is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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I love the night life, bla.
I love the night life, bla.
I woke up today thinking about my status as part-time Vampire (and when I say that I am a Wampire part time, I mean that I tend to be awake at night, and not that I vant to drink your blood, or that I am a member of the race of living dead, bla).
My romance with the night began strategically enough: in my apartment in San Francisco it is impossible to get sonic peace any time other than during those hours when everyone else around is asleep. This is partly because San Francisco is a city, and 16th Street is a major thoroughfare, but mostly it is because I am sandwiched between two different households of satanic (by which I mean loud, inconsiderate, and apparently incapable of thinking about other people) neighbors. I could describe their tendencies but that would be tiresome. Plus, here in Amherst my sentence has been commuted.
Which of course makes me wonder why I still stay up all night. Here I can find silence most of the time. I live in the middle of nowhere on a rural route at the edge of a nature preserve in an old farmhouse divided into six units, two of which are empty, the other three being filled with quiet scholarly types. I have only once in my six months here heard any aural evidence that I have neighbors.
Right now it�s almost noon. Silent. Yesterday afternoon, as I was reading, around 3, silent. This morning around 8, when I woke up and decided to go back to sleep, silent. It�s so quiet here that more often than you would think I am reminded of how unfortunate it is that refrigerators exist. I hate �machine noise� in general, and often my silence is made less than perfect by my food-keeping appliance.
So, given the silence of Joseph Smith House, I could, theoretically, change my orientation toward the hours of the day and night, and be born again, night-time caterpiller to day-time butterfly, as a morning person. Why not? Morning also has its glories. When I labored as an archaeologist it was very lovely to witness the rise of the sun each day. And when I lived high up on Alamo Square with the beautiful view of downtown San Francisco and the bay, and no curtains on any windows, I never in all my years there took for granted how beautiful the sky looks when it turns from night to day. The sun would announce itself, reminding me to wake up for a moment or two to attend to its return.
But I like the transformation from day to night much better. I love that time of day when it isn�t exactly day or night, and the things in my field of vision appear, somehow, both more and less distinct than they do during daylight, and the sky achieves an unbelievably deep blue that makes you think you have to drink it in rather than just being there amongst it. It becomes an indigant teenager not deigning to speak but simply stating by means of its glowering: �as IF you could just stand against me passively, indifferent to my colors. No. You are part of this scene, even if the way it transpires is indifferent to you and your tiny little plans.�
It�s not just silence that makes night better. I also prefer its light. Night is often thought to be characterized by an absence of light, but of course that is not true. Stars, moon, planets, and then all the electric lights added by humanoids, these all make the night less than utterly dark. At Alamo Square the sight of the city lit up at night made me stop and marvel numerous times nightly, and that stopping and marveling didn�t abate as I became accustomed to my good fortune.
Here in Amherst the man-made lights are fewer, and because of that, I see many more stars than I do in San Francisco. Especially on bitterly cold cloudless winter nights, the stars here are stunning, almost as beautiful as they are in Yosemite, or on a dirt road outside of Delphi, an island in the Aegean, or in a remote rural outpost in Israel.
You�ve already heard about the recent full moon on snow.
And of course the silence I crave isn�t absolute silence, which is knowable only as death (that silence I once experienced in the Golan Heights, on long road flanked on both sides by minefields. We stopped to take some photos and John turned off the car. No noise of any kind remained. If there is such a thing as ontological terror, that is what I felt right then). The silence I crave and which I most often find at night is human silence, AKA the absence of human-made noises. No neighbors, no machines, only animals and insects and the shifting of trees in the wind and the settling of houses with age.
About the night: it isn�t only for solitude. I also like the kinds of conversations that happen late at night as opposed to during the day. There is almost a sense of conspiracy sometimes when you converse with someone at 5am and it�s still night rather than being morning (the difference between the two being determined by the availability or advisability of sleep). Think of �conspiracy� as a hatching of plans, but also in its classical, latin sense of �breathing together.� It�s sweet, and meaningful, with meaning of a sort different from what some other conversations hold, even on the same topics, at some other time of day.
I hope I need not remind you that I�m not necessarily talking about romance when I say �breathing together.� I have a longstanding quarrel with the phrase �just friends,� as if friendship were always something less than something else.
So, about night I like the dark and its light, and I also like the quiet and its noises. A certain kind of philosopher would find in my statement a pair of contradictions, or at the very least, catachresis (abusive use of language). But that philosopher would be blind (and deaf) to the truth of skepticism.
Skepticism is thought to be always-already undermined because it is in contradiction with itself. What I mean is: a skeptic is unconvinced that there can be such a thing as truth. But in making that statement, the skeptic is making a statement of truth. She believes that it is true that there is no such thing as truth. And so, danger, peril, contradiction attends the skeptic�s ideas, her arguments undermined before they�ve even begun.
But contradiction is only contradiction if it occurs in one moment severed from all other moments. Only then is yes incompatible with no, light with dark. But no human life lives moments such as these, separated by distance from other moments. So yes, I like night�s light, and no, not its light, but rather its dark is what I like, and also I like night�s silence and its noise, and none of that is contradiction. When we write and speak and think of time we represent its flow as a series of moments that can be captured, packaged up, historicized, written down, remembered, neat and tidy like that. But when we live time things are never so tidy, bla.
At any given moment I have, like, 18 or 18,000 things on my mind, many of which might be found to contradict each other if we wrote them down and then tried to treat them as if they all occurred in one time, and then conceived of that time as a simple flow of instants one after the other during which things never happen at the same time as they unhappen, and yes is never at the same time as no, just as silence is not at the same time as noise.
But when we live these moments, silence is at the same time as noise, and red and blue cohabit and assert themselves without having to become purple. Yes and no are together without becoming maybe. This is the real ground of the reality we eke out together as human beings. Our simplifications via reason cause as much damage as they do ease. None of this is to say that I am �against reason.� That is not a contradiction.
My little discourse on why I like the night life, bla, has inadvertently become a demonstration of just how limited the logical written human form of reason is. There is so much it will never capture, and we all know that the minute we look at something beautiful, be it art or a sky full of stars, and then think of how we might describe it to someone else, who is or isn�t there with us. And we �remember� this as well when we fall in love or listen to music that somehow reorders the known world in ways not quite recuperable by �knowledge.� We know it whenever we try to explain to someone why night is beautiful. The work of reason and of writing and of conveying our thoughts in words is irredeemably fraught with imperfection, uncertainty and risk. And that is why we love it. Because love is what it is only because it occurs as risk, uncertainty and incapability of precise expression. This multidirectional feature of reason is also what makes us capable, despite ourselves, of communicating more than we write or say in the very act of writing or speaking. This is for better and for worse, as we all, I am certain, have had our experiences of saying one thing and being understood to say another. What better evidence do we need? Reason is limited. Communication is always risk. This makes living with other human beings difficult and at times dangerous. We do not want it to be otherwise. (And when on occasion we do want it to be otherwise, that's just tough luck for us, bla.)
2:09 p.m. - February 26, 2005
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