There was one startling passage in all the verbiage. I’d written about the eighteenth-birthday party I’d thrown my younger brother not quite a year after I’d moved into the apartment. A lot of chocolate frosting had been smeared around on a lot of people, and there was talcum powder on the stereo and towels soaked with champagne in the tub, I mentioned proudly. And then the letter went on to list essays I was trying to write, though it would be a couple of years before I published anything.
I mentioned a “long essay to work it out for myself—about my penchant for long solitary walks at night, the danger involved (I’ve given it up. I was nearly assaulted a few weeks ago) and how it affects my attitude toward feminism—of what value are the advances made in the last decades when one’s physical freedom has become so severely jeopardized. Most urban women, you know, live as though in a war zone. . . . There’s a price to pay either way—a year and a half of living dangerously has warped my mind. This essay is going to be a mammoth prose poem, an analysis of (or at least a hymn to) the nature of the night itself.”
That essay was never quite written, though I often afterward wrote in praise of darkness, sometimes trying to reverse the metaphors in which good is light or white and black and darkness are evil, with their problematic racial overtones, and I eventually wrote a book called Hope in the Dark. Years after this letter, my time in the desert taught me to love shade, shadows, and night as a reprieve from the burning heat and light of day. And four years after that ambitious proposition to write about gender and night, I wrote for the first time about violence against women and the ways that thwarted and limited our access to public space and freedom of movement and equality in any and all arenas and then I wrote about it again and again.
When I wrote my book on walking almost twenty years later, I quoted Sylvia Plath, who declared when she was nineteen, “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.” Reading the passage long after I’d put it in the book, I wondered about who she might have been if she’d had the freedom of the city, as they used to call it, and of the hills, and of the night, of how her suicide in her kitchen at thirty must have been in part from the confinement of women in domestic spaces and definitions.
Children are diurnal animals. Nocturnal life to a newcomer to adulthood was almost synonymous with the new world of sensuality and sexuality, of freedom of movement and exploration, with a lingering sense that the rules fade a little when the sun goes down. Nightlife. Nightclubs. Nightmares. Patti Smith’s first hit, “Because the Night,” had come out only a few years earlier, telling us that the night belongs to lovers and to love. Love is made mostly in dimness or darkness, and darkness—the failure of sight, the most rational of the senses, the awakening of the other senses, the otherworldliness that the world takes on when it turns away from the sun and faces out into the galaxy—can itself be an erotic embrace.
My bohemian aunt had given me a copy of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood when I was eighteen, and I had fallen in love with what that brief novel did with words and with its romantic extravagance about pain and loss. It’s mostly remembered as a lesbian novel now, and the love of Nora Flood for the elusive Robin Vote forms the bones of its plot set mostly in Paris. But the ode-like monologues by the garrulous cross-dressing garret-dwelling doctor Matthew O’Connor, “an Irishman from the Barbary Coast (Pacific Street, San Francisco) whose interest in gynaecology had driven him half around the world,” dominate it. He is an expert on the night, on night as the mysteries of the human heart and the fluidity of who we are and the foolishness of who we think we are and what we think we should have and hold. “Every day is thought upon and calculated, but the night is not premeditated,” he tells Flood. “The Bible lies the one way but the night-gown the other. The night, ‘Beware of that dark door!’”
He’s an oracle akin to the transgender Tiresias in Oedipus Rex, someone who understands men and women and the things they want and imagine and do together and alone. Night is the space in which poetic intuition, not logic, prevails, in which you feel what you cannot see, and perhaps in some sense he is the night itself, or its oracle and high priestess. In that letter to that old friend of my late teens, I was saying that I wanted to bring Barnes’s ferocious lyricism to my own immediate experience, to wed the poetics of what I wanted and the politics of why I had trouble reaching it. To whom does the night belong? It did not seem to belong to me.
2
At least books belonged to me. Closed, a book is a rectangle, thin as a letter or thick and solid like a box or a brick. Open, it is two arcs of paper that, seen from the top or bottom when the book is wide open, look like the wide V of birds in flight. I think about that and then about women who turn into birds and then about Philomela, who in the Greek myth is turned into a nightingale after she is raped, as her brother-in-law pursues her to murder her.
The word nightingale is an old one in the English language, cobbled together from night and singer. I wonder if Keats had Philomela in mind when he wrote his “Ode to a Nightingale,” or if I did when I dreamed of him and flying. In it the poet imagines flying himself “on the viewless wings of poesy,” into a dark forest—“for here there is no light . . . and tender is the night,” a line I was happy to recognize again in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, which is also about incest and rape and their unspeakability and the way the harm spreads outward. Both Keats’s poetry and Tender Is the Night came to me the year I was seventeen and was finally taught some ways to read more deeply, to see a story as made up of layers, echoes, references, and metaphors.
I had read Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, with the story of Philomela and all those other goddesses, nymphs, and mortals being ravaged, much earlier. In the myths, women keep turning into other things, because being a woman is too difficult, too dangerous. Daphne is turned into a laurel as she flees Apollo; I’d known that even before I’d memorized Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,” including these lines:
The gods, that mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race.
I’d learned it in the same introductory class where we read Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” which I can see now is creepily specific about the details of a god in the form of a bird raping a woman. “How can those terrified vague fingers push / The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?” That so many Greek myths are about rape and women trying to escape it never came up. It’s not that I think we were too fragile to be exposed to this stuff that was everywhere, in pop songs as well as sonnets and classics, just that the fact that the reality, the ubiquity, and the impact of rape were weirdly unspeakable, in art and in life. Our tongues had been cut out too.