Crepuscular Creatures.
"like a city where many beings, alone and distant from me, move and murmur with a destiny heaven no longer knows," - The City by Jaime Sáenz.
We bike as the sun sets, the road seems long, longer than usual, flying pass the trees, in an hour the pollen moves in waves as we return for home, it looks like the sea to us, the ocean millions of years ago once lived here and it returns now and then. A poet once called The City a forest of tents. A city can only ever truly feel like a city at that crepuscular moment and when the moon hangs in that dark scarlet sky. That is to say it requires the lights to be on to be a city. Thousands of places with lights, all these buildings have ancestors in the humble tent which the nomadic bands had setup each night. Our world has forced a grand many to return to that life against their will by our number of crimes of letting the work/war machine run wild. This time these bands are nomadic not in search of better lands but rather to avoid the searing eye of the army-state, America ceases to have any better lands now anyway. As soon as fine leather shoes set foot in a town with cheap rent it is over. Those leather shoes wish Mu would appear not to see what new urban worlds it would hold but simply to have another empty luxury condo. I pass by these crepuscular creatures, mourners leaving a cemetery at dusk. We watched a Shabbat synagogue service today, in the end they uttered the mourner's Kaddish for those who had recently departed for the unknown elsewhere of our universe, if there is an elsewhere. If the Greek legends really were true we can only believe that now there is a bus idling near the Styx highway, boat long gone. The encounter with the naval crossing like that now lives on in a few places, canal cities, forests of boats.
As we welcome the Queen we also say farewell once more, there would be less of these if the world let these nova nomadic bands come to a rest in homes currently held as gambling chips. The world is Vegas for a select few now, holding cut up parts of the urban landscape as gambling chips, able to go and see Buddy Holly's hologram sing any night they want. But these high rollers of the globalized world still feel like the rest of us, empty hollow people. You see men like Bezos fire themselves so high to try to get any emotion out of themselves. It was always Vegas, now it just looks more and more like Vegas. Vegas merely offered the American the experience of what the American Noble would've been. Las Vegas is a crepuscular city, meant to be viewed in dying light, meant to be viewed in Raoul Duke's car speeding through the night on the strip.
We do not talk enough about the crepuscular, the nocturnus, and the gallicinium. Or their spaces. History takes place in the day, tragedy and comedy are most at home in the night. Plays of the most tragic and comedic kinds should take their captives in during the day and release them into the night air, releasing them fully changed. These captives of theater must be told "Thou" by the actors, to have that relation of recognition if theater is to survive this century. And moreover if humanity wishes to survive and not perish in the desert there must be that I-Thou relationship. An era of post-historical man would be an era of I-It, no it would be worse than that, it would be It-It.
Actors and theater people are crepuscular creatures, organs struggling to break the machine-beasts apart and have a wild beast full of Joy. Restaurant workers are natural friends of actors, people used to waking before the dawn and leaving to rest once again only after the sun has been gone from the sky for hours. Robby Müller, Fryderyk Chopin, and Jaime Sáenz are some of the few artists ever able to fully capture this rare nocturnal aura, the moon lit expanse inviting endless possibilities.
Streets seem longer at night, the world itself seems to invite you to embark on a journey. Those impressive Cities call out to you, to wander off into the night and become a midnight gyrovague. Cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Las Vegas have a draw to them, they seem endless, both in their urban space and their time, they suggest that night can be eternal there. At night in these cities there seems always to be a place that is still open. Those diners and bars where writers and actors spend their nights, always on a lookout for shadows of monsters of their own creation. Artists are naturally depressed people, a reaction to a world which is trying always to kill them or hollow out their art.
With us being near Denver it always calls out to us. Cities, they have that draw, a magnetic force for lonely souls. We wandered once with two wild souls, cultists and artists of that old type, flying across the glacis. There are people like that who are meant to be nomadic, bands of autistics sharing words and wonder. That was the night we first tried weed, the return home on that bus that recalls the image of a plane felt surreal, to be with wild people is an art. We do not entirely recall what we and them talked about, far-off towns and lands, experiences of a world that is rapidly disappearing from memory. That night can only be viewed through Robby Müller's lens for us, the lights of the night seemed to be alive and wandering with us too. We wandered through history itself, old buildings, eras crashing together like ships. That was one of our first experiences of being at presence in the world I think, or at least one of the first times being alive with people who you can call friends. There's always death and desire in Denver, that is what happens with human places. Wandering in a forest of tents, lights, and souls is perhaps what humans were meant to do.
The phrase "nightlife" would have been impossible for most of the Christian world before technology had dragged night out of its den. Paul Virilio with a Catholic view bemoans a supposed unnatural turn in time with a creation of technoculture day1, my view of time differs here, for us nightfall is the start and end of the cycle. We welcome the Queen in with Friday nightfall and she leaves us once more with her crepuscular departure in a day. That crepuscular moment is brimming with activity and energy, the old day has ended and the new one begins. The Jewish nightlife is different entirely from the Secular Christian nightlife which seems to be invested with a Capitalist and Caffeine fueled invention. Secular time ends its day at midnight when no one is suppose to be observing it, an event that is impersonal, with this definition of a day it is no wonder that the technocultural day has spun out of control. Night for us remains personal, you can see with your own eyes as a new day begins, for us of course that crepuscular moment would be in limbo, night is not death, it is simply another world for us to explore.
July 11 2022.
Landscape Of Events, Chapter One, The Big Night.