We should be known to them however, as strange, meteoric creatures, wont to fall catastrophically dead out of the mysterious blackness of their watery sky. And not only we ourselves, but our ships, our metals, our appliances, would come raining down out of the night. Sometimes sinking things would smite down and crush them, as if it were the judgment of some unseen power above, and sometimes would come things of utmost rarity or utility, or shapes of inspiring suggestion. One can understand, perhaps, something of their behaviour at the descent of a living man, if one thinks what a barbaric people might do, to whom an enhaloed, shining creature came suddenly out of the sky.
alone all night
broken, wrong, no light
feel like everyone has the wrong sight
or is it just me
or am I the blind one
can't have no good thoughts
not this night
maybe my blues are right
As two figures took form at its head.
And walked, unhindered, toward the city walls, darkness swarming around them.
Erawan. The golden-haired young man. She’d know it if she were blind.
A dark-haired, pale-skinned woman strode at his side, robes billowing around her on a phantom
wind.
“Maeve,” Lysandra breathed.
People began screaming then.
A chapter of the Vendidad describes how the herdsman's dog, being a creature of the Holy Spirit, spends every night killing the creatures of the Evil Spirit and warning against those plagues of the pastoral life, wolves.
Still today Zoroastrians not only regard the dog as a righteous creature, they hold a dog's gaze to be purifying, a power that drives away demons. At a Zoroastrian funeral, for instance, a dog has to be present, to purify the corpse with its gaze and so strengthen the ‘good’ creation.
Upon the rock, whose flood dried up millennia ago, two dry roaches. One is the silence of the other. The killers who meet: the world is extremely reciprocal. The quivering of an entirely mute rattling in the rock; and we, who made it to today, are still quivering with it.
—I promise this same silence for myself one day, I promise us what I now learned. Except for us it will have to be at night, for we are moist and salty beings, we are beings of seawater and tears. It will also be with the wholly open eyes of the roaches, but only if it is night, for I am a creature of great moist depths, I do not know the dust of dry cisterns, and the surface of a rock is not my home.
We are creatures that must plunge into the depth in order to breathe there, as the fish plunges in the water in order to breathe, except my depths are in the air of the night.
O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
Even into thine own soft-conched ear:
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes?
I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly,
And, on the sudden,
The darkness had been ushered in by droning calls of reclusive creatures, and beasts that did not normally stir during the day now added their voices to the night.
Searching in the darkness, running from the day...
Hiding from tomorrow, nothing left to say...
Victims of the moment, future deep in doubt...
Living in a whisper until we start to shout.
We're creatures of the night.
There are two kinds of vision:
the seeing of things, which belongs
to the science of optics, versus
the seeing beyond things, which
results from deprivation. Man mocking the dark, rejecting worlds you do not know: though the dark
is full of obstacles, it is possible to have
intense awareness when the field is narrow
and the signals few. Night has bred in us
thought more focused than yours, if rudimentary:
man the ego, man imprisoned in the eye,
there is a path you cannot see, beyond the eye’s reach, what the philosophers have called
the via negativa: to make a place for light
the mystic shuts his eyes—illumination
of the kind he seeks destroys
creatures who depend on things.