First thing the map will tell you it has no place – It encompasses a plethora of places but they all escape the meshes of its grid – Except when surface tension is enough to hold them like in Faustroll’s boat – Places each of them at the end of a tentacle – Each of them vast yet intimate –

Second thing you must refrain from the urge to fall asleep and dream – There are hundreds of reasons to dream but it will not bring you closer to night – On the contrary you will be busy with your various stories and experiences and it will pass you by as if nothing happened – Night is not within you – You walk into the night you do not dream into the night – You walk away from your birthday cake – You keep waking up from a nightmare that you can not remember –

Third thing it is not situated in time – Once it is encountered it takes off from the temporal flow – Sets up headquarters on the open sea without reference points – Evades measurement and eludes containment – A conference without memory where everything seems vaguely crucial – You do not sit there and wait for it you walk out into it –

It has its particular palette of colours of course – A particular lack of people a certain sense of quiet intimacy urgency and perhaps even conspiracy – It famously has characteristic privileged loci of course at bridges quays and lakeside walks, at dense parks and forest edges, at misty fields, at empty squares and abandoned places, it flows along the distribution of streetlamps – But it is easiest to recognise it by the relative lack of background noise – Which makes the little rattles and squeaks and your own heartbeat so much more distinct your bloodflow and tinnitus – Even in those cases where the air is perhaps full of the sound of breaking waves or of wind and rain or of cicadas or crickets or frogs screaming away these are not background noises these are monologues of mechanisms of existence they need to be put on record but there is no need to stay quiet in deference and in expectancy of secret messages well surely you need to shut up at times but you already did or you wouldn’t have been invited in the first place and once you’re there you know that secret messages are everywhere and not even secret – Perhaps there is always an ocean nearby – And dawn is always approaching – But you do not know whether you have a home you need to accept that you will have to survive wherever you are – Night remains fix perpetual beyond reach always safe inescapable haunting unreasonable – Sometimes you just cannot find the way there for months – (There was no typo there nobody said sometimes you just cannot find the way there for moths)