The Province of Night

Something about the dark of night matches my character in ways that I cannot fully understand. It is not sinister, but is not innocent. There is something viscous and slightly more delicious about the way that thoughts move through the air and isolation in the dark of night. Movement is elegant and thick reminiscent of bubbles rising through shampoo bottles as they turn, only the shampoo is all around and the bubbles are everything that moves or changes.

I remember watching “Little Miss Sunshine” for the first time as the characters retreat to their first night in their respective motel rooms and slip comfortably into their anonymous and most comfortable vices (addiction, despair, optimism, ambition, isolation…) - something about that scene spoke to me deeply. Night is retreat to that which stabilizes our least self conscious sense of who we are. We are absent the distraction afforded by being able to see the world around us and the sphere of our perceptual experience becomes concomitantly smaller affording focus to naturally turn inward.

Have you ever noticed that the best conversations you have ever had are nestled deeply in the stillest part of the night. It is then and only then that the absence of external stimuli meet the sleep deprivation induced abandonment of social convention and quite naturally provide for something approximating real communication; a communication of thoughts and ideas absent of the otherwise omnipresent bias of self consciousness. It is a perfect storm of communication potential.

The dark of the night recalls demons for some. They are in the closet and under the bed. They are stuffed resoundingly in the dusky compartments in our own head. They roam the streets and forests with weapons untold and bursting with violent and vicious capacity. This is where the wild things are. The werewolf of legend is recalled from his beastly slumber within the confines of his human prison at the primal wash of the light of the full moon. Perhaps even the most sinister of all fantastic characters – the vampire can only come out at night to engage in his carnivorous endeavor and shrinks from the light as his mortal foil.

What subconscious monster lurking within causes us such primal terror? The fantasy of consuming flesh is not so intangible for anyone who has ever really made love with abandon – even taking nourishment from the very lifeblood of our objects of adoration. Flesh is both beautiful and delicious. Have you ever watched a nursing child? The connection between mother and baby as the fleshy cheek and lips meet fleshy breast and nipple is singular in nature as the purest demonstration of sustenance. It is not strictly vampiric but it is about as close as can be righteously imagined. Watching mother and child is beauty at fullest blossom – but it somehow is the stuff that terror is made of.

This is the province of night. When that which is most beautiful of all is deeply terrifying; when we can abandon the limits of the oneness of ourselves for the universally accessible holism of selflessness; when our most comforting vices connect us not to only to individual tragedy but to the tragedy implicit in all of humanity; when agape love connects us all like warm shampoo moving as the earth moves in its timeworn orbit; and when discovery of oneness and newness and humanity is a nourishing revelation each and every night.

As the stars shine to us from millennia long since passed – teasing from the infinite.