Three-Way Switch: A Divine Comedy, Ethereal

“But words are vain; reject them all—
They utter but a feeble part:
Hear thou the depths from which they call,
The voiceless longing of my heart.”

“In good sooth, my masters, this is no door.

Yet is it a little window, that looketh upon a great world.”
-Phantastes, George MacDonald, 

In the land of Nod, there were three types; they were “the On”, “the Off”, and “the In-Between”.

Nock Squeeze was in-between.

If presented with a choice between apples, oranges or a vile and bitter fruit, he would likely choose oatmeal.

The tart of the apple, the sweetness of the orange, or the puckering taste of the bitters was no contrast for Nock; he’d settle on the bland over the gamut in his inability to choose, perhaps for fear of regret.

“The On” were predictable; and so were the “The Off”.

But “The In-Between”, who could know?

They were like the indeterminate sot who was in the predicament of choosing for poor Schroedinger’s cat.

Observe the situation, and the cat is in-between the living, and the dead. Open the box, and he dies; for Nock, it was to walk away and leave it to someone else, the cat, his cat, forever in-between.

It is so much easier, to never choose a path – but in so doing, the path may be chosen for you.

Sprightly Jam saw nothing but good in the world.

She danced through the wood a slow jig, slothly animated like a molecule suspended at temperature – absolute zero. She manifest the sweetness of Jam, but also its viscosity.

She was a lightning bolt, striking through amber; a bullet shot through molasses.

Her hair was strawberry blonde, like the jam, but her movements were of a great and beautiful Queen captured with each strike of mallet against chisel in time by the painstaking carving of the sculptor.

She was fluid, but slow; positive, but determined.

She was always on, but somehow a bit off as well – but she was never in-between.

Formless Void was always one of “The Off”.

There was an utter darkness to his depths, and his path solid resolve.

Profound, and deep, he found nothingness in everything.

If Sprightly Jam slow-sung an ode to the sugar-rush awakening of a sweet orange at breakfast, or the tingling tartness in the slow savor of a Granny Smith apple at a noon-day repose, Formless Void would taste the bitter of the orange-peel zest, or dwell on the bland leather skin of the apple. He was the bitter fruit, and the pain of confronted reality.

Everything with Formless was countered from the baseless, cold-dark depths.

Between space and sky and the chasm of the deep like an oil, Nock Squeeze floated the surface, Sprightly Jam would glide the oceans, crack the surface, and rocket to the moon but in a time-lapse sort of manner that even a sloth would catch, and like kudzu-seaweed, Formless Void would blanket the floor depths like an oozing carpet.

These three individuals embodied the whole of the land of Nod, and together would forge a fabled testament to its existence in legend and lore.

Swim the Depths Before Diving From the Moon

Nock dives from the moon.

Have you tried to swim to the bottom of the deep blue sea? Buoyancy. It is such a problem.

Rocks are your best friend when trying to get to the bottom.

Fill your pockets full, and down you go.

It is different when diving from the moon.

You need momentum. A running start.

Propelled like a circus clown from a cannon.

And so it was with Nock.

He decided that he would do a graceful dive from the moon and land somewhere in the Mediterranean sea.

So he concocted a plan.

In one of the largest craters of the moon, he tied off bungee cord like a spider’s web, and carefully stretched it to the crater’s core.

There, he tied it off to a rope fixed to a moon stone.

A big moon stone.

Each strand he walked to the bottom of the pit, and there with mechanical aid, he stretched the bungee and tied it to the rope.

Strand, after ever-loving strand.

Eventually he had a web of strands that were practically side-by-side and covered completely the crater. Not even light could get through.

He decided that by fashioning more bungee, woven through the stands and it too under tension, that he could increase the tension on the giant slingshot.

He made himself a suit that was heated, and little-by-little he poured water across it until it looked like a very large mass of ice.

It would freeze quickly on the moon, as long as he kept it in the shade of the bungee.

Soon it became quite large.

He had learned of a magic trick as a lad where there was a slide that was fashioned under a lid in order to slide a quarter into a matchbox that had not previously been there when examined by the audience.

He made such a slide through the ice and down, down into the heated suit.

It was there that this projectile would propel him to the Mediterranean sea.

He would roll down the slide and into his suit and the mass of ice would be his cannonball escape from the moon and send him into his dive in the sea.

It was a brilliant plan.

The ice would melt in the earth’s atmosphere, and away he would go, down to the warm and waiting sea.

Everything had to be perfect.

He had to shoot at the precise moment so that the timing of the earth’s turn and his descent would line him up for the beautiful sea below.

He had the time and date down to the millisecond.

A timing device with a razor on a spring-arm would cut the rope, and away he would fly — screaming through space.

He just knew it would have to work.

And it did.