“Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the cross-roads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?” — Henry Beston (1888-1968), The Outermost House, 1933
Tag Archives: light
Night Blight
Sky-Guy for the Strayed Eye
The sky is in the sand,
That blend of sea and land,
Where ribbled pools
Make optic fools
Of eyes that stray or strand.
Peri-Performative Post-Scriptum
This poem is my sub-Housmanesque attempt to capture the sight of sky reflected in pools between wave-ribbed sand, so that there seemed to be another world floating there. I don’t like “optic fools”, where the adjective is obtrusively un-Anglish. But I also considered “photic fools”, for the alliteration. In the end, I might have used “eyeish fools”, if it hadn’t meant I couldn’t use “eyes” in the final line. Alternatives like “Of all that…” or “Of those that…” didn’t seem good. Oh, and “Sky-Guy” uses guy in the sense of “trick” or “hoax”, not as it’s used in the title of the TV program paronomasized in the title of this post.
Old Gold
Golden Light (1893) by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-93)
Lux Legibilis
I wake from dreams and turning
My vision on the height
I scan the beacons burning
About the fields of night.
Each in its steadfast station
Inflaming heaven they flare;
They sign with conflagration
The empty moors of air.
The signal-fires of warning
They blaze, but none regard;
And on through night to morning
The world runs ruinward. — A.E. Housman in More Poems (1936)
There was a young fellow named Bright
Who travelled much faster than light.
He set off one day,
In a relative way
And came back the previous night. — Anonymous
Childe Thing
The Goldfish Window (1916) by Childe Hassam (1859-1935)
(click for larger)
ConstKunst
John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds (1825, Frick Collection)
Elsewhere other-engageable…
• Discussion of Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds (1823) at Wikipedia
Performativizing Papyrocentricity #23
Papyrocentric Performativity Presents:
• Face Paint – A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, Laura Cumming (HarperPress 2009; paperback 2010)
• The Aesthetics of Animals – Life: Extraordinary Animals, Extreme Behaviour, Martha Holmes and Michael Gunton (BBC Books 2009)
• Less Light, More Night – The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artifical Light, Paul Bogard (Fourth Estate 2013)
• The Power of Babel – Clark Ashton Smith, Huysmans, Maupassant
Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 