Things That Resound Through the Night...

I have always been intrigued by the night - the stillness, the quiet, the calm that still manages to convey a sense of expectancy. I have pages and pages of my own verses about how magic night is to me, written by torch or candlelight on my bedroom windowsill or the back verandah in the early, early hours when the world was all my own and I was all of the world. Day always seemed so chaotic, so frenetic and charged, that my powers of thought and creativity were stifled by the necessity of building and living through life. But to step outside at night alone was to enter a room surrounded by thick, black drapes that hid the chaos away. I used to feel that if I stayed up all night I gained some supernatural power, some deeper understanding of life that was only bestowed on those who were willing to wait, and to listen.

I know night, for obvious reasons, is often associated with dark hours, with danger and uncertainty and a particular kind of sadness and loneliness that isn't conceivable in the light of day. Whenever I feel this I have to wonder how much is due to stirrings of thought and memory that are perhaps best left dormant: in other words, I think that sometimes in the calm and quiet, the reflections that flit through our heads of ourselves and our lives and where we have been and what we have done and how we have come through it are so overwhelming that they cannot be comprehended.

"You're only alive if you feel the distance" was a line from a song I wrote in 1997 called 'In the End', and what I meant by it was that, to me, the nature of humanity was only really experienced when you came so close to realising who you were that you couldn't stand it; that you understood what it meant to be alive by covering all the distance between where your life began and where you are now. It came from a time when I was fascinated by the stars, out in the backyard every night with a torch and a star chart, watching my newfound-but-ancient star-patterned friends swirl about my head as the night went on, and the distances between myself and them used to stun me. Realising that looking at the light of a star which had travelled hundreds or thousands of years to get to a point where I could see it; it was like looking back in time, in some cases it was almost raising the dead. It was like there was a great secret that the universe held, and for some brief moment, I could hear a whisper that gave me hope, if not direction, for the days and weeks ahead.

For what it's worth, I'm not a morning person. ;)