Sometimes certain recurrent themes keep appearing in one’s mind; for me, these days it has been the subject of nighttime. I have been, for example, thinking about Coco Fusco’s recent film, La Noche Eterna (The Eternal Night), which narrates the stories of three Cuban men who are condemned for their beliefs. And, while not directly related, I have also been thinking of Going Dark, the important exhibition curated by Ashley James at the Guggenheim, which involves questions of visibility in the work of artist of color exemplifying how, as the Brecht cliché would have it, there is singing— about the dark times.
Night is an inevitable metaphor for the darkness and despair felt in a hostile social or political moment (think of Night by Elie Weisel, or Max Beckmann’s The Night). Images of night are common when associated with the decline in progress, culture and science (thus the term “The Dark Ages”); 2020, our annus horribilis due to the pandemic and the dictatorship rehearsal we endured in the United States, led me to make a series of late-night drawings titled Penumbra (a series of incubus-like characters).
Night as a symbol represents, in a broader sense, the idea of being physically or spiritually adrift, direction-less in an uncertain and foreign terrain. It is this particular, perhaps more personal, interpretation of the night that I have been thinking about, and more specifically, my own ambiguous relationship (fear and attraction, fixation, and overall obsession) with it.
Many decades ago, when I was a young art student and initiated my studies in Chicago, my first day included several classes ending with an evening session of 2-D (Drawing). The class ended at 9pm, and I, tired and with a headache, took the wrong subway line. Getting off on the wrong station, I was assaulted and mugged that very night.
After that incident I developed a mild fear of the night or nyctophobia, a fact which until this day I had never shared with anyone. It did not help that I felt out of place, with fellow students who were death metal fans while I was a preppy, sheltered, pop-culture illiterate, and anachronistic kid who read Cortázar. After the mugging incident, I perhaps psychologically associated my sense of displacement in my new life with the night, and whenever darkness arrived, I started to feel uneasy.
At the same time, I was fascinated by the night, perhaps in the same way in which small children have a simultaneous fear and fascination with monsters — wanting to explore my own fear in a controlled environment. One of my favorite reads was La Noche, a 1963 short story by Juan García Ponce that evoked various aspects of urban Mexico City which I missed. One could say that I had a fixation with the night, but perhaps it was more of a fascination with the interplay of light and shadows, and my fantasy that light is a living organism that contains memories.
I have always liked the term lucubrate, as well as the action it refers to which is to study or think by night. Because nighttime is typically is a period of self-reflection (and often a time when, because we are by ourselves, we confront our greatest worries and have negative thoughts) but also because of my synesthetic-like impulse to equate light with memory, my homesickness became intricately linked to the night. My drawing professor was Bill Cass – an American printmaker and draftsman who made compositions with a de Chirico-like, metaphysical painting aesthetic but with a midwestern visual vocabulary (that is, faceless mannequins amidst deserted landscapes with farmhouses, cornfields, transmission towers, and such). He was quiet and gentle, guiding us in creating “interesting shapes”. At some point he handed us a printout of a chapter from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, titled “Corners”, which I kept with me for a long time. I was fascinated by Bachelard’s emphasis on how small spaces constitute universes, “our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty.” I sought in those corners, the “antropocosmic ties”, in Bachelard’s terminology, that could be drawn from the simplest places, “experiencing its primitiveness, a primitiveness which belongs to all, rich and poor alike”. On those meditative, snowy winter nights of Chicago, illuminated by the yellowish street lighting, I became particularly fixated with the lights of a church around the corner of my apartment that somehow made me think of Mexico and its colonial architecture.
I became obsessed with learning, for no clear reason, all the songs in the Cancionero de Upsala, which is a collection of Spanish Renaissance music, of which the only surviving copy was found in 1907 in the university of Uppsala in Sweden. One of the songs, generally considered anonymous but sometimes attributed to 16th century composer Francisco Guerrero, is titled Si la noche haze escura (If the Night is Dark):
Si la noche haze escura
y tan corto es el camino,
¿Como no venis, amigo?
Si la media noche es pasada
Y el que me pena no viene;
Mi ventura lo detiene,
por que soy muy desdichada.
Véome desamparada
gran pasión tengo conmigo.
¿Como no venis, amigo?
—-
If the night is dark
And the path so short,
Why don’t you come, my friend?
As midnight is past,
He who pains me does not come;
My fate stops him,
Because I am unfortunate
I find myself forsaken
a great passion I carry in me.
Oh why don’t you come, my friend?
This 16th century Villancico can be interpreted on its face as a simple song of unrequited love and longing. However, if one is versed in 16th century Spanish mysticism, the notion of night and darkness is also representative of the idea of crisis of faith and of being spiritually lost. The most explicit example of this is the treatise by San Juan de la Cruz, La noche oscura del alma, (The Dark Night) whose title in modern usage is still used to describe difficult times:
¡Oh noche que me guiaste!
¡oh noche amable mas que aurora!
¡oh noche que juntaste
amado con amada,
amada en el amado transformada!
—
Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!
Fast forward to many years later, in New York, where I would return to the night, poetry, and the Spanish 16th century again, by attempting to revive a secret society.
In 1591 in Valencia (the same year when San Juan de la Cruz died), a Spanish nobleman by the name of Bernardo Catalá de Valeriola created a clandestine writing group of about other 45 noblemen that met on Wednesday nights in his palatial home. They called themselves Academia de los Nocturnos ( The Academy of the Night Revelers). They were amateur poets who styled their compositions around the Italian-influenced works of Garcilaso, and Lope de Vega. In their gatherings, each member would take a pseudonym associated with the night (such as “Sombra” (Shadow), “Silencio” (Silence), “Sueño” (Dream), “Soledad” (Solitude) and so forth.
They wrote poetry on topics generally established by the president of the Academy, usually on the fashionable formats of the period such as sonnets, tercets, redondillas (a Spanish stanza form consisting of four trochaic lines, usually of eight syllables each, with a rhyme scheme of ABBA) hendecasyllabic poems, and more. The poetry produced by the Academia was generally mediocre and little, if any, would be salvageable as prized literature, but, to their credit, the Nocturnos were incredibly diligent and meticulous in keeping records of their presentations, so we have very accurate records of each of the sessions they held during their meetings. The subjects of the poems are widely varied, going from the philosophical (“Sonnet in praise of madness”, “a speech in praise of mathematics”, “three redondillas in praise of sickness”, “ten tercets about understanding”) to the love-related (“three octaves praising the lips of a lady”, “four octaves for a lady’s comb” “sonnet by a lady who dismisses her lover for being effeminate”) up to the outright absurd and hilarious (“redondillas for a mouse”, “four octaves praising a parrot” and “two stanzas praising a magnet”). The pedagogical elements of this group fascinated me, as well as the nightly secrecy of it.
I thought it would be interesting to revive the group at some point. The opportunity came with the closing exhibition of the legendary non-profit space Exit Art co-founded by Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo. After the death of Jeanette in 2011, Papo Colo made the decision to close the organization for good with a last exhibition in May of 2012 titled “Collective/Performance”. I proposed to stage a revival performance of the Academia de los Nocturnos on the last day of operations of Exit Art. We had a series of writing workshops that culminated in the final event, at 3am on May 19th, 2012. I chose 3am as the time of the performance as it appeared to me that it is a threshold hour, even in a place like New York City: at that hour, the last bar has closed, and the first city workers (sanitation, and such) have yet to start their day. There was something exciting and surreal for us to perform at 3am; I remember the slight confusion from the staff at Exit art not knowing if they should serve wine or coffee at the performance. I enjoyed the idea of performing within that threshold, and always wondered about the question of what special knowledge can be gained from the depths of darkness.
When Borges was named Director of the National Library of Argentina, in 1955, his eyesight was almost entirely gone, shortly after he became completely blind. Regarding this, he wrote the famous verses:
Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.
—
No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and night at one touch.
It is late at night as I write this, and I am getting tired, lucubrating as I am about nighttime. I am tempted to end with a cliché statement along the lines of “it is in the darkest hours when we see the light”. But I want to resist that lazy answer and instead turn back to San Juan de la Cruz:
¡Oh noche, que guiaste!
¡Oh noche amable más que la alborada!
¡Oh noche que juntaste
Amado con amada
amada en el Amado transformada!
—
Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!
This seeming love poem is nothing but a symbolic parable of the path of the soul from the body to find God, guided by faith. Transported outside of the spiritual realm and into the artistic process, just as those artists who “go dark”, it is clear that the night is not something to be feared, but to be mined, for it is there where we find the darkest truths. All artists are, in a way, night revelers.
Thank you for including the excellent term "lucubrate," which I will definitely need to use more often in my vocabulary-!!
I loved reading this just after waking up on a gray day, feeling the night recede around me. I wonder if the Spanish interest in poems and songs about the night isn’t the corollary of the alba, or poems and songs of the Dawn, which most often are about lovers (usually illicit lovers) having to part at daybreak? The song you posted (a beauty,btw) seems to be about a man or woman who is waiting for the arrival of their “friend” at night…a song about disappointed love? I’ve also read that in earlier times, when interior lighting was a burning candle, people often went to bed after it got dark; I winter months, when the night is over 12 hours long, this was tricky, and it was not unusual for people to get up in the middle of the night, and attempt to do things, before going back to sleep. Your society of people who get together at 3 a.m. seems like a throw back to those earlier habits.