A huge contradiction: looking at the silent universe, where sound does not exist and when it is born it does not spread, and having so many sounds born in you, so much music composed over the centuries, so many words, texts, poems, verses, so many paintings, so many thoughts, dreams, promises, trips into our inner world…
We look at the outside world and sink into ourselves. What greater proof that we are all made out of the stardust, the material of the universe?
Up in the night sky we placed God, fear, hope, prayer…
Night is the most primal image of ‘all’ and ‘everything’, of the concept of ‘protecting vail’, but also of the ‘other’ that exists out there.
It is a magical image because it unites the past (starlight takes from minutes to many thousands of years to reach us) with the present (the moment we observe it) and the future (it automatically makes us dream of tomorrow).
At the same time, it is the most ‘ephemeral always’. While it changes very slowly, every night is different, unique, and while it seems timeless, it contains so much movement (falling stars, movement of the planets, etc.).
Paul Bowles, a composer and author who lived most of his life in North Africa and knew the Mediterranean night well, as only Mediterranean peoples know, wrote: ‘everyone thinks they have seen the moon, but how many distinct moments can we remember when we have seen the moon? 3? 4 perhaps?’
The times I was in contact with the night have deeply etched themselves on me, and fortunately these moments come to remind me of my origins at regular intervals.
As a child, in my pre-teen years, I remember going to the rural villages of Thessaly, where my family comes from, as a ‘summer vacation’ since finances did not allow for more exotic vacations on the Greek islands. There, with my older cousins, we would go at past midnight hours into the fields that were irrigated 24/7 for a ‘change’ — every 2-3 hours the irrigation pipes were moved from one point in the field to another, ‘changing the watering point’ to successively water the entire field – manually, in the mud of the freshly-wetted soil, in absolute darkness far from the few lights of the village, next to all kinds of small and large animals and crawling things, barefoot because shoes sinks in and makes walking difficult. The first few times, I didn’t believe that they were allowing me, the city kid, to be exposed to what was, until then, absolute danger, but also to the ‘grandeur of the night’, which was the same as that of ‘life’ for me.
I had never seen the night so closely! I had never listened to the silence so carefully.
Light and sound pollution in cities is unimaginably great, and something that even modern societies have not yet addressed. There is no real darkness almost anywhere near a city, no matter how small. And you only understand this if you find yourself in a forest, in fields far from villages, on uninhabited islands, in the open sea…
Years later, during my military service, I would spend 10+ months on patrol, alone (since older soldiers are disrespectful and do not accompany you – illegally, but you can’t object) on the slopes of inhospitable mountains, winter, spring, summer, with mud or tall grass, with thousands of sounds of the night (animals, reptiles but also people, outlaws, smugglers of all kinds) where you always fear that they are definitely watching you, waiting for you, or at best avoiding you, as well as in endless hours of military observation post, where however you have the luxury of being silent, to experience every sound, every movement, to observe the 20-30 stars that you see falling every hour, to watch the night that gives you the impression of stillness amidst its perpetual movement.
I was lucky that just a few years before the army, I had begun exploring the barren and uninhabited islands, where the night dominated in dreams, whispers, oaths and illusions… and fortunately, this journey into the night with its own sounds, laws, dimensions and effects has not stopped since then.
Summer, for me, almost always meant ‘absolute night’, clear skies, sweet coolness after the heat of the day, a breeze from the breath of ‘mother’ life… the one you always trust, since forever, even if it’s a lie…