It isn't fair to speak of topography under such pressure. It is not even fair to say topology, though it amounts to this. The topology of Venus is what's important, because while the topology is somehow knowable, somehow representable, the topography is not. Uncertainty devolves from uncertainty, surrealist predictions are simply formulas that seem true to the phenomena, and the phenomena are the lightning bolts of all the artist knew and felt. Everything is interconnected when he looks across the heat of the planet. It's similar to psychosis, like being in love. Like love, it is a self-contained dream: The heat of Venus has little to do with the Sun, and everything to do with itself, folding its gases into itself and cooking. Its languid winds cause ripples in the mist and cells of compacted air travel slowly from north to south, south to north. It spins, I am horrified to report, from east to west, almost as surreal as Uranus. The topography, or topology, or geography of it is a mutation in a dream, and even the artist cannot describe the nightmare he has alone that morning. The pressure then requires some overt activity, and this is the difficult thing, the incredible thing, because motion in this swamp must be impossible: How do you move through objects which do not keep still, or even if they're still, do not behave correctly to your vision? You move the way the painter moved, like the maple-fantasy that grows, perhaps, from the triangular gravel. Your footstep is the same as the interchanges of nature (and by that I mean the flow of life to death, oblivion to consciousness, and back again). It becomes the weather-heavy shreds of carbon breezes and twisted knoll shapes. You can only move like twilight, which is a way of saying Venus typifies your love affairs. Your motion is the motion of the planet itself, not like the motion of the Moon which is dusty, arid, airless and therefore dead. There is no weather on the Moon like Earth weather, with slabs for clouds and alternating sun and rain.

NASA photo

But on Venus the weather is a vast compression of your eye, your ginger footstep, and a nightmare simulacra of the motion of spring into summer, unbelievably hot. The loneliness of this kind of love is oppressive. Somehow activity on the surface of Venus becomes a river of smog and sulfur, cut off from the rest of creation like a rhyme lost in a dead man's mind. The veils lift one by one and settle in the early morning stillness again. Here on Earth, fortunately, things grow everywhere, in the neatly trimmed edges of the lawn, beside the cedar bushes we love. For now the vegetation burgeons in the heat and damp. Air made of carbon dioxide is rich to a pine, though the clouds of early morning still oppress and flatten everything and force a comparison you never before could make because you weren't awake. Mosquitoes plow up out of the blades of grass to feast on your blood. Breezes twist the leaves of silver maple. The neighbor screams at her dog. Hot summer, the smell of lilacs, small armies of kids wrestling in the yard. Rain threatens. © Dana Wilde, Stolen Island Review 1996 Previous page Fires of the Sun home The Mind Errant

A Weather Report from Venus