Night Swimming

Night Swimming

There is a rather terrible song from Steve Winwood called "Don't You Know What The Night Can Do?" that, despite being a decent title for this piece, I could not in good conscience use for it. The song fails to actually say exactly what the night does!

It is about all things night, and what it means to me, that this piece refers to and strives to articulate. I will not paint myself a tortured insomniac, a 3am suffering artist, but I will say that I've always been a bit of a nocturne since I was very young. That I currently am required to live an early day existence is not by design, but by circumstance. All my creative energy forms at night. All ideas I've ever had, all songs, titles, imagery, and dreams or musings of the future are born in the dark of night. Can I do things in the day? Sure, I can. I shoot my photos in the day mostly, I can and have worked on images in the daytime, but they are started or conceived at night.

And why is that?

The waking hours, it seems to me, is frenetic. All that humanity, all that traffic and noise, all that near manic energy coming off everyone - it is all a white noise to me. It is not at all conducive to deep thought, to pondering, to forming a meaningful idea. I have always felt that I must be the last one to bed, to be awake into the deep part of the night as often as I can, most likely to be alone, in the stillness, in the calmer side of our terrestrial day. I have lost a great deal of sleep because of this, but the trade off is anything I've created was conceived in those lost hours, indeed, even this writing is being done well past midnight.

I imagine this man is a family man - his kids are asleep and he finally has time to himself, to return to the land of possibilities and escape the day's toll. He is releasing all the deleterious energy of the day, shedding it, bathed in a pool of brilliant moonlight. This is the time to create, to swim the currents of a clear mind rife with possibility. No one is awake, no one to distract.

It is not a need for darkness, or even a preference for it that governs this. It is a need for a different kind of light - one that illuminates subtly, gently, illuminating just enough to see where you are, but leaving much in shadow, allowing your mind to fill in the details.

Model: Ben