Night

I remember your neck, its strength
and the sweetness of the skin at your throat.
I remember your hair, long, in our way
drawing it back from my mouth.
How my hands slid the low plain of your back
thrown by the sudden flaunt of your loins.
I remember your voice, the first low break
and at last the long flight
losing us to darkness.
And your lips along my shoulder,
more sure, even than I had imagined -
how I guarded their track.
I ask you then what am I to do with all these 
memories
heavy and full?
Hold them, quiet, between my two hands,
as I would if I could again
your hard breasts?
Mary Dorcey

the eyes at the foot of the bed

My room had grown cold, and intensely still. I was waked by the queer feeling we all know — the feeling that there was something in the room that hadn’t been there when I fell asleep. The room was pitch black, and at first I saw nothing; but gradually a vague glimmer at the foot of the bed turned into two eyes staring back at me: they gave out a light of their own. I groped about for a match and lit the candles. The room looked just as usual — as I had known it would; and I crawled back to bed, and blew out the lights. As soon as the room was dark again the eyes reappeared; and I now applied myself to explaining them on scientific principles. But the fact that they were not due to any external dupery didn’t make them a bit pleasanter. For if they were a projection of my inner consciousness, what the deuce was the matter with that organ? I had gone deeply enough into the mystery of morbid pathological states to picture the conditions under which an exploring mind might lay itself open to such a midnight admonition; but I couldn’t fit it to my present case. I shut my eyes and tried to evoke a vision of Alice’s eyes, but in a few moments those had mysteriously changed back into the eyes at the foot of the bed. It exasperated me more to feel these glaring at me through my shut lids than to see them, and I opened my eyes again and looked straight into their hateful stare…And so it went on all night. Have you ever lain in bed, hopelessly wide awake, and tried to keep your eyes shut, knowing that if you opened ’em you’d see something you dreaded and loathed? It sounds easy, but it’s devilish hard. Those eyes had a physical effect that was the equivalent of a bad smell.

Edith Wharton – The Eyes

tied to the moon

She moved like a woman tied to the moon. It enveloped her and it opened her to an absolute night without dawn. 

Anaïs Nin – Aphrodisiac 

the mystery of just being alive

Night is an element of love; like fog. It liberates space, lets freshness cross it. Its magic elevates the body, brings to the surface the mystery of just being alive, being. With or without stars and galaxies, the sky becomes a private territory — the imagination’s own scope. These are moments when one reaches all there is between the moon and oneself. 

Etel Adnan – On Love and the Cost We Are Not Willing to Pay Today 

A Night of Love

In fact, the relationship between love and night is not only a well-known theme of romantic poetry. It also has an existential foundation variously attested. Universally, it is especially at night that men and women unite sexually. Even when it is a simple adventure, the typical formula and promise will always be a “night of love” —  in this context a “morning of love” would have the effect of a false note.

[…]

And so often women — some women — still desire this condition now, it is because acts in them, more than modesty, a distant instinctive reflection of the phenomenon serving as a basis for the ritual dispositions or customs of which we have spoken and giving them a meaning that is not absurd. Hathor, the Egyptian goddess of love, also had the name “Mistress of the Night,” and perhaps a distant echo of all this can be grasped in Baudelaire’s verse: “You charm like evening — Dark and hot nymph.”

Julius Evola -Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex

Identity and darkness…

“I used to think,” Nora said, “that people just went to sleep, or if they did not go to sleep that they were themselves, but now”— she lit a cigarette and her hands trembled — “now I see that the night does something to a person’s identity, even when asleep.”

Djuna Barnes – Nightwood

An image made out of accurate, thoughtful brushstrokes

The world has never been so full of images, those on our mobile phones and computer screens, on newsstands and book covers, in films and on TV, on packaging and billboards and in shop windows. We walk, work and rest amid throngs of vivid, avidly attention-seeking images, every space and every moment of our lives crammed full of them.

You couldn’t imagine a more different environment from the late Middle Ages, when the world would grow pitch black as night fell. Not only were images rare, the very medium allowing us to see them — light — was severely rationed. Every night, you would be plunged into long (or, depending on the season, slightly less long) periods of darkness. Imagine, as Johan Huizinga once suggested, the effect of a candle-lit window on the weary traveller as he made his way through an almost pitch-black landscape. Now imagine the effect of a fresco in a chapel on that same traveller.

 […]

Today, in the world of mass media, a world where everything is being instantly, infinitely and indefinitely reproduced, a world of low-quality images, a world in which a blurry snapshot can find itself on millions of screens, in which ‘visual culture has been reduced to imaginary spam’ […], painting has rediscovered its own uniqueness. A carefully chosen image, an image made out of accurate, thoughtful brushstrokes (or any other carefully considered technique for that matter), an image that carries the weight of human touch — of human presence, of repeated analysis, of intense gazing — a full-resolution image, life-size, and in real time — the apparition of such an image today can be just as miraculous as that of the fresco in a remote late medieval chapel.

Marc Valli and Margherita Dessanay – A Brush with the Real: Figurative Painting Today

Midnight

the woods are a hurt thing in the dark, indentations moving through grey-green silk. you stand a long time by the creek, then feed it two pennies, one for you, one for the love inside you that you can do nothing with or about. midnight. you follow home the rain.

Sheila Dong – Two Pennies

I whisper your name

I whisper your name‎
‎ In the dark of night,‎
‎ when the stars‎‎ come out
to drink from the moon‎,
‎ while here below leaves‎ sleep 
in silence on high ‎dark branches

the Witch Goddess

A common depiction of the pale-faced Witch Queen is as a lonely old spinster sitting at a spinning wheel; “the weaver or spinner who controlled the fate and destiny of the Gods and the human race. This is of little surprise considering that the Witch Goddess is known by some as the ‘Three Mothers’, being in some ways a composite of the three Wyrd Sisters or Norns of Anglo-Saxon mythology, who spin, measure and cut the threads of fate. Here we return to the subject of cloaks and robes, for weaving, besides being symbolic of the manner in which linear threads of order are spun from the tangles of chaos, is a practical art that enables the witch to bring things into being, to fashion the very trappings that enclothe the magical force. This brings up the whole arena of cord magic, knot magic, knitting magic, the cat’s cradle, weaving spells and so forth, but of particular relevance to this article is the art of weaving magical garments, that is to say garments as woven fate. These arts were considered under the auspices of Holda (identified by some with Nicneven, Dame Habonde, Herodias, Diana and the night goddess Lilith), who rides out through winter’s night sky with her hordes of witches in tow, these being the spirits of her followers who have left their bodies to travel to the sabbat held within Holda’s sacred mountain peak.

Clad in the black robe, or daubed in the black unguent as a consecration of wisdom, we are as one with the hidden and secret realm of Night, and when so enveloped we become the fertile void wherein we may receive the inspiration of the Muse or Genius, for “in the darkness of the Chasm, Night still is and is still creating, bringing forth”. It is to enter the silence from within which the Word is spoken, the night-time realm of all potential, and when we realise the witch as a mediator between the worlds we realise why the witch seeks to enflesh the Dream and thereby make it manifest; such is to deliver the vision of night’s phantasies into the waking world of the existent. Our world is but the manifested dream within the embrace of the Night sky, the realm of Chaos, and it is in the dark dreamtime that Chaos seeps into our River-bound world, her influence being as stars falling upon the earth from midnight’s celestial vaults.

Martin Duffy – The Devil’s Raiments: Habiliments of the Witch’s Craft