The End of Daylight Savings

Darkness is now asking more questions than light. My question: is it Job 1 to gain understanding of whatever it is we do not understand or misunderstand, even if both are promoted by enemies of the truth? When we try to understand the lies we’re being told are we giving away our power to the ones who are telling them? What did Samuel Beckett mean when he said, “the artist’s task is to find form to accommodate the mess?”

Perhaps all the poetry that needs to be written has already been written, and that trustworthy, well-written non-fiction is now the most important form of modern knowledge, the one we cannot live without. And the historian who says we “must always be ready to read what was never written” * is the new poet.

When I first started looking at painting, sometime not long after puberty and before the downfall of abstract expressionism, the old thinking was that only great masters could use the color black. Now black is a common color, often used in partnership with the colors red, white, and yellow, also common colors in the paintings of the many new masters who are now painting.

Once upon a time I dreaded the end of Daylight Savings Time. I was the boy in the neighborhood who loved light, the longer the light lasted the better, the longer I could stay outside and play with my little friends and the later I had go to bed. Now I welcome The End of Daylight Savings. It grants new permissions—permission to have a drink earlier in the evening, the sun down an hour earlier; permission to go to bed at  9 pm, the body-clock in my mind knowing that it’s actually 10 pm. I enjoy the new early dark day-by-day; the dark now asks more interesting questions the light, and I don’t have to go to school the next morning. 

*Christoper Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner, A Speculative History, Princeton University Press, 2020.

Hall of the Mountain King, Wapiti, Wyoming, 4:30 pm, November 7, 2021.