venus1

A Weather Report from Venus

On hot, muggy summer mornings, nothing stirs.
Heaviness is everything. When you wake up, the
vast nowhere of the universe seems already to
have coalesced and winked out. I remember July
mornings in Maine so dense with heat I thought
no bird or sound of wings would ever fly again.
Even the lake a half-mile down the forest road
barely gleams, it seems so dull and still and dead.
I remember mornings of coming to so slowly I'm
not sure if I'm still dreaming or not. My head is
so fuzzy no memories twinkle at all. In that kind
of primordial heat even dreams are
substanceless, or at best acids that dissolve
everything, as if before the lead-gray sky and the
stillness, you never were at all. After where I had
not been, even sleep is a form of awake. I
remember putting one foot unsteadily in front of
the other and moving to the window and seeing
dawn and the green yard. It's a pressure cooker.
Everything motionless. If I could just start
breathing in this humidity I could come to life.
Life begins not in spring but in midsummer
when the rest of the world has been under way
for eons. The planets circling untold billions of
years in the sky, the stars careening still in their
courses. From the window it seems something is
happening beyond the leaden cloud cover. There
has to be a way to punch through it or this is all
going to collapse and return to oblivion so
complete it obliterates sleep.
Wake up!
Somehow I move groggily from the bedroom
down the hall to the kitchen. The legs are as stiff
as the brain. I can't remember going out the
screen door, like forgetting the moments you fell
asleep. In the grass the mosquitoes are thick and
vicious. They swarm up like mist from their
nesting places under the blades. It's the heat and
wet. Through May and into June, rain falls days
at a time, and then comes bright hot sun, then
more clouds, and the moisture never evaporates.
Eggs hatch like crazy. Slablike clouds, made of
who knows what, cover the whole morning and
seal the landscape.
The bugs sting and suck, and this is really the
first indication sleep is gone. Dreamlike images
appear and disappear in the steamy air like
blossoms and fruit, and after you slap four or
five mosquitoes and smear your own blood on
your forearm and cheek, you start to think you
may not be on Earth at all. Hot summer morning
biting and waking up are hallucinations of some
superheated elsewhere you might inhabit like a
fall into a potboiling book from which there is
no escape, except to close it up, oblivion. This is
not Earth at all. It's like the surface of Venus,
looking up. You might escape from Earth
awhile, you think. And then, horribly, you do.
In the beginning, hell goes everywhere you go.
A dull middle-dusk light gleams on Venus
because the air is so thick. It's hot beyond

tolerance, and the bloated atmosphere creates
huge pressures. It's a hundred times denser than
Earth's. Seeing on Venus is like looking through
the chlorinated water of a swimming pool.
There's more to heat waves than the illusion of
motion, there's a twisted quality to every object,
a depression in which a boulder looks like a
pancake fried in a convex pan. Like the bent gray
overcast of summer morning. On the surface of
Venus, seeing is living on the outskirts of a
cubist painting with images rounded inward and
down.
The pressure to see on Venus what you see on
Earth is tremendous, and this causes a kind of
horror. The whole world is profoundly distorted,
if you can stand the heat. The pressure of the
cloud-plugged atmosphere does more than press,
it oppresses, and oppression like this unravels
with organic ferocity in lurid, chaotic
hallucinations that resemble the burnt pastels of
drug images. The whorl of pink, red and green in
a rose bush which overwhelms the normal world
and becomes a freakish monument of blood and
joke, will, if it can stand the CO², occupy a small
concavity which your depth perception won't at
first allow; you can't believe in this topography.
Mountains degenerate to sea rollers and threaten
to crush you with strange gray rock armatures
and shifting quartz-like triangles that twist and
crash in the atmosphere, gleaming. It is a
hallucination of pressure.
The distortions of the visual surface gut and
disintegrate the shapes of Euclid; on Venus,
squares can not be imagined. This is to the
Earthbound eye a horror beyond hallucination.
The pressure is so great, the general theory of
relativity seems to be at work, light itself is
bending, you think, it's passing through colossal
gravity like the Sun's. But it's merely sunlight
filtering through clouds of sulfuric acid. The flat
lakelike twinkle overhead seems immense,
though Venus is about the mass and size of
Earth.
Though it is not the same. It's impossible to
know exactly what a temperature of 800 degrees
does to your vision, and what that vision did to
your soul. I keep thinking a surrealist painter like
a sleeping alter ego went there and back and
could not talk about it, and these are his images,
limited to the dimensions of his own capacity for
horror, which to us are simply figments of
topology. The surface of Venus is devoid of
granite boulders Instead it is a causal
interconnection of sight and object, imagination
and oppression - a maple tree on Venus would
grow like an anemone and send out nervous
tendrils in the steam, across an acre of crushed
uncertain rocks; an observer would see and
understand the squalor and derision all at once of
being made of heat and smog and leaden mist.

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