I’ve sought solace sitting in the garden as it gets dark. One evening at half past nine it was perfectly quiet; as nearly so as it could possibly be here on the edge of town. Half a mile distant, traffic on the A1237 had thinned out so much that instead of an unvarying tinnitus hiss you could hear individual vehicles pass, but spaced so as to allow quiet to seep into the gaps. I think it was a weekday evening. Another day, a Sunday, it was noisy at ten – the traffic was still frenetic.
The first thing that happens is that the gulls go home. Half a mile past the A1237 is the tip, where the gulls – herring, lesser black-back and black headed – spend their working days scavenging and squabbling. My uncle once had a job chasing them away from where the tip workers were working, in order to fulfill some workplace safety legislation. He chased them away with a stick every half hour, on the half hour. It was like chasing the sea off the seashore: the birds simply wheeled around like so much white froth and settled again immediately. Legislation fulfilled, my uncle sat in his van for another half hour. Crazy law.
The gulls start flying eastwards about an hour or so after I come home from work. It’s like watching another commute. Or like watching ghosts of bombers returning, out of formation and damaged, from a raid, the different types mixed up together as they limp home. The sky is filled with them. Sometimes, you see one with a piece of plastic trailing from its leg, or a long streamer of string. Or one mid moult and missing feathers – or missing them from some fracas or other. Sometimes, you see them circling upwards on a thermal to gain height. Even their calls seem subdued, more like radio-chatter.
Then the sky starts to turn pale, as if the gulls have melted into it. The swifts drift about high up like specks trapped in some viscous medium and swirling about in its invisible eddies. Their thin, sharp cries presage the ultrasonic chitter of the bats. Things sink in on themselves and draw their colours in. It gets cooler. Blackbirds start their chit – chit – chit bedtime calls. A robin perches in the gloom on the edge of the fence beneath the rowan tree and surveys me cautiously, caustically, or indifferently, or whatever. A tiny black eye is lost in the static fuzz at the edge of the human eye’s ability to form an clear image as the light drops off. The darkness soaks up from the earth through the plants: the buddleia, hawthorn, blackthorn, clematis, rowan, plumb, tamarisk, photinia and rosa rugosa.
The grass starts to feel cold and damp to bare feet; frogs start to come out of the pond and lose themselves in the long grass. Their work-shift consists presumably of finding and eating slugs and insects in the pitch darkness. The vegetation radiates damp and cool in the inverse manner to how warm brickwork radiates heat. The evening is the via negativa of the day. Heat and colour pass into coolness and… not dark but a kind of absence of colour that is not darkness but transitional to it. But a kind of life emanates from this in-betweenness. Black silhouettes of moths and other insects etch themselves into your corneas, passing like alpha particles in a cloud chamber. Presaging the bats, and like smaller versions of them.
One evening, evening sunlight illuminated the space over a neighbour’s garden, in front of a group of large pines and leylandii and a slightly smaller holly tree. Insects danced in the golden light.
The insects carve erratic, mad trajectories. They’re like thoughts failing to catch onto anything; random firings of neurons. A colourless radio static fizzes in the bushes, the exact visual counterpart of ‘noise’ in digital images caused by insufficient light, or the grain pattern in photographs taken using high-speed film. The evening knows that its own spirit lies beyond words, beyond even thoughts. The day thinks it knows, but the evening knows that it doesn’t know shit. The colour of the sky is not white, or blue, or purple, or yellow, but is beyond colour. The moths are all sizes.
In late June 10 o’clock is about when it gets dark. The sky itself finally darkens so that stars appear. Stars here are like stunted patches of galinsoga or mayweed which have been allowed to poke up in isolated patches on the compacted and polluted earth at the edge of a once brand new light industrial estate. Like you should be glad to see them, but it would be neater if the sodium haze obliterated all of them. Let the lights along the bypass do for stars, accusatory gods that stars are. They look like bits of plastic. At 10 o’clock it gets too dark to read my book and I have to get the guinea pigs in, and the washing, if there is any.
If the guinea pig run is in the part of the garden past the end of my studio, where there is a quince tree and some tansy that won’t grow up straight, I might stand and look over towards the north to see if I can see any bats. It has pleased me inordinately to know that there are bats, even if I hardly ever bother to look for them, or often don’t see them even if I do. I think they might live in the clump of bigger trees I already mentioned. In any case, if I look north it seems, if anything will, to summon them into being. Looking northwards over the gardens, you can see a patch of sky near the horizon which often retains the gaudy sunset colours (like those seen of some of Edward Hopper’s paintings). (It’s a shock to see those colours, like the kids have smeared paint on the wall). The bats patrol up and down along the gardens, including over my garden and to the south, but their touchstone seems to be the trees. Once, when I hadn’t seen them for a long time and thought they’d gone, I thought of doing a text painting to lament them, but they reappeared. I might do the painting anyway. I have no idea which type of bat they are. Bats are mysterious. A bat night – a night when I have the luck or patience to see them – is a blessed night. There are bats in Goya’s print ‘The dream of reason produces monsters’ and they beset the dreamer, but I find bats comforting. If they are dreams, or inhabit them, they are soft and silent dreams, not fearful ones. Bats ‘speak’ at a pitch above hearing; they speak an elevated language.
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