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“I dreamt you, and when I awoke I was sure your spirit had just fluttered from the room. I have yanked you from your sleep before–into the dream I was dreaming. Twisted you like a spiral of hair around a finger. Love, you arrived with your heart full of birds.”

— Sandra Cisneros, from “Eyes of Zapata,” Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry, eds. Bryce Milligan, Mary Guerrero Milligan, and Angela de Hoya (Riverhead Books, 1995)

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“Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self. I remember isolated, yet fragmented and confused, images–and images, shifting, enlarging, is the word, rather than moments or events–which are mine alone and which are especially vivid to me. They involve me wholly and immediately, even though they are the disintegrated impressions of a young child. They call for a certain attitude of belief on my part now; that is, they must mean something, but their best reality does not consist in meaning. They are not stories in that sense, but they are story-like, mythic, never evolved but evolving ever. There are such things in the world: it is their nature to be believed; it is not necessarily in them to be understood. Of all that must have happened to and about me in those my earliest days, why should these odd particulars alone be fixed in my mind? If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else.”

— N. Scott Momaday, from The Names: A Memoir (University of Arizona Press, 1996)

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“I am watching a bat scoop the emptiness from the night, watching the hackberry embrace the moon. Sometimes we have to hold hands with our own nightmares. When I tell you that the voice of the nightingale turns dark you have to understand what this love is trying to overcome, you have to know that if you ever leave, if you ever disappear, the sky would rip, and the stars would lose their way.”

— Richard Jackson, from “Night Sky,” in Resonance: Poems (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)

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SURROUNDED BY COLOR

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After the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, many Civil War soldiers’ lives were saved by a phenomenon called ‘Angel’s Glow.’

The soldiers, who lay in the mud for two rainy days, had wounds that began to glow in the dark and heal unusually fast.

In 2001, 2 teens won an international science fair by discovering the soldiers had been so cold that their bodies created the perfect conditions for growing a bioluminescent bacteria, which ultimately destroyed the bad bacteria that could’ve killed them.

Source Source 2 Source 3

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An Enormous Mosaic Spanning 1,250 Hours of Exposure Time Captures the Milky Way in Incredible Detail

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“It was you, me, fall and fallen light, It was that kind of imperfection through which infinity wounds the finite.”

— Christian Wiman, from “Poem Ending with a Sentence from Jacques Maritain,” Survival is a Style: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020)

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Striding into town at the head of a vast, roiling cloud of gray cats = new life goal. 

Eight thrifty uses for excess night

1. Are you finding the nights too long this Winter? Cut off an hour or two and sew on some fastenings to make an attractively gothic cloak. Not only is night ideal for brooding in, but if you choose a suitably wintry one you can use the cloak to keep yourself cool in Summer.

2. Whizz up some night with a blueberry or two in the blender to make an eye-catching smoothie. Only do this if you have some specific stray eyes around the place that need catching, however; it can be difficult and time-consuming to unstick eyes that have become accidentally caught.

3. If you have been storing up excess daytime from midsummer, now is the time to make a zebra. Simply take some shears to your spare day and night, sew together the resulting pieces, and provide straw. Your intervention could help restore wild zebra populations to their former glory.

4. If there are nefarious deeds that you prefer to do under cover of night, but you also like to stay in bed, consider putting some of your extra night to work as a bedsheet. Night is a highly economical bedding material and never shows stains. It can even be washed, although I would not wash anything else with it.

5. Are you a squid? Do you like squid? Have you ever wanted to be a squid? Try carrying a small balloon full of night when you go swimming for an authentic squid experience. Now if anyone intrudes on your lane you can expel a few hours of dark and make a safe getaway in the confusion.

6. Fill your pen with night to darken any subject; it is by far the best ink for obfuscation, subterfuge and misdirection. Indeed, it is sometimes possible to tell if you have a local espionage factory by the relative lack of night in the area compared to the astronomically-expected amount.

7. An single application of night is enough to turn most cats grey. If you have ever dreamed of striding into town at the head of a vast, roiling cloud of grey cats, using any spare night you might have to hand is by far the most efficient way of achieving this goal.

8. Fold up the night, as small as is practical: be aware that night does not follow the usual physical laws for folding that you may be familiar with. When you have it in a tiny bundle, you can make tiny holes in the night with a candle. Particularly complex patterns can be achieved by burning the candle at both ends. Unfold to reveal an attractive doily. These decorations are particularly appropriate when serving up diverse poisons to royalty.

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I don’t know what’s more enchanting, that songbirds dream of their songs or that humans use their advanced scientific capabilities to find out what birds dream about.

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“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”

— René Magritte (via albarrancabrera)

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“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”

— Barry Lopez, from Arctic Dreams (Bantam, 1986)

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Seven ways to buy a house

1. Take the house for dinner at the sort of restaurant it likes. Be warned that houses have expensive tastes; also, you may need to book a table outside to avoid having to fit a building inside another building. Affix its plumbing to a bottle of good wine. When the house is merry and all lit up inside, slip it a brown envelope full of dubious currency under the table and say something vague about loyalty whilst looking at it full on in the bathroom windows. This method is not cheap but, fingers crossed, you should have the house’s vote when the time comes.

2. Find a house which you think may be a serious timesink. Failing this, find a house with a bathroom which contains a serious timesink, ideally one with a mixer tap so that you can easily set your own custom mix of past and future. Such houses are easily bought, but you will need to put some time in. Your first step therefore should be to buy as much time as you can. Be on the lookout in particular for time which is under sentence to be killed and which consequently may be happy to come and snuggle in your sink.

3. Keep on the lookout for houses which have been accidentally filed in some other category, for example books or tableware. These houses may be valued well under their true worth. There remains the chance, however slight, that if you search long enough in the second-hand bookshop you may be able to find a bijou maisonette at three pounds fifty which the owner has absent-mindedly shelved under ‘Science Fiction’. Not only could you get a bargain, but you will be freeing up a great deal of valuable shelf space.

4. Impress the sellers with an exceptionally large deposit. It may take a long period of time to build up such a deposit, but if you are lucky you may be able to make use of an existing deposit which belongs to an entity which does not require a house. For example, the Pacific ocean is not currently house-hunting and contains extensive silt deposits. Purchase a suitable dredger and get ahead in the housing game.

5. Consider investing in a pyramid scheme. Not only will this give you an air of power and mystery, you are also almost certainly guaranteed to get a pyramid at the end of it. Put in a skylight or two and an escape hatch and you will have a charmingly archaeologist-filled, mostly corpse-free dwelling-place all of your own! Make sure you don’t invest in one of the cursed ones, though.

6. Try buying a mouse. From a distance it looks quite a lot like a house if you have messy handwriting or the light is bad. Depending on the size of the mouse and your tolerance level for being digested, you may even be able to live in it (note however that you will probably be unable to install a cat flap).

7. If no affordable houses are available to buy, consider constructing your own. Bungalow seeds are available cheaply from most wholesale merchants. Simply plant in a secluded location with desirable local facilities and wait. You can get around the planning permission issue by using endangered varieties of bungalow; once established, these should be protected by international treaty. But don’t forget to visit regularly to prune any budding stairs, or you may end up with a townhouse or worse, a tower.

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“I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages, from the sentences of which I’ve conjured images of a bleak site years ago. Here in this room, I suppose, is to be found the interior world of the book; but it opens upon a world beyond the windows, where no event has been collapsed into syntax, where the vocabulary, it seems, is infinite. The indispensable connection for me lies with the open space (of the open window ajar year round, never closed) that lets the breath of every winter storm, the ripping wind and its pelting rain, enter the room.”

— Barry Lopez, from About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)

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“Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and associations, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.”

— Barry Lopez, from About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)

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"The lightning flashes, the smashed circuits through which, on occasion, leaps the light of universes beyond our ken, exist only in rare individuals. But the flashes from such minds can fascinate and light up through the arts of communication the intellects of those not necessarily endowed with genius."

Loren Eiseley - from the essay "Strangeness In the Proportion" in his book "The Night Country" (Scribners 1971)

drawing by Aron Weisenfeld.