When the Night is Thick Enough to Slice Like Butter
on the strange eros of nighttime
My daughter is six—almost seven—and she recently discovered the possibility that terrible things might emerge from the murky night shadows, when her grownups leave the room. It’s not always easy for me to tell if this is simply another brilliant stalling tactic to delay bedtime, or whether it’s a genuine fear. Whatever it is, it’s sparked several long conversations that usually end with me trying to demystify the shadow spaces for her.
I’m not sure that I really believe in the night anymore, I recently found myself thinking. But what does that even mean? It’s not simply that the electric illumination all around me never ceases. That does have something to do with it. At night I often pull the covers over my head as I drop off, because the streetlights insistently find their way into my bedroom. They gnaw at my eyelids. What’s changed my experience of the night even more is the digital watcher I wear around my wrist: my sleep tracker. I know it’s surveying me all night long. I work hard to please it, and I’ve found new strategies for efficiently cutting off my waking consciousness so I can drop quickly and deeply into sleep. I just don’t experience the night like I used to.
I used to stay up late so that I could read, and write, and think. I used to luxuriate in the thick, deep solitude of night. It used to feel like no one could touch or disturb me. It felt like I had permission to explore things that would have felt wasteful, frivolous, or even prohibited during the daylight. Even then, though, there was a dimension of the night that I could never access—a form of the night so thick and heavy that light can’t push through it and can only be contained by it.
It’s possible that I’ve only ever experienced that form of night a few times in my life. One still feels very sensibly present to me. In my early twenties I went on a hike, alone, in the Maine woods. I started too late and miscalculated the sunset. I ended up walking for more than an hour after the sun was gone, with nothing but a flashlight. I was convinced, over and over again, that I’d lost the trail. I was also certain I could feel gleaming sets of eyes surveying me, from within the folds of that thick darkness. My isolation was so complete, it almost felt as if life itself was over. I was relieved to find the trail’s end, but it also felt like I’d been ejected from some fantastic dreamscape.
Forms of night like that—so thick and rich it seems like you could slice through them like butter—are a mystical combination of terror and eros.
This week I want to share a project with you. It’s an audio project, produced by sound and visual artist Krista Dragomer, that we collaborated on for the Machines Inbetween series. The piece is called “Nights Inbetween”, and it’s about forms of night, ways of thinking about the night, and modes of relating to the night. The project is—on the most basic level—an interview between Krista and I, where I ask her about her series of black-on-black night paintings that she created during the lockdown in 2020. Her whole experience of being in New York City—living in that city that famously never sleeps—shifted radically in those months. The audio piece is punctuated by her poetic musings on her dramatically altered experience of the night. Together we walk through different ways of articulating our mutual experiences of the night—sometimes resonant, sometimes departing from one another. You can also read her description of the piece here, which is different from the one I offer. As she puts it, the piece means slightly different things to each of us. Here’s a short trailer for the piece:
Krista also commissioned the work of other artists and musicians, in Brooklyn. So the piece is full of gorgeous and original music and arrangements from Aeric Meredith-Goujon, Josh Dunn, Kensuke Shoji, and Katie Martucci. Aeric Meredith-Goujon also took the photos of Krista and I that you see in the trailer above. We’re at the beach on Coney Island (at night, in December). The piece is a really beautiful audio tapestry, so I hope you will check it out. If you have the chance, please leave a comment and let us know what you think! We haven’t really had much feedback on it, and we are curious to know what you make of it. And please feel free to share with anyone you think might be into it. You can listen to Machines In Between wherever you download podcasts.
We recorded our audio for the piece at Harbor Studios, in Red Hook (Brooklyn), in December of 2021. So it’s also interesting for me to think about how this particular project on the night has shaped my own thinking and writing, since then. I’ve been interested in underworlds for some time. But I was just recalling, as I thought back to some research I was doing that November into cultural histories of the night, how the figure of the cave became fascinating to me right around that time. I’ve always found caves to be terrifying. But when I started to think about the form of protection they offer—in, with, and against the night—they started to feel warmer.
There’s something incredibly tender in the image of a small group of people gathered around a fire, to tell stories or sing songs after the sun has gone down, in one of these mouths of the underworld. As long as there have been people, we’ve always been living up against that abyss. Sometimes we do it magically; we build and weave something beautiful there. I love what people make with and against the strange eros of these almost-underworld spaces. There’s something very honest and courageous about what happens there, I think. That gives me strength.
In the piece I also read from biblical texts—the opening passages of Genesis, specifically. There were so many little things I’d wanted to say about the many mystical uses (and abuses) of the night in theological history, as we were producing this piece. I’d also recorded myself reading passages of this fantastic poem by Alejandra Pizarnik: all night I hear the noise of water sobbing… That didn’t make it into the final piece, but oh you should really read it. This week, I returned to one of the books that made a very deep impact on me as a scholar—Catherine Keller’s The Face of the Deep (2003). Catherine was my mentor through my PhD program, and her work has influenced my own in many uncountable ways. I was curious to know if there had been some seed planted there, in that book, that I continued to cultivate as I explored different faces of the deep night.
It felt both shocking and yet entirely predictable to find this passage that seemed to bring together—in uncanny ways—disparate things that Krista and I were both trying to explore, about the night. There is even a reference to the sibling figure which, of course, made me think of my book Sister Death:
“If we face the shadow in the night—whether we call it Other, angel, Elohim, problem, sibling —we may find ourselves moved by a strange eros.”
CATHERINE KELLER, The Face of the Deep
What is your relationship to the night like, these days? Did the lockdown, or the pandemic itself, change how you experience the night? What are you making of that strange eros of the night?