Night Watch

On a bleached morning in late April 1989 I rode a bicycle against the wind across the island of Arran to Machrie Moor, a complex of Bronze age stone circles and cairns. Sapped by the long ride, I have no firm memories of the site and in my journal only mentioned the tepid loneliness and chill air. For years I’d forgotten them until coming across photographs in The Modern Antiquarian that stranded me with a sense of recognizing something I’d seen long ago: three tall stones, narrow, shaded against the green hills, one almost triangular like a giant handaxe rammed in the earth. The whole trip north from London felt like an uneasy dream, from the glowing fluorescents of the overnight train to Edinburgh to the unheated, empty hostel I’d escaped on bike. It was as if the experience of the stones had hidden itself from my depressive exhaustion to return in an echo.

We usually move through historically muddled places, locations where the present appears to be embedded in the era of construction or drawn from a religious context, cultural sensibility, or function. And this is thrown into relief by places like Avebury or Uxmal where very different but not incomprehensible histories, events, and moments mingle. In those place we have none of our unconscious ease, little intuitive sense of our surroundings, and a fragmentary knowledge of archeology which can leave us conjuring banalities. Mute appreciation may be the only honest response. It takes time to gain a feel for the different scales involved, the patterns of the light and the methods of approach, to discern foreground from background. But this frustration or alienation or boredom with the first encounter can also open a distance between us and the world in which other times might make themselves felt.

“Night, the astonishing, there, the stranger to all that is human” (F. Hölderlin)

Where the giant leg of the Irish tortoise still rises from the waves, interior submerged, the vaults remain accessible to the wary. And beyond, the magnetic north, the aurora borealis shimmering from space, magnetosphere aflame. Numbers stations speaking to no one in the deep night. From the bricked up crypt of an Edinburgh graveyard to sunlight streaking along rails out, the dead will not be be held back, will not be restrained, they rise up, beacons on the ridge lines, bright phantoms flashing to life like a spark more afterimage than image. Why do these places haunt? Their surging colonnades, throats opened in chant, articulate histories, seams of gold drawing the numbed eye. I still feel the damp, dog-eared pages of its work.

At times travel moves though gothic dimensions, exposing us like silver halide to a new light in unfamiliar frequencies.

“His face was like the breath of a face—a streak that some unknown passerby has left in the air.” (B. Schulz)

Within a cyclopean museum in Mexico City designed by a Communist architect in the 1940s, Kirstin and I sought the entry to the ancient city, which stood under guard behind locked and imposing doors. Challenged and turned back, I looked over a bookstall in the lobby displaying Spanish editions of science-fiction novels I’d read in the 1970s. An old man running the stall tried to sell me some 45s, pulling out a clamshell turntable with bluetooth speaker connections and a laser stylus to keep the vinyl in pristine condition. Unable to buy his singles, I objected when he grumbled that I didn’t give a shit about New York music.

Astarte’s fallen star, a meteorite or “aerolith,” was a god of its own standing—Baitylos.

In that plaza beside the pigeons we pause to marvel at the light as the sun’s pitch and tilt across the cupolas tinges with diesel exhaust and sea spray to a fiery plasma. We walk beneath fig trees and past ibises prowling the marsh hoping for a stray word to entertain them. We mark a single path weaving among others to the display cases holding the remains of one who cast his shot before the silent mountains. The tram takes us past bulging shop windows and vast waterfalls populated by statuary to a grave from which we gather acanthus leaves. No one knows what we do with our days, but we feel that we’ve escaped with only the air in our lungs and now, for the moment at least, the roadblocks are lifted.

From the earliest ages our imaginations take us beyond the bounds of memory and personal experience (though these are hardly separate from imagination) and open out onto other times and worlds with the conviction of evidence. Their depth and presence isn’t a hazy apprehension but as concrete and detailed as anything in front of us. The subject of those spaces—Rimbaud writing Illuminations, Jarry at work on the masks for Ubu Roi—calls our attention, as it did André Breton’s wandering Nantes under Rimbaud’s spell. They shaped our shared world well before we came into existence, but we join them in some way on these streets, just as at times we can join those strangers caught in photographs or newsreels. They are like the light of distant suns playing over the earth.

“Dreaming is not an unconscious chaos but a language of a new type that requires for its translation the extensive riches of poetic invention.” (J. Schuster)

Gilgamesh, Sargon, Bes, Azurbanipal—natural secretions, colors, thought, and images dripping from metal and stone.

An enigma poses itself as if expecting an answer yet recedes out of sight even as its question is pronounced. It reveals an expanse where dead leaves stir on a concourse under quiet, dark clouds and find a path through the old streets of this city where the linen hanging in long banners from the sills ripples and the ringing of chains on metal drums echoes from the wharves. Unobserved, I tap a path past the sealed facades that once held shops behind high oval windows, each object encountered speaking of things to come. The odor of boiling chickpeas wafts from an alley. People move about, avoiding conversation and contact; perhaps they don’t belong either. It must be too early in the morning for any amiable presence, for chat and cigarettes. If a woman gripped my hand and told me to follow, I would without hesitation.