The Night

Published by Via Pública Magazine (Year 3 Number 11- 1992)

Written by Cristóbal Peláez González

Translated by Sara Gallego Perez

Note: In order to appreciate as much as possible the article’s original meaning, it must be read out loud in order to capture its poetic tone. Thank you.

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to non-affirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and reflowing waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribleness of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendor, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

James Joyce. Ulysses.

When the rays of the day invade the shadows´ territory, the children of our ghosts dissolve in agony. They hate the light. It brings work, chores and duties, familiar hugs.

The night is the art’s atmosphere, its climax. There, confounded in the excessive vastness of what is gothic, like the voices of the dead, the prayer vigil, and dreaming, is the imperceptible presence of the unknown. In the silence and in the darkness the strange resides; the otherness manifests itself.

There is also crime, the affectionate hug, the myth, the idleness, the collective festivity, and sin. In other words: culture.

If man during the day just passes by, at night he lives; objectively or subjectively, in the daytime the flesh circulates, at night his spirit; in one he sees himself, in the other he perceives himself; in a solar perspective the slaves wander, at night the man, like the cat, overcomes feeling liberated and primitive. The danger and the mystery underline the existence.

Long like a cold night on the earthly globe, literature has invented the most extensive and desolate of nights. In her concludes Leopoldo Bloom´s journey across the ocean during the day and gets prolonged by Molly Bloom´s sleeplessness.

More frightening than the sinister mist before the creation of the World are the horrific confinements of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

The fairies escape from Shakespeare and flee by sleepwalking to the enchanted forests retrieving their dreams, meanwhile one of our own, León De Greiff, recites volubly insults against the day- calls it naïve, horrid, calm, brute, dumb- while lustfully summoning the night “his dark-skinned woman.” José Asunción Silva inaugurates a new rhythm in language with his full night “of murmurs, of wing music,” and at the foot of the window, Jose Manuel Arango listens to the wind, spending the night awake “trying to remember a face.”

Maeterlinck, Poe, Rimbaud, Nerval, Kafka, Lautremont, Pessoa, Bierce, Baudelaire, and so on, are notable cheerleaders of the night. We do not forget, of course, of the “Prince of Darkness” the terrible creature of the Irish writer, Stoker. Those nighttime languid tenants were the popular myths that tormented our infancy in the mountains.

In this nocturnal issue, Via Pública wants to see within the shadows, emerge inside the dark city as if groping its witchcraft and its mystery.