The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Category “Art”

The Passion of the Space Jockey

Sunday, 14 February, 2021

Alienated Sentience and Endosymbiosis in the World of H.R. Giger by Eric Wargo The following is a paper presented in 2018 at the Rice University conference Gnostic Afterlives in American Religion and Culture. A final, fully sourced version appears in the journal Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies 5(1), 2020. Giger paintings are used with permission […]

Where Was It Before the Dream? — Time Loops and Creativity

Tuesday, 7 January, 2020

Dreams go hand in hand with origins, so it is conveniently coincidental—coincidentally fractal maybe—that what is usually considered to be the first recorded poem in our tongue was about the origins of origins—the beginning of created things—and was composed in a dream after the poet had tried to escape the burden of being original himself. […]

Edges of Forever: Time Travel and the Stories That Might Have Been

Thursday, 21 February, 2019

“We can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain.”—Adam Phillips, Missing Out Ship’s Log: star-date 3139.0. Having tracked unusual spacetime ripples to their source, the Starship Enterprise now threatens to be ripped apart as it struggles to maintain its orbit over an uncharted, weirdly time-disturbing planet. There is chaos on the bridge. Mr. […]

Time Loop at Hanging Rock

Thursday, 28 June, 2018

Valentine’s Day, 1900. A group of Australian schoolgirls, all clad in white dresses, are driven by coach to Hanging Rock, an enormous volcanic formation in central Victoria, Australia, for an afternoon picnic. Four girls, including the most popular, Botticelli Venus-looking Miranda (played by Anne-Louise Lambert), defying the orders of the school’s stern headmistress, venture off […]

The Nightshirt Guide to the Twin Peaks Rebirth

Tuesday, 27 June, 2017

“We live in a world of opposites, of extreme evil and violence opposed to goodness and peace. It’s that way here for a reason but we have a hard time grasping what the reason is. In struggling to understand the reason, we learn about balance and there’s a mysterious door right at that balance point. […]

What Was Your Original Face on Mars?—Zen and the Prophetic Sublime

Saturday, 11 February, 2017

The famous “Face on Mars,” first photographed by the Viking orbiters in 1976, was the object of much speculation in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to be. After it was identified by Richard C. Hoagland, the Face became the central icon in a narrative of ancient global destruction—perhaps nuclear war—that, some suggested, may have […]

Altered States of Reading #6: Stories of Your (Future, Past) Life

Sunday, 27 November, 2016

Few films could better illustrate the workings of precognition than Denis Villeneuve’s excellent new film Arrival, based on a 1999 story “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. If you’ve seen the trailers, it will give nothing away that it is about a first-contact situation, and the attempt of a linguist, played by Amy […]

Altered States of Reading (5): Kirk Allen of Barsoom

Sunday, 24 April, 2016

What could any Other know of the up-and-out? What Other could look at the biting acid beauty of the stars in open space? What could they tell of the great pain, which started quietly in the marrow, like an ache, and proceeded by the fatigue and nausea of each separate nerve cell, brain cell, touchpoint […]

Psi’s Big Guns: Sleep Paralysis and Astral Time Travel

Saturday, 16 April, 2016

A year ago I wrote at length about out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) in the context of alchemy and the hermetic tradition. I confessed that I was a fence-sitter on the question of what they are—lucid dreams that just feel more real than most (i.e., corresponding to real physical environments) or actually what they feel like, some […]

Altered States of Reading (4): Ginsberg & the End of the Bookstore

Saturday, 9 April, 2016

Ralph Waldo Emerson warned, in his essay “Self-Reliance,” about the failure of most people to notice and follow their inner light or spark: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he […]