The World At Night

 

At night, the smudged & blurring reflections of houselights assault the black water of the lake, carried into that cycle of disintegration & reformation that the waves demand of fractured light. The houses are still & quiet on the grass lawns perched above stone barriers dividing them from the water. Under its undulating sheen, treetops rot & shiver, old lifeways are scoured by current, & all that was once trod land carries on in this new, curious aquatic figuration since the dam was built & the water bulged out in its erasures.

In the houses, within the safety of their walls, lives play out the way lives do. Sitting on the porch in the darkness, the sterility of the place resounds in its iterations of quietness. A single voice carries across the water, simply because it is the only one venturing to speak out into the night, a sort of prayer, a callnote. & when the single voice hushes again behind another door, there is the water lapping the shoreline, the susurrus of the trees, the occasional acorn pelting a tin roof in a figured distance. It is so utterly & willfully depopulated by humans that, were you the sort who enjoys their presence, you might find it eerily discomfiting. I am not that sort, but I am given pause to wonder.

Perhaps, it occurs to me, everyone is staying inside & out of the darkness out of a deep & abiding fear both of the earth & of the promises held in its penumbras. Maybe staying indoors bespeaks the sublimated fear attending to the fact that we will all one day be interred in the soil. The fear is a mortal fear, a shock the prolonging of which cannot be endured when there are the salves of convenience & ease & maybe even seeming meaning within doors. The corporeal body does not want to flirt even liminally with the chthonic breath underlying all things, does not want to feel prematurely upon its skin the cold, damp embrace of black dirt & dew. It does not want to posit what sense of its own power it has managed to carve out in this life against the current of all the associated wonders of the natural world. This thing upon which we stand, whereon we manufacture our purpose & which we declare domesticated by sheer virtue of our lawnmower & our chainsaw, we know full well the scope of its might. It stands outside of our conception of time, stalwart & resolute, only humble enough to suffer us. But we are not a species that seeks reminding, nor that bends toward recognition of our removal. Our solipsism demands that we turn from the soil, from the dirt, from the earth. Our monocultures deny it, our cities feign its absence by paving it over, our neighborhoods seem to subjugate it entirely in their formulaic geometries. We stand before the earth & subject to time terrified at what both have done, what both will do. & we tremble & retreat within our walls.

The night, too, a thing we fear, perhaps because just as we shudder at the thought of our interment & thereby deny the touch of the soil, so too we recoil at the thought of an eternity of darkness awaiting us when we breath our last. We see in the gloaming the curtain rising on a cast of mysteries we’d rather not engage. We turn on all the lights of the house against it, & when our tiredness charges us with sleep, we clutch to nightlights & LED clocks, the porch light still lit, the robotic hum of the house filling our ears when outside the world goes on spinning.

This is what I have to tell you about the beauty of the world at night: it is a symphony, a thrumming beating heart. It is alive, so fully & with articulate & incisive tales to tell. I have never regretted sleeping outdoors, even at -60 in the Yukon. I have seen the wash of stars enwreathed in the nacreous stain of the galaxy. I have awakened from brief slumber in my dog sled to gaze up into auroras skipping & twirling through a firmament so deeply enriched & enlivened by their colors that the shape of every mountain was writ against the horizon line. I have heard the chorus of the wolves, ghostly & piercing & gorgeous, & the great reedy baritone of the horned owl. I have crossed country itself seeming gentle at rest, frozen rivers yawning against the cold, snow crystals luminescent & shaping the outlines of the boughs overhanging them. I have watched the shadow of my dog team carve through the snow & have had occasion under the full moon to watch their fur blown in the breeze, the miles beyond us visible against the reflected lunar glare. It is a gift to see it, a fragile & glowing gift.

Here, night befalls & all is retreat. We are held in a cradle of comforts that does not permit our growth. But I know too well the incursions wilderness can make, how even in the greatest cities it lies in wait under the pavement, threading spinning eddies of verdant thread through every crack & telling it now to grow. I know that all the things we will toward the erasures of night, too, are yet there, adumbrated & undiminished. We do not possess an understanding of time, of deep time, such as the world does, or its daily conversations between light & darkness. We think we have won something, staking our claim against our most deeply rooted fears. But I know that their abnegation, their dismissal, is among our greatest losses. We are alive in the world, a little longer. Let us be alive. Let us be in the world.