When It’s Not Quite (Yet, Still) Light

[Image: “Zodiacal Light vs. Milky Way,” by Daniel López;
featured at Astronomy Picture of the Day on March 20, 2010]

From whiskey river:

Incandescence at Dusk

(Homage to Dionysius the Areopagite)

There is fire in everything,
shining and hidden —
Or so the saint believed. And I believe the saint:
Nothing stays the same
in the shimmering heat
Of dusk during Indian summer in the country.

Out here it is possible to perceive
That those brilliant red welts
slashed into the horizon
Are like a drunken whip
whistling across a horse’s back,
And that round ball flaring in the trees
Is like a coal sizzling
in the mouth of a desert prophet.

Be careful.
Someone has called the orange leaves
sweeping off the branches
The colorful palmprints of God
brushing against our faces.
Someone has called the banked piles
of twigs and twisted veins
The handprints of the underworld
Gathering at our ankles and burning
through the soles of our feet.
We have to bear the sunset deep inside us.
I don’t believe in ultimate things.
I don’t believe in the inextinguishable light
of the other world.
I don’t believe that we will be lifted up
and transfixed by radiance.
One incandescent dusky world is all there is.

But I like this vigilant saint
Who stood by the river at nightfall
And saw the angels descending
as burnished mirrors and fiery wheels,
As living creatures of fire,
as streams of white flame….

1500 years in his wake,
I can almost imagine
his disappointment and joy
When the first cool wind
starts to rise on the prairie,
When the soothing blue rain begins
to fall out of the cerulean night.

(Edward Hirsch [source]; here‘s a good place to start learning about the mysterious figure whose name appears in the epigraph)

…and:

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

(Jeanette Winterson, from Gut Symmetries [source])

…and:

I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.

(Haruki Murakami, from The Sputnik Sweetheart (translated by J. Philip Gabriel) [source])

Not from whiskey river (Mark Clare is an archaeologist obsessed with a recent find):

Two nights later and Mark Clare lay in bed, unable to sleep. Kathleen was beside him, clutching a pillow around her head. Each time he closed his eyes, coloured whorls and spirals crossed each other within the infinite recesses of his night vision; and, as always, these phantom shapes seemed to mimic the object of his thoughts — even as he tried to sleep he was still attempting to understand the circles and indentations which had been carved upon the large stone which sealed the tomb. Quietly he got up from the bed and tiptoed across the room; he did not want to wake his wife who, in the waning darkness before dawn, seemed invested with a kind of sacred stillness. The world was balanced between night and day, and her troubles had left her suspended in a fragile sleep. Or so it seemed to Mark. But when softly he opened the door she watched him from the bed with wide eyes; and when he had closed the door she pressed her face once more against the pillow, her eyes still open.

(Peter Ackroyd, from First Light [source])

and:

Recuerdo

We were very tired, we were very merry —
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable —
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry —
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a
shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

(Edna St. Vincent Millay [source])

Last week, I heard a song on NPR — a cover of Randy Newman’s “Losing You,” by Mavis Staples. Long after the last note had sounded, long after the radio was off, I could not stop hearing Staples’s voice. It seemed torn from her heart. And although the NPR piece is called “A Look Back in Regret,” I’m not sure that covers what’s happening here. The persona which Staples wears during this performance seems not entirely regretful; her voice seems to gouge a rough, indistinct line in the sky — a narrow canyon, visible only in long retrospect, separating an all too brief light (unappreciated at the time?) from a profound dark.

Lyrics:

Losing You
(by Randy Newman; performance by Mavis Staples)

Was a fool with my money
And I lost every dime
And the sun stopped shining
And it rained all the time
It did set me back some
Oh but I — I made it through
But I’ll never get over losing you

Do you know how much you mean to me?
Should’ve told you ’cause it’s true
I’d get over losing anything
But I’ll never get over losing you

When you’re young
And there’s time
You forget the past
You don’t think that you will
But you do
But I know that I don’t have time enough
And I’ll never get over losing you

I’ve been cold
I’ve been hungry
But not for awhile
I guess most of my dreams have come true
With it all here around me
No peace do I find
‘Cause I’ll never get over losing you
No, I’ll never get over losing you

Damn. Just… damn.