Nocturne the first . . .

There is no season, dram of nature, age of human development or corner of the soul that hasn’t been parsed and versed and calibrated and celebrated in song and art and poem. Nothing new under the sun, so I’m told. But it seems to my rather casual observations that in the imagery devoted to the light and dark hours, night wins hearts and minds and invokes artists’ worship more frequently and passionately than daytime. If true, this may be horribly unfair given that daytime has so many glories and mysteries of its own. Still. I readily admit that I’m a frequent-flyer on the lovely-is-darkness magic carpet too. There’s the romantic edge, sure, but more than that there’s some inexplicable allure that I get sucked into just like everyone else. Yep, I like it. Serious or not, deep or shallow, I’ll keep jumping in. I love the night.

I'm faithful to the night as well . . .

. . . and while I love the day with equal fervor, I can also say that I’m far less inclined to celebrate it in my art, and one of the things I suspect is that it’s partly pure graphic sense. Darkness, lighted with any small source, provides a much more dramatic and lurid instant contrast than most daytime settings do, in the strictly visual sense, and we all tend, on that, to imbue the world of night (or day) with metaphorical and imagined contrasts that reflect the world of the seen.

Sing a song of nighttime? Yes, I will again. And again, and again . . .

So I reiterate the old refrain that I, er, always repeat myself. Obsessive? Stuck in a rut? Not so much so that it worries me–my actual concern has more to do with losing interest in finding something new to say about the old, learning how to follow the fruitful tangents that emerge, letting the new supplant the old when it needs to do so. Learning how to let go of the repetitious if it’s sucked dry, or if it’s sucking me dry. But I cannot imagine ever finding so little to love or so little to make new unless night becomes something it isn’t, or stops being the amazing, bizarre, ineffable, haunting, happy, wild-and-woolly things it is.

Good night, my friends, goodnight.