If you would, indulge me for a moment? I hope the lateness of the hour allows me to make not just daytime sense, but some ‘night sense’ too. Things are Different at night. Capital D. Double, triple 10 to the 18th power D in fact.

It’s 3:44 a.m. by my radio-signal clock that has no electrical cord… and neither do the tall hind legged/ shorter fore-legged coyotes who are howling just now…some serious ‘teeth monsters’ out there for reallies.

And I am thinking for the thousandth time about how I can sense ‘out there’ at night, though I’ve never met them, a considerable number of serious night bloggers who are wrangling words, maybe listening to music that moves them…

or like I do, writing and listening to the deep, not-quite silence of these Rocky Mountains, an air music with tremolos of creatures and grace notes of night birds in it.

I sense that night bloggers serious about their work have a bit to a great deal of the wild huntsman in them…
that they are like the wild riders, moon or no, seeking some evidence of grail or gall or devil’s-claw, some saint or sanity somewhere, enough to entrap its spirit, bring it back to this keyboard, this writing pad, to see something, say something about it… something somehow useful

…and, hoping we won’t be faced with ‘The Disappearing Leprechaun Syndrome’, that is, after capturing “magical spirit enough” for a post, but…

when we open the post the next morning, after a long night of researching and writing and checking and linking, there’s nothing left in the bag but a tiny pile of very non-magical dust.

Thankfully often enough, the spirit that came at night, remains… sometimes develops more grandly than at other times. No knowing how to make it so. No forcing it. Can’t make ‘the flow’ happen. Just stand there on the moor; lean into the crevice between worlds; sit on the single chair in the ocean, waiting. Sometimes, waiting to discover. Other times, waiting to be taken.

It might be said, the night bloggers ‘live in the night.’ At least part of the time, we say later, in daylight, something like: It was good last night. It was good. Or good enough. Or a bust.

But regardless …

of many less than stellar outcomes in the writing life wherein effort does not always equal meaningful result, the night itself, living in that special dark, was good.

Despite misgivings, worries about what we’re doing to the magneto, how we’re ever going to get enough rest.

When after a long day at work at my day job, I can then turn to this other kind of writing for The Moderate Voice, and if I send an email to Joe at TMV at 3 a.m. thinking he’ll read it after daybreak, I often enough receive an email winging right back from him immediately. He’s often enough awake like I am, after a long day at ‘the day job,’ awake, living in the night, too.

Every now and then I receive an after midnight email or IM from some other soul blogging away in India where it is daylight (but I consider their words in ‘night-think’ nonetheless)…or from a night blogger in The Windy City or New York, or a small town in Oklahoma where it is dark and they’re writing to save something, or keep the spectres away, or to influence, or understand…or just lay one more rough plank across the chasms. Living the night.

Night bloggers. Many intra-species gaggles of us. No doubt, some, the grown up version of their child selves that were ‘poor sleepers’ no matter how much warm milk. And some, no doubt, night being the only time of the 24 that at last the incessant phone/talk/noise finally ceases, when the darling ones are asleep finally, when day is done and the lights go dimmer… and sight, somehow, sometimes, grows sharper in the dark

Without the nattering of day… you can think a whole thought without it being hit and shattering like a pat of mercury.

There are many poets to choose from who were night riders and night writers. Charles Bukowski, is one. Looking like a stevedore, often unshaven enough to look truly derelict, leaning like an old tree struck bad by lightning, Bukowski was one of the most revered and reviled of the beat poets. Some say his poems are dregs from his drink and drugs and no more. Others though are not cynical or are more sharpened in their understanding of him as an earthy and complex mind.

He had a night habit too. He lived the night, most all nights… and all night long. He knew what it was like, daytimes, to have his reverie and his recovery from the night, shattered too.

Same as most of us, but also, different reasons. Along with the night habit, he had others: the magnifying glass of ‘the bottle.’ And, the habit of taking up with skinny-sick, pecked out women who thought the fourth food group was heroin.

But despite all Bukowski’s toxins, many of us who write at night can relate. Sometimes, if conditions are right in your little circle of yellow light in the dark, you get drunk on God, or on the words, or with the mystery, or the facts, or the night, any of the above

Thus ‘taken’ by that elixir of night writing and night riding, maybe there’s a certain kind of recovery that depends only on the body’s timing.. in order to be returned to an inhabitable ‘day self.’

In one of his poems Bukowski writes about a neighbor woman who sounds like she has lowered the art of cheerfulness into a dark art without meaning to. As she greets Bukowski on the street in the morning, he says her ‘hello’ hits him like a rifle shot through his body, so coming from the trance of writing, so without sleep and so without sobriety is he.

In another poem, he writes about how after writing all night, and again, mummifying his body all the meanwhile, he cannot believe that people call him at 9 a.m. in the morning. He writes that he is rough with them then. Slams down the phone receiver.

Bukowski says he knows that any caller who calls at 9 a.m. …has wasted the night.

Unlike many of the night bloggers, in all their shapes and conditions, Bukowski is saying the early callers have let a precious night go without living it.

Here’s Bukowski’s poem: To paraphrase The Wolfman: This goes out to all you night bloggers out there.

one thirty-six a.m.

by Charles Bukowski

I laugh sometimes when I think about
say
Céline at a typewriter
or Dostoevsky…
or Hamsun…
ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes,
ordinary men with hair on their heads
sitting there typing words
while having difficulties with life
while being puzzled almost to madness.

Dostoevsky gets up
he leaves the machine to piss,
comes back
drinks a glass of milk
and thinks about
the casino and
the roulette wheel.

Céline stops, gets up, walks to the
window,
looks out, thinks, my last patient
died today,
I won’t have to make any more
visits there.
When I saw him last
he paid his doctor bill…
it’s those who don’t pay their bills,
they live on and on.

Céline walks back,
sits down at the machine
is still for a good two minutes
then begins to type.

Hamsun stands over his machine thinking,
I wonder if they are going to believe
all these things I write?
He sits down, begins to type.
He doesn’t know what a writer’s block is…
he’s a prolific son-of-a-bitch
damn near as magnificent as
the sun.
He types away.

and I laugh

not out loud

but all up and down these walls,
these dirty yellow and blue walls

…my white cat asleep on the
table

hiding his eyes from the
light.

he’s not alone tonight
and
neither am I.

Charles Bukowski “one thirty-six a.m.” ©All Rights Reserved
Bukowski b 1920, d. 1994

Bukowski’s typewriter and night lair in daylight.
Does this seem at all familiar to you?