Are some thoughts nocturnal?
Santee, ca, 2022
The night is an interesting concept. In America, for 8 hours a day*, the sun recedes past the mountains and into the Pacific Ocean, its light being extinguished like a drowned flame. Light is something often seen as a revealing force that shows us what everything truly is. But if life is chaos and order is an unnatural manifestation of humanity, what is the dark really? We all know what it is visually, but there’s more to it than that. We can feel it; something changes. The night can reveal to us the deepest truths of ourselves and those around us.
*Besides some northernmost states.
I used to walk at night. I would walk until the then bone-chilling air seemed to reach my soul. I was thinking about a plethora of different things back then, unknowing how drastically my life was about to change. Wandering the dark suburban landscape of Southern California afforded me many interesting obscurities. Flowers and decorations with a thin, sharp layer of frost, much unlike the coastal desert that it was. The occasional fellow traveler, searching for the same thing I was, I’m sure. It was, at least at first, startling to see another person appear out of the black void that surrounded me. But after a while, it was akin to witnessing a passing ship, far and lost in the night looking for shore. And me, manning the helm of my mind while the crew slept below deck.
What was it that dragged me out into the night and reluctant of the day? I felt heartbreak, aimless anger, and a phantom pain that I still feel to this day. I think that seeing my neighborhood this way opened my eyes to a lot. It wasn’t the spotlight of sunshine that showed me the vigorous hatred that crept through the town like a heatsink; it was the dark of night. So at night, I could see the space between. The streets devoid of cars and noise, I could finally look between the brushstrokes of my landscape and myself within it.
I could hear the coyotes hunting in the hills, every now and then venturing into the streets. That is when I started to hear it. The land speaking to me through seemingly abstract methods. The sound that stretched far into the hills that was only able to echo into our town at night could finally be heard while everyone slept. The night allowed the wild back into the landscape of Southern California, and it gave way to its low wail of claustrophobic restraint. I lived there for 17 years before I finally heard the voices in the dirt telling me ghost stories of the shape of footprints before the stone rose and was sculpted by malignant hands. This space in between, the shadow of our planet, showed me that there is another world, and it’s here.
Methods of thinking like this are only available to us at night. We need some semblance of seclusion from the world to finally hear the sound of our heartbeat against the bark of the trees. We are here, and so are they. So is it: The voice from way out there in the hills calling us by a name we never before knew.
When I look out into the hills of my hometown today, I see eyes looking back at me like those of the people I met on my walks. Looking for something else, somewhere. Something once held but now lost to the sea of sunlit smog and noise.
When you look into the sun, all you see is the blinding white. But look at the moon, and you will see all of the craters of interstellar impacts covering it as well as the stars piercing the sky.
