Blackness Strikes at the Centre of the World [1]
The chase between night and day has been going on for billions of years. The skin of the Earth changes; mountains split in two, continents shift, oceans spill into places that were once land. The Earth becomes ice, becomes forest, and now bakes like a toxic furnace until it takes on its next form.And yet, always, always, it moves through this obsessive succession of day and night.
It is day, and then it is night, and then day again, and then night.
A lazy but utterly consistent account of the history of this planet might go something like this: It was day, and then it was night.
Forever.
In truth, though, it was night first, and everything else came afterwards.
Or, to be more precise, (i)n the very beginning, first of all, there was Chaos. And then broad-bosomed Earth (...). And from Chaos came Erebus and black Night. [2]And Night, coupling with her brother Erebus, gave birth to Day. So, Day is the child of Night, the offspring of the most primordial incest, a legendary act of inbreeding that set everything in motion.
Things grow in the dark.
***
The Ambiguity of Celebration
Nights of Carnival Excess
On the fringes of violence
The crowds came together, frightened and exhilarated
A mêlée of revolution and carnival
An emancipatory night
Either a troubled border, a restless frontier
Claiming a history that leaves no traces
The place where desire and necessity meet
Stories not to fall asleep to, stories that keep you awake at night
The Nights When She Turns into a Tyrannosaurus
Nights are revelatory.
Nights are tender.
Nights are merciless.
Her first thoughts at 2 a.m.: Last league, dead last, with the swagger of a champion by morning. She feels like a football pitch somewhere beyond the zoning limits, on the outskirts of some remote mountain village.
One of those nights when she woke in the middle of the night and could do nothing but think and scratch herself, she went online to find out what might be wrong with her. She will admit that diagnosing yourself through a web search is idiotic, but she is sure you’ll admit you’ve done it plenty of times too. And, of course, she could have had every single syndrome she was reading about.
One of them listed, as a possible symptom, sleeping with your hands turned inward and curled beneath your chin—the so-called “T-rex hands.”She looked at the reference photo and thought, “Nah.” But then, just as she was about to fall asleep, she noticed that her palms were turning inward of their own accord, settling into exactly that position.
That was it.
She has been sleeping with T-rex arms.
She was born on a Monday at ten in the morning, sleeves rolled up, just a few days before the longest night of the year. Forty-two years undefeated in the service of daylight, she is chased by the light, waiting for night to come so that her soul can finally fall back into place. And now she discovers that she is a relic of the Jurassic period, curling up to sleep with the palms of a tyrannosaurus.
She have never suffered from insomnia. It’s just that sometimes she doesn’t want to “go to bed,” nor does she want to “let sleep take her” without putting up a fight.
Going to sleep voluntarily feels like a terrible surrender. And yet she admires people who so calmly accept their “defeat” and make their way to bed. They turn off the light, slip beneath the sheets, close their eyes, and allow sleep to sweep over them.
At the same time, she finds comfort in the places that never close at night: petrol stations, airports, hospitals, twenty-four-hour kiosks, pharmacies on duty, toll booths. Perhaps because she is a child of the city and needs to know that, at any given moment, somewhere, there is a person you could exchange a few words with. Or perhaps she simply cannot bear this ultimate stage of adulthood: the knowledge that no one goes to sleep after her.
She is the last person to turn off the lights and go to bed, alone in the small silence of the apartment. There is no television murmuring in the background, no other waking people in the house, nothing continuing inside it once she closes her eyes.
[1] Alice, Fabienne, ed. The Allure of Black: An Anthology of Texts on the Colour Black. Translated by Sofia Leonidi. Athens: Agra Publications, 2017
[2] Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia. Edited and translated by Glenn W. Most. Loeb Classical Library 57. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018
