Nickel van Duijvenboden
In an interview that was broadcast last year with the late author Marguerite Duras, she compared the act of writing to the night. This analogy, and the succinct and sphinxlike way Duras put it, has been haunting me ever since. What did she mean? Clearly, she was referring to the solitude and withdrawal of writing, invoking the familiar metaphor of edging your way forward in pitch darkness (cf. Heidegger’s likening of philosophy with hacking your way through a thicket). But above all, I suspect, it was a nod to a concept popular in 1970s French thinking: the death of the author. It holds that the writer necessarily abandons his writing after it is completed, after which it is up to the reader to endow it with meaning, with life. And so the author ought to remain silent and leave the interpretation to others. In my view, Duras’ allusion to the night was primarily a response to the interviewer’s questions, which expected her to illuminate the act of writing. Yet anyone who prefers noctural circumstances for creation, literally and figuratively, understands why it’s hard to discuss them in broad daylight.
The most striking remark in Paul Bogard’s lecture, last Friday, on the increasing disappearance of true night, was the fact that most people in favour of the ubiquity of electric glare use the argument of safety. Supposedly we feel safer when we’re not enveloped by darkness. But in his talk, which was refreshingly romantic compared to the paradigmatic discussions of the Anthropocene a day earlier, Bogard suggested that the modern-day use of electric light doesn’t actually increase safety but rather instills a dread of the dark. The idea that light protects us from some invisible threat is primarily commercially driven. After all, our cities have only been electrically illuminated for two centuries, and before that darkness was simply an integral part of our lives. In terms of security (read: visibility) we’re actually far better off with a sparser and more thoughtful distribution of light than the indiscriminate proliferation of sideways and upward pointing lamps we are seeing nowadays. And more importantly, it would allow us to see more of the night sky and remind ourselves of our insignificance…
Our modern discomfort with darkness can perhaps be compared with the common suspicion of silence and solitude. The painter Agnes Martin once wrote: ‘We have been very strenuously conditioned against solitude. To be alone is considered to be a grievous and dangerous condition. So I beg you to recall in detail any times when you were alone and discover your exact response at those times. I suggest to artists that you take every opportunity of being alone.’ For me, this quote makes for a nice complement to Duras’s: it evokes a state that is believed to be negative, yet our endurance or even embrace of it is indispensible to creation. Silence, too, is considered awkward and menacing; it is persistently being drowned out in much the same way as we diminish darkness with light.
During Paul Bogard’s talk I was reminded of an article in the New York Times Magazine titled ‘Is silence going extinct?’. This article described field research conducted by the US National Park Service (NPS) to measure the waning of silence in remote areas. They made week-long sound recordings in Alaska only to find that engine sounds (airplanes, cars, machines) produced significant and frequent interruptions. The encroachment of human-induced sounds actually affects the habitats and habits of wildlife. Certain birds and animals have migrated and even changed the pitch of their ancient calls (that is to say, they evolved) to get above the daily hum in areas populated by man. There are less and less places where they can find refuge. In the same vein, Bogard remarked that, according to a friend of his in the NPS, only three locations throughout the US were eligible as ‘class one’ in terms of darkness. One of them was in Death Valley.
Bogard himself was indeed reminiscent of the hikers and rangers I met when I travelled through the Californian deserts. His talk brought back an significant experience I’ve had with the night. It happened in a State Park in the south of California, close to the Mexican border. Overcoming my fear of the dark, I ventured out one night with my recording gear, hoping to get some solid silence on tape and perhaps encounter a coyote or a mountain lion. I walked for forty minutes, feeling increasingly comfortable. If anything, the darkness heightened my senses. Alertness gradually made way for focus, undistractedness. Until the rhythmic crunching underneath my feet was slowly overwhelmed by a low rumble. It took me a moment to discern a pair of moving lights amongst the stars. Apparently, a border patrol helicopter that was surveilling the area had caught sight of me. It hung still for a long while as we faced each other. Then it swerved and flew off. It could have been amusing, if not for the sudden realization that they might confuse me, a Dutchman hiking alone at night with headphones and a microphone, with an illegal immigrant. I quickly made my way back to the camp site for fear they would send a patrol car.
It follows that, much like in Agnes Martin’s maxim, if you’re not afraid of the night, of silence and solitude, then other people will be afraid for you. Civilization will be afraid for you and make sure there’s less and less of it. But night, both the nighttime as well as the capsule that ensures an unbothered and unsurveilled thought process, is indispensible. I can only say we need more of it.
Links:
Paul Bogard’s website
Light Pollution Map
New York Times Magazine: Is Silence Going Extinct? (includes some amazing sound recordings)
Marguerite Duras: Écrire (in French)
