The track Dusk is the opener of The Long Night. It serves the purpose of intellectually setting the stage as well as aurally creating a starting point to begin the journey into the long night…. Dusk ushers in the evening, it’s the dawn of the night. It’s a kind of magic time, when the day creatures still linger and the night creatures begin to emerge from the shadows. Twilight is almost gone, only it’s darker nature remains. Dusk can also be defined as growing dark, and it is with this track, the first track, that establishes our prime subject, darkness growing….
Dusk beckons, but dusk obscures. Senses not usually relied upon come into play. Subtle hints of the coming night are painted in monotones of contrast, often so faint as to be missed, yet slowly defining the shapes that begin to call the night forth. Gradually one relies less and less on familiar senses of sight, and color is barely a hint of shade. As the auditory system ramps it’s collective radar, so to do senses of feel, of position, strain against established norms. In doing so, there are moments of disorientation, or perhaps, reorientation, that resolve into new perspectives, new ways of seeing. If purpose exists here it is to let go, to give up the frail illusion of control that is clung to like a receding rope of light, to let oneself drift, unmoored, into the unknown… a place of ignorance, and a place of exquisite potential.
Embracing the dark is embracing the unknown, not to gorge on the fruits of ignorance, but to learn from it. In the beginning, just being aware is a heavy burden, wrought with a multitude of hesitation and uncertainty. This gives way to understanding, without knowing, to know without the need to understand. A sojourn into a space that one oft tries desperately to repel with fire, with light, with knowledge…. but then you miss the unknowable. Something that can’t be warmed by fire or seen in the light, that defies explanation and category. This is learning to be, without learning anything else. Learning to embrace what you do not know just as surely as you embrace a favorite scent or a well worn book.
Gradually, control is rendered not only mute but unimportant, as are so many illusions we drape across our minds. To know only that you are is a pristine place of enlightenment, rented at high price from our ever more inundated senses. A place of calm, of stillness, but a stillness born of being perfectly in the flow of the universe around and within… The joining of before and after, the absolute majesty of an infinite temporal existence. This is something far beyond the pale, far beyond the trappings of a life rooted in constructs. This is the realm of shadows, of the indistinct, of the essence….