Lightning flashes across the other side of the city giving me a quick reflection of my face in the window.
All that electricity concentrated to razor’s edge; it amazes me that we are able to contain that potential for destruction in order to light our nights, to keep the wolf from the door; to extend our awareness to more than just the daytime.
It is only when the lights go out that we remember how afraid we are of the dark.
The night time is when the mind is most aware, alert to the sounds of the predators that lurk, freed by the imagination to wander unhinged in the loss of visual comfort - all that darkness out there.
There is no ambiguity in the night’s language.
The city too takes on another face at night; it watches, awakened from the day’s slumbering, paranoid, alert.
If you watch the city from up here, it all makes a kind of weird sense, a balance: Justice does not patrol the night with half the vigilance it deploys during daylight – racial minorities beaten with the nightsticks of self-righteousness, high contrast real-life drama under the spotlight from a news helicopter.
Yes, bad news for the night's victims; but the real bad news goes down in broad daylight.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, collateral damage – call it what you want – real criminal activity, by day the camera crews cannot (or will not) get away with shining that bright light, in daylight we believe what we’re told by those in the know.
At Night we huddle together for protection from their own thoughts, afraid of what lurks there; by day it all goes smoothely, without fear; the pursuit of money as a means to power; Armageddon as a self-fulfilling prophecy, perpetuated by megalomaniacs under the pretext of god’s will.
And blood, when freed from the confines of the body, runs with the force deeper than mere morality and stronger than the moon’s gravity.
All that electricity concentrated to razor’s edge; it amazes me that we are able to contain that potential for destruction in order to light our nights, to keep the wolf from the door; to extend our awareness to more than just the daytime.
It is only when the lights go out that we remember how afraid we are of the dark.
The night time is when the mind is most aware, alert to the sounds of the predators that lurk, freed by the imagination to wander unhinged in the loss of visual comfort - all that darkness out there.
There is no ambiguity in the night’s language.
The city too takes on another face at night; it watches, awakened from the day’s slumbering, paranoid, alert.
If you watch the city from up here, it all makes a kind of weird sense, a balance: Justice does not patrol the night with half the vigilance it deploys during daylight – racial minorities beaten with the nightsticks of self-righteousness, high contrast real-life drama under the spotlight from a news helicopter.
Yes, bad news for the night's victims; but the real bad news goes down in broad daylight.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, collateral damage – call it what you want – real criminal activity, by day the camera crews cannot (or will not) get away with shining that bright light, in daylight we believe what we’re told by those in the know.
At Night we huddle together for protection from their own thoughts, afraid of what lurks there; by day it all goes smoothely, without fear; the pursuit of money as a means to power; Armageddon as a self-fulfilling prophecy, perpetuated by megalomaniacs under the pretext of god’s will.
And blood, when freed from the confines of the body, runs with the force deeper than mere morality and stronger than the moon’s gravity.
Victory in Fallujah - November 2004
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