3 am: Wonder, Paranoia and the Restless Night

Inspired by the forthcoming exhibition of the same name at the Bluecoat, C James Fagan presses play on a mix probing night’s dark recesses… 

It’s 3 AM.

Where are you?

Lost in an overheated mass of strangers, as the music loses meaning and becomes sensation; sharing an impersonal moment as the rush of a familiar beat takes you and everyone else to a point of hand lifting excitement.

You’ve spent the hours waiting for this euphoric moment which will lead to satisfaction, the climax that will crown and justify the night. Justify the money spent, justify the chemical imbalance in your brain.

Are you using the thunder of the music to displace the fears of the day, a sonic barrier reforming you into someone free from the tedium of job, mortgage and the other tyrannical responsibilities of the sun?

Are you trying to forget the approaching ugly lights that will shine and highlight the night’s flaws, leaving you with the echoes of a fading good time? Are you already out in the hollow night, drifting through the empty streets?

You are the only witness to the streetlight’s fight against the night. The lights that throw out their piss-stain streaks into the spaces the dark allows; all the time the lights know that this a losing battle. This is the night, the dark inherits all.

Do you see the static houses hiding behind this light? The shops they forget to turn off, their goods now twice as unattainable and only for those who dwell in a brighter world. Are you crossing an empty car park, deserted by nightfall, are the lines and symbols laid across this plane spelling out a secret poetry to be decoded by those who share the night?

At night the world holds it breath, the normal modes of activity are suspended. Not for the dwellers of the night the conventional morals that live under a blue sky. You are free to be what you want, free to see the beauty which comes when the piece of the earth you’re on turns away from the sun.

Have you snapped awake, been torn from subconscious daylight and greeted by the sheer infinite black cliff that’s invaded your home?

Suddenly a millennia-worth of primal fears of the night come rushing at you, their forms shifting as they slip through the ink of the night. Before they get close you exorcize them by the flash of light from your phone, a comforting reminder of the other world of rationality, of the moving sun where the demons are kept at bay by the magic of routine.

Do you surrender yourself to the world of sleep or are you captured by the night, turned into the only living thing on the planet, distant from any ideas of life? The only thing you have is your past, everything that should have been, every missed kiss, dropped chance.

You promise yourself tomorrow, tomorrow it will all be different – the night allows you this chance, the day will obliterate it from your dreaming mind.

Are you up with the cries of your child who wakes only due its own rhythms, unaware, uncaring of the night? You’re there to shield them from the hollowness of the night. You conquer the night for them, the night is yours: the night belongs to all who dare to witness it.

Like the fox you prowl, you are the manifestation of an unconscious sleeping population. Free from the demands of the sun, free to walk amidst the infinite to take passage under the canopy of the light of a billion burning suns, all the more desperate to shine for you.

You know the cyphers of the night and hold them in the glare of the incoming dawn. The night is ours, we know the night, we know why the birds sing at dawn.

C James Fagan

3 am: Wonder, Paranoia and the Restless Night Sat, 28 Sep 2013 – Sun, 24 Nov 2013 @ the Bluecoat

Image courtesy commons.wikimedia.org 

Posted on 30/08/2013 by thedoublenegative