“One eats well here. Moreover and more importantly, the rose touches me,” the centaur said. “Its ‘significant form’ arouses the instinct for the beautiful and the elevated, and its fragility reminds us of the evanescent nature of life and that even the beautiful die, is it not so?”
“Thank you all,” Marie said, “for piercing through the facade of my unadorned presentation to fathom the core of its aesthetic—and may I say, existential—program. ‘Less is more,’ as someone opined earlier, at some simpler time when the world was not fastened in snow and sunk in night, when we were young and careless with the truth, when we’d rather appear right than be happy, when we thought happiness was waiting just around the corner and when we never imagined our hearts splintered and set in a cast of ice-cream sticks and rubber bands, when we never thought that we would be, out of the air, speaking French and, in that tongue, sense our mutual affection.”
Louie felt a breeze, a turbulence of plates. A strong cat had leapt to the table and, uninvited, was on the liverwurst, tongue first, with little raspy licks.
Marie, returning to English, said, “Oh! Red, dear, you’ve come back.”
The cat gave her an acknowledging nod before dragging the prize onto the sawdust floor, where he chewed away with the manic gusto of the starved.
“I had a cat once,” Louie said. “Nicolino.”
“Did he run away?” the centaur asked.
“Did he get married and go off with his bride, and live with his rich in-laws in the suburbs?” Harry asked.
“Did he die?” Marie asked.
“Of grief,” Louie said.
The cat ate until only a little mound of the liverwurst was left. He waddled to a corner of the bar, spun about three times before gagging, and finally vomited up a ball of meat and fur.
“He’ll go away and hide until I clean it up,” Marie said. “He knows I always will. I was born to clean up another’s mess, as long as it’s a cat’s.”
“The stars indicated that about you,” the centaur said. “They were very clear about it tonight.”
“Died from the poison that was meant for the rats who rule this park he so loved to prowl,” Louie said. “I left the fire escape window open to him in all weather and he came and went as he chose. One morning, I got a call from a parkie who found him and had read his name tag with my phone number. He had the humanity to ask if I wanted to come collect Nicolino’s little corpse or he would dispose of it in the usual way.”
“What way was that?” Marie asked.
“First the dumpster,” Louie said, “and then carted off to the grinder and ground. Nicolino had been grieving over a svelte Persian who had left him for a pedigreed tom from First and Seventh. In no time, she squeezed out a litter of eight on a kilim carpet. I saw Nicolino slowly pine away and drag himself from room to room and sulk at the window and crawl down the fire escape, his head lowered like a defeated man. Well, he was defeated, after all. Grief had drained his soul and the rat poison finished him.”
“There are so many tales of love. I read dozens of them on my long sea passages,” Harry said, “and I learned that the best is to end before the eventual boredom, recriminations, and contempt.”
“As I was saying,” Louie said, “the young German felt himself easing into a painless, welcoming death. Haven’t you at a lecture or at a sermon longed to close your eyes and had to fight with all your might to keep them open? Open, so as not to be publicly disgraced or to disgrace your companion beside you, and haven’t you thought at that moment it was better to die than to hear another word?
“Imagine then this young man’s wish to surrender his life. What did another hour or day matter when it would be over anyway, sooner or later, one time or another? In fact, better now when it was so comfortable to die in the soft snow and in the softening night and call it quits. What was ahead for him anyway? Some moments of pleasure, the fleeting ecstasy of music, and maybe a few seconds of joy seeing a hawk in flight, the orgasm, the early days of love? The rest, at best, was the ennui of daily life; the worst, the fall into decrepitude and illness, into loneliness and loss. What was the point struggling to stay awake when it was so inviting—so delicious, in fact—to sleep in the eternal night for eternity?”
“Who is this friend? Was it you?” the centaur asked.
They stood in the tall gloom of the ever-freezing, ever-darkening bar, each sending out a sound of displeasure with his and her abject condition: a groan, a snort, a sigh, a “whew.”
Until, finally, one said: “Let’s ride out of here,” and another, “Let’s weigh anchor.” Louie said nothing, his jaw still frozen in place, but he pointed to the door and nodded three times. Finally, Marie said, “Last one out turns off the lights.”
“You may have noticed,” the centaur said, “that the power and the lights have been out for some while and the candles themselves are inching toward extinction.”
Who first said, “Let’s go”? Who fetched the smelly horse blankets left moldering in the old stalls? Who first pulled open the ice-trimmed door to the icy night? Who took the tenuous first steps into the snowpiled sidewalk?
No matter: we soon were out into the white. Marie rode sidesaddle on the centaur’s broad back; Red, who had appeared from some burrow in the bar, nestled himself in Marie’s arms. Harry clung to the centaur’s flowing tail, and I followed behind in the centaur’s narrow wake. The man in the moon loomed above, casting us all in a silver glow. He was crowned with a sailor’s watch cap and wore a tartan scarf about his cheesy neck. The ice had frozen his goofy smile.
We staggered our way through Avenues B, C, and D, pausing at the lightless housing projects, which loomed like giant walls of black ice to block our progress. But we soon wended our way through and crossed the East River Drive, bereft of cars and persons, through the park, until we finally made it to the river, which had locked tugs, oilers, and barges in ice. A helicopter hung, like a mosquito, in the icy membrane of the sky.
We stood at the railing and watched the ice cracking below to form a channel just wide enough for a tug to make its way and halt before us, its engine churning the water into a frothy boil before it went dead and silence encased itself in ice. Lilac sprigs rose from the tug’s prow, scenting the air, the fragrance melting the jagged edges of the ice sheet that had draped itself over the tug.
The captain, preceded by billows of cherry-flavored smoke from his chunky pipe, emerged on the deck. He smiled with jack-o’-lantern teeth, and his ruddy cheeks glowed with hearty life. He was, I thought, a man who had seen the days and who loved his beef and stout and long afterdinner naps.
“Come aboard the Arcadia,” he said in a cheery voice.
“Is there room for me?” the centaur asked.
“We’ll fix you a cozy berth,” the captain said, setting out the gangplank for us to tread.
“What do you say, Marie?” Harry asked.
“As long as Red can come along.”
“Cats are loved here,” the captain said.
“May I join you, Captain?” I asked, out of politeness, knowing that I too had been invited if, indeed, I had not been long awaited.
We boarded and were soon weaving downriver, the night and ice parting before us. We were soon fast upon the Narrows and I knew that in no time we would attain the open sea.
Nineteenth-Century Nights and Nocturnal Lights
Cecily Parks
A farm near Uppsala, Sweden, late July: night deepens over the grassy lawn, the hunching brambles, the river gone pale gray with glints of black. Unable to sleep, nineteen-year-old Elisabeth Christina leaves her bedroom and pads with bare feet downstairs and through the large farmhouse dining room where her family ate supper hours ago. When she opens the door at the back of the house, the wind off the river pushes her nightclothes against her stomach. Cold grass underfoot, flowers wavering in the wind. Perhaps she escapes the house that night for sensual reasons, hoping for something to happen. Something happens. In the location in the garden wh
ere she knows the orange petals of the Tropaeolum majus to be, several flower-sized fires sparkle and flare. Perhaps Elisabeth Christina runs inside to wake her father, Carolus Linnaeus, the botanist famous for devising the classification system we still use to name plants. Or perhaps Elisabeth Christina kneels by herself in front of the flower flame. Not hot fire but a trick of phosphorescence, she will explain when she publishes in 1762 a paper on her discovery: the Tropaeolum majus, commonly known as the nasturtium, glows in the dark.
Across the Atlantic decades later, as botanical and horticultural texts proliferated in nineteenth-century America, so did reports of the nasturtium’s nocturnal magic. Hermon Bourne writes in The Florist’s Manual (1833): “This curious plant is said to possess the extraordinary property of emitting flashes of light in the dark. It exhibits an appearance not unlike the gleam of distant lightning. It is often so bright as to render the plant itself entirely visible.” In his nasturtium entry in The American Flora, or History of Plants and Wild Flowers (1855), Asa B. Strong writes: “Darkness flies at your approach. In the darkness of mid-summer’s night, it is said, that the electrical sparks may be seen emanating from the flowers of this plant.”
*
As an adult, the poet Emily Dickinson began gardening in the dark—before dawn, at twilight, or even at night—when she suffered an eye condition that made it painful for her to be outside in sunlight. According to scholar Judith Farr, “Her neighbors recalled glimpsing a white figure, slightly illumined by lantern light, kneeling in the darkness above her lobelia and sweet sultans.” What began as a medical necessity became a preference, so that when her eyes improved, Dickinson continued to dig, prune, weed, water, and sow in the dark. “We grow accustomed to the Dark— / When Light is put away—,” she writes, and later, in the same poem:
Either the Darkness alters—
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight—
And Life steps almost straight.
Darkness suffuses the movie of Dickinson’s life, A Quiet Passion (2016), flickering through the sitting room where Dickinson and her family occupy themselves with solitary pursuits—sewing, reading, sleepily treading into the “larger—Darknesses—Those Evenings of the Brain—[.]” In another scene, a wide-eyed Dickinson asks her father for permission, which he grants, to write poems at night. This is the kind of request a child makes of her parent after she’s already begun to do the thing requested, already begun to slip out of her bed after the family is asleep and pad with bare feet to her small writing table. If, on those nights, Dickinson eschewed the table for the door at the back of the house and with “Uncertain step / For newness of the night—” stepped outside with a lantern in her hand, she was still practicing a poetics. The “work of poetry is to counter the oblivion of darkness” writes Susan Stewart. Darkness flies at your approach. In this way the nasturtium is the work of poetry, gardening by lantern light is the work of poetry, stepping out of your father’s house at night in your nightclothes is the work of poetry.
Mary Ruefle: “I am convinced that the first lyric poem was written at night.”
*
I use the term night poetics to think about what happens in the night that cannot happen in the day, with a specific attention to those sensual relationships to the natural world that the night cultivates. Small spots of light, which I think of as metonyms for poetry, mediate many of these relationships to the darkness and are often born out of it. Stewart again: “When we express our existence in language … we literally bring light into the inarticulate world that is the night of preconsciousness and suffering.” Stewart’s metaphorical night cleaves closely to the darkness of the literal night, especially the nonurban night in which and of which nineteenth-century writers wrote. While this literary attention appears most publicly in Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s essays, which their race, gender, and privilege permitted them to publish with relative ease, these men are two stars in a larger nineteenth-century constellation that includes Emily Dickinson and the tellers of ghost stories. These less public voices, in most cases, chose night for the same reasons they chose poetry or the ghost story—because they were places for secrecy and transgressive desire. They bound their fears and desires into small books and placed them inside a box, or whispered them around a fire.
Because the nineteenth century, which saw the advent of electricity and rapid industrialization, marked the beginning of the end of the American night, these texts and traces of texts are remnants of an unrecoverable time but also, I want to point out, an unrecoverable place. I would be overlooking the safety, comfort, health, and social welfare of many vulnerable people were I to indulge in a nostalgia that says that old nights were more beautiful, and therefore better, than our present ones. I am more interested in noting that we, as humans with secret desires, used to have a physical place to seek them that we no longer have. The night, which I am thinking of in this essay as an environment, like a wetland or prairie, is being gradually eradicated in America, as in the rest of the world, by electricity and all that it illuminates. For beneficial or destructive ends, our secrets are increasingly public, shared on the Internet that never sleeps, glowing on screens long into the yellow light-polluted night.
*
I first encountered the word o’nights in a passage in Thoreau’s journal. Obscure and expressionistic, the word arrested me in part because of its weird contraction, which we most commonly encounter in the word o’clock. I assumed that o’nights was a word that delineated time and translated it for myself as something like of the nights, letting it rest that way in my mind for years. O’nights. Even without looking up the word in the dictionary I could tell that it described not just one but multiple nights, as if there were a range of experiences that the night proffered or, more likely, a range of nights to experience. In the nineteenth century and earlier, those nights could only have been encountered sensually, with cold grass underfoot, the wind from the river pushing against your nightclothes, the sweet stinging of pines in your nose, the song of the whip-poor-will in your ears, and the taste of nasturtium petals in your mouth.
The word, according to Oxford, means at nights. Use of the word declines throughout the nineteenth century so that now, as I write this essay, Microsoft Word leaves a red ripple under the word to let me know that it is obscure and possibly wrong. Not alone among environmentally minded literary critics who draw attention to the relationships between language and place, Robert Macfarlane argues that the loss of the ecological signifier forecasts the loss of attention to the signified, which is a kind of loss of the signified itself. Macfarlane discovers that the most recent edition of The Oxford Junior Dictionary does not include words such as acorn, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. Without the words to recognize the fern and the pasture, perhaps my children will turn away from them, leave them unseen, which is a way of allowing them to vanish. In the places of the effaced flora and fauna in the Oxford Junior Dictionary are the new additions of our digital era: attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, cut-and-paste, and voice mail. It is not hard to imagine the twenty-first-century child waking up in the night and padding with bare feet to her computer, forgoing the darkness outside to search the bright Internet with her fingertips. Dickinson, in a letter: “How do you sleep o nights—and is your appetite waning?”
*
In her late poem “[Those—dying then,]” Dickinson describes losing faith in the certainty of a place with God after death and concludes that a capricious natural source of light offers a serviceable substitute: “Better an ignis fatuus / Than no illume at all –[.]” Ignis fatuus (foolish fire) is the Latin name for the will-o’-the-wisp, the greenish light that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers reportedly glimpsed flickering in wetlands and followed at their peril. It is said that over the course of her life D
ickinson increasingly chose gardening over churchgoing and, before her death, requested that her coffin be carried through the flower garden she tended at night, an indication that her particular ignis fatuus may have resided there. When Dickinson (earnestly, I believe) offers the ignis fatuus as an alternative to Christian belief, she communicates not only the extent of her religious crisis, but also the fact that in that religious crisis, she might locate a religious experience outdoors, at night. Dickinson’s belief in the natural world echoes Thoreau’s declaration: “Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable.”
Thoreau’s encounter with a will-o’-the-wisp occurs on an expedition in the Maine woods one night while his fellow travelers are asleep. He slips out of his blankets with the intention of stoking a low campfire and spies on a piece of firewood an “elliptical ring of light[.]” An investigation with his knife reveals a ring of sap under the bark, “all aglow along the log,” whittled chips of which “lit up the inside of my hand, revealing the lines and wrinkles, and appearing exactly like coals of fire raised to a white heat.” The encounter prompts Thoreau to marvel: “I little thought that there was such light shining in the darkness of the wilderness for me. … It made a believer of me more than before.” A believer in what? Not in science, which he disparages in the same passage, and not in Christianity, which he disparages all the time. The will-o’-the-wisp, as he learns from his Native guide Joseph Polis to call the phenomenon, makes him a believer in the poetry that the natural world offers at night. (“[I]f I can show men that there is some beauty awake while they are asleep, —if I add to the domains of poetry,” he hopes in another essay, titled “Night and the Moonlight.”) Thoreau kept the chips, splintered relics, and the following night tried to make them glow again. They did not.
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