“Detachment is greater than love.” – Meister Eckhart

For a moment I imagined that Edgar Allan Poe himself, or one of his desperate characters, had scrawled the initials I saw in human blood across the worn-out concrete wall of the abandoned factory on Harlem Avenue in Oak Park, Illinois, USA, in late October 2026.

And to me, this abandoned factory looks as if it really is haunted.

A kid climbed to the top of the highest metal tower, slipped, fell down all the way, and died on the spot. Others, too, have gone into the Great Beyond here.

The imagined mental scene about Poe desperately writing his own initials in blood on a concrete wall had the force of a personal vision and was not planned by me at all, which is of the essence of a “vision” (a fancy name for sudden daydreaming); it (the vision) came on its own, overtly spontaneous, and was gone almost faster than it appeared.

But it had caused enough of a shock wave that it left a resonance, or a ripple, behind. The mind, in the contemplation of imagination, held onto the scene and the image of the vision for a little bit even as the brain readily moved on to wonder who really had written it there, what it really meant, and decided it was time to move on down the road, etc.

This is what Oscar Wilde intended when he said that ALL ART is “perfectly useless” (he was looking at it from the practical commercial English side of things). And this is what William Carlos Williams called “contact” with the world.

It is also what James Joyce called an epiphany; and what Wordsworth called “a spot of time.”

It is an internal happening virtually unseen by the outside world, the kind of thing that is remembered for a while (sometimes a long while) and then repeated with (seemingly infinite and possibly eternal) variations.

And this is what life, at its core, IS, for some of us more than others.

Everyone has the same potential. (The Universe is a great leveler.) What you choose to make of yours is always up to you.

A free (a very free) imagination is the very first thing that keeps us sane, and human.

Without it, all is lost.

And you have to fight to keep it free.

Dale the Drifter

(Images provided by Dale the Drifter, who also made another fine music selection!)