To one who follows his nose as a general principle of life, especially to seek inspiration, it matters when and where the ideas come. Most of the pieces in this blog have been conceived under the sky, preferably walking. “Sit as little as possible; credit no thought not born in the open air and while moving freely about,” wrote Nietzsche.
When not wayfaring I may flirt with the Night, that realm of fancy, irreconcilable with daytime brightness and clarity: till Reason sews up Days and Nights together in the patchwork chequer-board of life and rolls them into the scrolled archive of Time. When Reason’s away, primal impulses play. In dreams’ unfettered playground, no daytime rules apply. To an optimist, worshipper of Day, dreams are no more than a crop to be harvested, distilled perhaps to medicine for improving noonday health. Such a one may snatch dream-narratives by the nightshirt before they flee; then launders and irons the torn-off fragment, to play with it as a puzzle-piece: where does it fit to daytime understanding? Such an optimist ignores an array of vast unremembered sagas, too disjointed and evanescent to survive the sceptical light of day. Few are those who heed them, and drain to the dregs their fantastical atmospheres.
What if sleep shrinks from us and we lie too tired to get up but unable to melt into that shadowy land? Then our lucubrations are disordered in a different way, presenting problems without solutions: the state we call worry. The loose ends of day-life—debts unpaid, slanders unanswered, fears unresolved, the world’s future—bully us in the night; fuelled I suppose by nocturnal brain-chemicals. And so it should be: for the night is no time to act—only to reflect.
I snatched a fragment of dream and tore it away from other phantasmagoria. I was in the House of Commons, a windowless cavern of sophistry, in the small hours. The normal Parliamentary session was over. Members were lolling about in little cliques and I passed a row of Tory Opposition spokesmen, recognizing them vaguely and giving them a cheeky smile, knowing they would not recognize me. Politicians love a challenge and my smile threw down the gauntlet. “We’ll see about that!” they responded, smiling back enigmatically. —Which put me on the defensive. I managed to find a dark corridor in the middle of the Chamber, a kind of tunnel or cook’s galley, and hid safe there, congratulating myself.
This notion of smile as a weapon arose from an incident the other day in a narrow alley, leading from a dead-end street, a cul-de-sac of decaying factories, broken tarmac and refuse. I suppose I was scowling, for my face falls into it naturally, belying the cheerful soul inside. The rest of my life has been transformed, only the surface still betrays history. A belligerent-looking man approached from the other direction and seemed to take it personally. This was despite (or because of?) my declining to look him in the eye as he drew near. He yelled a remark at the moment of passing. We didn’t slow our pace, so there was no time to “refute him point by point” as P G Wodehouse would have expressed it. I yelled back “Yay!”: a little proud of my repartee.
It was a “wake-up call”. As women know better than men, change your face to change your life. A man is more stubborn and it took the dream to show me the way. Since then, I’ve been secretly composing my face into a smile, practising in private. When the sun shines in my eyes or the cold rain runs down my cheeks, my face screws up unprompted.
All I need do is obey the dream’s prompting and adopt this rictus unprompted.
What is it about Tory politicians? Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister hardly used to sleep. And this:
“Something of the night”. . .
Michael Howard, once Britain’s home minister and now [in 2003] leader of the Conservative Party, had a phrase hung around his neck six years ago that he cannot shake. A Tory rival, Ann Widdecombe, who served as his prisons minister at a time when crime declined markedly under Howard’s hard-line policy, said in 1997 that there was ‘something of the night in his personality.’
. . .
Whence the phrase? In 1900, the literary critic Lewis E. Gates wrote that the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne ‘had in fact something of the night in his disposition . . . a suggestion of the discolored temperateness of night.’ John Baker, a Washington lawyer, found this citation from Henri Frederic Amiel’s ‘Intimate Journal,’ published about 1886: ‘The relation of thought to action filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried toward a bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it.’
(Source: Taipei Times!)
Night breaks the links of Reason. What we call sanity is nothing but daylight. No wonder sleeping pills are popular to buy oblivion from the insistent voices of darkness. What happens when our day-world itself, under the sun, becomes a nightmare? For example when “Science” tells us what to think, how to populate the secret vault of poetic imagination? Professor Evans, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for medicine, goes public with an impassioned plea for the cultivation of embryo monsters (“legendary animals combining features of animal and human form”): “Please look at the evidence. Don’t immediately go for the knee-jerk reaction mainly powered by the ‘yuck’ factor,” says the Professor. Well, I wish the “yuck” factor could halt his research, just as it prevents most of the world from eating babies and other horrors.
Postscript:
I did not know how to end this piece, mainly because the night ran out and much of it was drafted in daylight. So I waited till the next night. I woke at 4 and lay quietly until the blackbirds started their pre-dawn chorus, echoing from the chimney-tops. My dreams retreated into their dark corners, and of all things I started to worry about 2012. The Olympic Games in London, only 30 miles away! A great festival of security, hype, politics and terrorist attempts. A looming catastrophe, with no sane purpose, a symbol of all that’s wrong in the world. Could it not be cancelled, in the name of sanity?
Dawn is lighting up the sky and these thoughts will soon disperse, as surely as day follows night.
PPS: The above post is not about politics!
a wayfarer’s notes 
night and the early morning which is the end of night are my best times to think and write.
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My son is focusing on wrestling in the London Games if his college career at U.C. Davis builds into the integrity we all might hope for as we understand how our small study times become the new theories of integrity. The torch run in San Francisco was on all the TV channels and made my thoughts much deeper than I can access. I do appreciate the encouragement to walk more and don't feel so disturbed by my late-night musings, thanks Vincent.
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it matters when and where the ideas come.
I didn't read this whole post, but I got my best thoughts and ideas from the cosmos, not from books or others.
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I find truth to what Scot and bbc have to say. On the Olympics, it's a shame that the political stuff has to impinge on what the athletes have worked so hard to attain, but Tibet, imo, is no minor matter – an area the size of western Europe being deliberately exterminated as a culture.
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I hate history! ;>)
I saw Thatcher's memoir, The Downing Street Years, somewhere last Saturday. I was tempted to buy and eat it. Well, I'm a bookworm.
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Vincent, your skill with words…
As I read this post and reached the part about the dream of smiling inside the House, I was thinking to myself… aha! How interesting it is that he thinks of his smile as a weapon. Then you shattered my cleverness… 🙂
I wonder if the references to things being like or of “the night” are a remnant of our superstitious past… believing in all sorts of pagan deities, wherein the Sun was the ultimate purveyor of all that is Good and Wholesome.
Thinking more about this duality of “good and evil,” “dark and light,” and such… makes me wonder if all these religions held so dear inside countless brains are really no more than a result of fanciful dreamings, like so many fairy tales, compounded on the natural state of night and day… sort of like the Caveman stories I had telling around the campfire.
Good stuff, again! One of these times, I'm going to say your post was terrible, just to break the monotony. 🙂
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So there is this Hindu teacher trying to explain to the adherents that the world is situated on the top of an elephant. Student asks: then what teacher is below the elephant?
Well, teacher says: there is another elephant supporting the first elephant.
So what is supporting that elephant? The students ask in harmony . . . ad infinitum.
Getting frustrated, but not yet losing control, the priest answers;
Well, it's elephants all the way down!
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Goatman, I am baffled as to what inspired your comment, but thanks anyhow.
Tim, thanks for the encouragement. I do wish you will say a post is terrible, not arbitrarily of course. I wasn't sure about this one. Are you really reductionist about religions? Are they “really no more than” something?
Funny you should talk about pagan deities in that way as opposite to what is good and wholesome. My former wife came from the Kadazans of North Borneo. She like all her large family was born a Catholic but a pagan religion upheld by priestesses was still important in the culture because it controlled the rice harvest – that was in the days when they grew their own rice, which was still true in '88 but now is a quaint relic along with the water-buffalos that they used to help them. Anyhow from her catholic point of view she called the pagan gods “devils” but from the pagan point of view had great respect for them.
From that point of view the light and dark principles were equal and both necessary. You find the same even-handedness in William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which he remarks that the Milton of Paradise Lost was of the Devil's party without realizing it.
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Siegfried I have the first DVD of that Margaret Thatcher series free with a copy of the Daily Telegraph. Haven't watched it yet. Many on the Left were unable to account for Thatcher in their simple idea of good and bad, right and wrong, and feminism. So they said she was a man in a woman's body, and therefore a monster.
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BBC, since you don't get your best ideas from books or others, I'll be understanding about your failure to read the whole post.
I get my best thoughts and ideas from the cosmos too, but filtered through the prism of moods and atmospheres of the world: very much an earthbound soul, perhaps.
I wonder if anyone gets their best thoughts and ideas from somewhere else than the cosmos?
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Paul, it seems to me that Olympics is nothing but politics writ large. Each host country has to commit vast funds to a statement about itself. Politicians commit that money. Athletes could do their thing anywhere any time and have world championships and it would be better for their sports to do that.
Yes, Tibet is more important than a successful peaceful Olympics, and I couldn't care less if the Olympics collapsed as a concept, for like the West, they have become too elaborate and absurd and will burst like a bubble, like the system of credit.
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Brad4d your son might focus on the London Games but he could focus on any championship for his sport.
I like the idea of thoughts deeper than you can access. & thanks for encouragement too.
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Scot, since writing this piece, I have gone further and realised that my times to think and write span night and day, indoors and out, physical action and sitting here tapping at keys. Writing becomes more difficult, a project that cannot be divided into little self-contained pieces as it used to.
the beauty of haiku is for the writer as much as the reader: a spontaneous moment.
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No need to speak of your writing itself, the art of it, superb and growing in itself.
Likewise, maybe you… “Writing becomes more difficult, a project that cannot be divided into little self-contained pieces as it used to.”?
Is my memory right, 2012 is the end of time by the mayan calendar? I didn't know the games were scheduled that year for England. There is to be a surface shift that year, an eruption from the content of this side building up, it will open all the possibilities involved in all the heretofore investigations. But this could be lessened.
That also brings to mind the Hitler problem, as Hitler was the dark subjective initiator and unleasher of much of what is our modern world today, much of what you mention, medical experimentation, weapon and technological invention, and so on including the supposedly good stuff like huge expressways and public reduction to antlike existences, rockets to the moon and cosmetic surgery, lol, etc, etc.
Just a catalyst for a surface shift which was completed by the Bomb and major mass murder.
But don't take that to bed with you, most don't agree.
Extensive subjects, night and day as wake and sleep, voices and dreams of and in each.
Lol, not about politics huh, lol?
If you know that energy makes matter right out of itself, and has formed this cosmos,
Why can't it be that that energy can reverse and draw back in that matter? Hence couldn't the cosmos only be a temporary manifestation for the benefit of us in our living endeavour? A part of an energy illusion that is very real indeed, but not one that could ever stand on its' own?
And why not our quest to know consciously that energy field from whence comes this matter, and in that knowledge, a life with both?
Fields of energy and its' will and manifestations. But that is too much, let me stop here.
But about the hitler thing, people who LOVE this world of inventions that pollute, kill, make ill, but that make for fun and excitement and enjoyment and mystery, and of course, sex, these don't like to put hitler in as a possible father figure to this world, they shun the thought, preferring instead to not seeing this world in its' true light, that of growing darkness.
But that isn't meant to depress, please don't sleep with it.
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[…] Something of the Night […]
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