R-12

As requested by the people who participated in my poll, tonight’s rumination shall be centred on a quote, “why in the night sky are the lights hung?” This quote originates from a Fleet Foxes’ song, “Blue Spotted Tail,” from their sophomore album, Helplessness Blues. This album is of great importance to me; Fleet Foxes is a piece of my core, for sure, and I love every album dearly – this one merely was the first album I bonded to as an adult. I intend to write a series of essays on Fleet Foxes’ work and my attachment to it, and it is likely you will see sectiosn if not the entirety of this rumination therein. Descend with me, fellows, into my mind.

Why in the night sky are the lights hung? I answer this first as if I were answering my youngest self as my oldest self. I am Thirty-One, speaking to my Five. First, what a question! A good question. There are no bad questions; sometimes people ask questions which indicate a poor stance or understanding, but there are no bad questions. Yours is a good question. Why in the night sky are the lights hung? Sometimes people put something out of reach so that others strive to surpass their limitations. If the lights in the sky are other suns, perhaps there are other planets circling those suns as we do our own; perhaps they are indications that, in a cosmic sense, in an interstellar sense, we are not alone. Perhaps they are hung there as a reminder that, despite the pervading darkness, there always remains light – and that, sometimes, is must be found by moving on from the place you are. We are understanding that one a bit more tangibly of late, though it makes us uncomfortable to recognise it.

Both of these mean hope, simply put. The lights are hung in the night sky where we would see them best, to let us know that there are other sources of warmth we might find when our nearest one is snuffed for the evening.

I think of this song in the context of the novels I’ve written, too. There is Orion, of course, who comes to mind first. I imagine him going through his nights, before Zeus places him in the sky, recollecting the stories of those who came before him. There were much fewer when he was young than there are when he himself is strung amongst them. And he wonders why the gods could not help some, why the gods placed up there others; Orion wonders the stories and wanders the world. And then he, no matter which lifetime, striving only to be with the one he loves, finds himself bound to the sky himself. And he wonders, “Why in the night sky are the lights hung?” He wonders why he and his love (Artemis) are strung up so, bound to their fixed points, imprisoned. The focus then is on the fact is is only in the night sky that the lights are hung. The light of the day sky is free to come and go as it pleases; the lights of the night sky are hung, fixed in place.

Personally, this song reminds me most of my curiosity. I’ve always loved gathering stories of the world, listening to information passed along by word of mouth, by word of page; stories, sung, written, spoken, all. I’ve always been a wonderer, always meandered through memory, always contemplated dozens and thousands of dozens of things at once. It makes me laugh, to think of the people who have spoken of my mind as a file box, as something into which I can reach and withdraw at will. That might be the atrium of my mind, but there are great expanses to be found beyond. The song this quote originates from is full of pithy questions, posed as an almost whisper on a simplistic instrumental; the interplay of simplicity and complexity is something quite familiar to me. I recall being five years old when I realised what death was, solely from a thought exercise engaged after I experienced sleep paralysis – and the calmness I felt thereafter, realising that someday I would conclude the adventure that was my life. This, in turn, spawned a new clutch of questions: what happens to me after my body dies, what would dying feel like, what would the absence of feeling feel like, would I be able to remember myself if I lived beyond my body. Such questions came easily to me, and the thought experiments I undertook were and remain thrilling and comforting, even if the experience internally while I experiment brings me moments of anxiety and discomfort. My great-grandfather used to say that if you weren’t learning, you weren’t living, and I hold fast onto that. I try new things; I, vulpine in nature, follow fox holes on subjects I find myself struck by; I seek, I listen, I explore.

This is the key to my enjoyment of life, I believe. Children are inherently scientists, trying new things and processing their experiences, and I have modelled my entire worldview on this concept. I may not find an answer to the query, but, gods, is the searching fun!