thousands of little frogs united in a wall of solid peep. I remember long ago taking the occasional trip back there to listen to them and wondering where the sound had been coming from. Long ago I’d first used satellite imagery to see that there were vast ponds behind the veil of trees around the lot. The water was dappled with many colonies of water plants, like a mosaic of mold on a neglected sugary drink, so it couldn’t have been that deep. There were two ponds separated by a suspiciously straight, even causeway. The ponds each had an almost perfect right angle, like a ceramic tile fractured on its diagonal. The image of those familiar twin triangles lay before me once again.

    I’ve long been absolutely fascinated by them, enough that I’d randomly think about it on occasions or find myself wistfully, bitterly imagining all those long summers with slow-flowing clear water below and cloud specked sky above. I’d almost be bitter that I couldn’t just belong there. Then of course whatever present situation would bury that thought again. But the thoughts would recur whenever I needed reminders of paradise lost. I suppose this is becoming a common theme. The promises of something better, and the things that go bump in the night both involve peculiar bodies of water. My vision of what was meant-to-be is a shallow lake in high summer, surrounded by long rippling marsh-weed with a big, forested hill looming behind. Summer Lake, I’ve taken to calling it. Even thinking about it now is a real bummer, and I’d suggest everyone not focus sharply on carrots dangled before them. That advice only works if you have free will over thoughts which, like Summer Lake, I presume exists because I can’t think of the alternative.

    Limerence is an unnerving subject at the best of times. Ever since I learned of the concept It’s been inextricably tied with psychotic ex-lovers and the basis for court orders. Maybe as with Halloween decorations it’ll become much less scary once we find the flashlight button. I’m using the term as more a type-of-thought and less a romantical or interpersonal-only matter. When you get down to the bottom, limerence seems to be about what-ifs. Everyone who understands cause and effect also understands what-if. To use goals necessarily means building an imaginary thing to then make material. But what happens when you’re a tenacious solver of something that isn’t solvable. You get stuck in the envisioning-goal phase and as you keep climbing the top step, your goal, appears to stretch into heaven when you’re really just on a Stairmaster. That’s the explanation I’ve managed to get from surface thinking, anyways. I’m fairly certain I haven’t experienced standard-limerence, so for all I know this may put a neat bow on the issue. I’m not satisfied, though. There’s something eerily familiar here. Something’s still letting the cold air in.

    Considering the other half, we return to the poor soul lost in his what-ifs. We’ve established that his goal is impossible. Yet he has that goal, and to him that goal is his personal capstone. What if he’s correct? What if he and the world he lives in is predetermined, but in a way that doesn’t remotely align with our souls. Humans have always dabbled with determinism. The idea of soulmates, everything happening for a reason, and big chunks of belief systems play around with the idea. Capital-D Determinism though as mentioned before is not a pleasant topic, much like eating pure cacao powder is an unpleasant and very non-chocolatey experience. The universe, and all our lives with their triumphs and terrors are just… stuck that way. No thought is voluntary, and there is but one path ahead. This doesn’t have to be scientifically true, just focus on the “if” factor. There is a possibility after all. If some people are set up to long for what can never be, and further are doomed to know it would complete them, that’s 100% pure cacao powder. And we get a teaspoon full every time we painfully long for something, and maybe a sprinkling when we consider the road not taken.

    So why take this on that extremely long, existential detour? Because I was cosmically destined to take it. In all seriousness though, Summer Lake is lodged deep in my ideals with no chance of removal. Even now, the what-ifs are peeping away in my ear like those frogs. What if Zeus really did rent our original forms in two, only to cast one part beyond reach. What if, despite the machine of reality ticking along, there are some 4-40 screws hopelessly stuck in M3 holes. What if the literal gates of Eden stand in a summery pond somewhere, and I’ve seen them. The only comfort is thus to admire the gates from a distance. To keep them not as a goal but an inspiration. This is an idea just as old as the Greek creation myth, in the form of muses. Muses, the earthly touches of the divine which propelled the great masters up to reach it. Often, they were romantic interests, but like limerence encompass cherished places and past art. In being a muse, they climbed to the top landing of the stairway, and opened the door so the artist might see heaven’s light. They became a vessel for the divine and made possible the highest of expression. They did all this while sharing the same bitter components as the bittersweet dream of Summer Lake. Raw cacao powder doesn’t taste very good, so the best thing we can do is make chocolate.

 

“I’d like to make myself believe

That planet earth turns slowly”

-Owl City