Magic of day and night

Some years ago I had a vivid experience of the night world. The location was prosaic enough: Cherry Garden Lane in a leafy suburb of Folkestone, late November. But these labels apply to the ordered daytime world. At night, when I stumbled on it first, my footfalls echoed in the lamplit clearing of an archaic jungle, connecting me with a distant past. I had a vision in which some Neolithic hunters crouched around a fire that made the shadows dance and separated the brightness of their hearth from a looming undergrowth replete with unseen life.

It was then that I had the fancy that in darkness you enter a completely different reality, whose mapping to the daytime world is tenuous, and has to be constantly reasserted with the dubious aid of logic.

Under a yellow street-lamp, the world was painted in strange colours. Frost sparkled on the paving-stones. Away from the lamp’s illuminated circle, everything was colourless, black, hiding its secrets in brooding shrubberies.

When I later witnessed the calm morning bustle of cars reversing out of drives, postmen and milkmen on their delivery rounds, it took considerable effort to conflate night and day versions as two views of a single place. So for a while there was an unbridged gap: two unreconciled worlds!

We allow logic to destroy magic just as we allow daylight to destroy our vision of darkness. Logic is just a construct which we use as a tool. If we decide that it exclusively defines reality we rob ourselves.

I’ve spent my career in engineering: not with constructs of metal, plastic or carbon fibre, but software. When engineering products break down there is always a reason, and logic can almost always find it. Software is pure logic, it has no other substance.

But in my bodily life, I cultivate the magical view, with totems and fetishes and animism and shamanic attitudes. Far from believing in mind over matter, I am strongly affected by sun and rain and seasons and the spirit of places and the vibes that reveal individuals, much more than their often false words. “Western civilisation” is not superior to any other adaptation to life on earth and in many ways is impoverished, as discussed here several times, with contributions from Rage of Reason.

Anything said here in words is neither true nor false but an artifact, like body-decorations of feathers, beads, or smeared ochres. What do you see in the picture above? Three children having fun as children do. They have painted their faces the same way, so that each sees a mirror-reflection of the One, and they are lifted beyond dusty poverty to a magical reality. You and I can share it directly.