It darkles (tinct tint!) all this our funnaminal world...We are circumveiloped by obscuritads. Man and belves frieren. There is a wish on them to be not doing or anything. (244.13-16)
What is it mean to have a book about the night, written in dream language, to feature a scene with growing evening twilight and the onset of night itself? This is the second so far (to the best of my knowledge): here, and at the end of I.8. Book IV is the coming of dawn for the first time (something which is spoken about often, and even dramatically, throughout FW), but night falls often in FW. Is the growing darkness of I.8 the same as II.1, the same as the night when the children study above the pub in II.2, and deep into which the inn keeper and guests drink and listen to stories in II.3? There is a narrative continuity in II.1-3 (and possibly beyond, still thinking through it), and it could reach back into book I, but I'm inclined to divide them, something I'm planning on sharing more thoughts about as I write.
To return to the original question: what about FW and its dramatization of nightfall (however many times)? There is a difference between the world growing dark and the end of the diurnal cycle that affects everyone: people go to sleep at different times, animals too, as is memorably narrated in this passage (which Joyce called a "Phoenix Park Nocturne" when he published it on its own). The question of the dream language of the book aside (and who the dreamer is), a book about the night does not only have to be about sleeping and dreams.
The night, by which I mean what is not day, daylight, when people are awake and working and busy and obligated, is long and goes through stages: twilight, onset of darkness, the quiet evening by the lamp when the children are in bed, the time of dozing off and on through the middle of the night when the clock is at its highest (I mean the arms) and after which it is all downhill...towards the dawn, but before that, the time when the child cries or comes into your bed, or when you stir from a dream or go to the bathroom, or are awakened by your partner coming to bed late. Then the part we often skip and dream through, the intempesta nox, the untimely hours when, if you are awake, you are beset by worries and anxious about a future, distant or near. When you half awaken and are deceived by your very eyes as you try and make sense out of forms, shadows, and distant lights. Or if, when you are lucky to be sleeping, you sleep the deepest and have the deepest dreams. And even when dawn is rising you fall in and out of sleep, try to prolong it, keep the day at bay. Some eat in the evening, or work or study, or travel home. Nighttime can be a time alone in a diner or a neighborhood walk under streetlights and darkening windows with shades drawn.
Night is the opposite of the where all cows are black, as Hegel memorably describes: the phaenomenal world maintains its phaenomena but now becomes phenomenal (how does a word meaning "what appears in the most basic way to human perception considered in virtue of that way it appears" also take on the meaning of "what appears to be the most extraordinary thing"?). It is the opposite of monotonous, abstract, bloodless, it is realistic: night is not uniformity but a dark rainbow of sights and sounds. It is sparkles ("darkles") in its darkness, and the darkness itself changes and changes with it.
I am also reminding myself that these lines are about children having to come inside after playing into the twilight as long as they can, fetched and brought home by their parents carrying a flashlight (here's a rare moment where I'll admit I prefer the British English: torch). Their "world" of play and imagination is "funnaminal," it is fun and it is tied to the magic world of appearances which, for a child, are never just what they seem, nurtured by the sparkling play of ever-darkening twilight, the changing lights of the houses and streets and the jewels of the sky.
For me, the night (in all the senses just described, all the phases) is alluring and challenging. It is often when my senses come the most alive, or my spirit stirs with the most urgency. It is probably why I am so desperately intertwined with FW. But is also when there is "a wish to be not doing anything." The one side (guess) usually wins out. This has been made ever more detrimental with shrinking screens and high speed internet. I sense that, if I want to rescue myself from the oblivion of doing nothing and being only for myself (when my being-for-others is put to rest, after the children are sleeping, my emails answered...before the untimely hours creep in and mix everything up) in the only time that (at least now) I have to myself, that I have to dance, even with tired limbs, into the night. Even through the motions. Hence this blog.
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