This is my submission for the Passage Prize 2021, originally titled ‘A Journey in Moonlight’.
A sliver of moonlight transfigures the world. The well-walked paths of daytime are turned into snaking strips of silver and black, and one walks as much over the topography of dreams as over the snow-covered rocks of a winter forest. There are worlds one can enter only in superposition – places which reveal themselves as places-upon-places. A man who walks into the moonlight also walks out of the world of streetlights – and there is much wonder for those who dare brave the night.
I remember the first time I entered that world. I was a boy, and my relatives and I were fishing by a lake long into the night. I never had much luck at fishing, but I always found something to intrigue me in the new scenery and I often joined for that alone. This evening the sun was setting, and the sticky heat of July was replaced by that invigorating coolness of summer twilight. I left our little group to explore, darting into a forest passage and delighting in the fresh summer air. My young legs bore me over mossy stones, jumped over exposed roots on dusty paths and ducked under hanging branches. Once or twice a crow flew overhead and I could see the first glimmer of the stars.
The arrival of night had come so slowly that I had hardly noticed when the evening purples were replaced by the silver-on-black. Paths that I had just taken became somehow new and strange in the moonlight. Seeing the dancing reds of the campfire in the distance, I made my way back to my relatives. As I exited through a different passage in the greenery, further away from the campfire, I stood before an ink-black lake crowned by that silver disk.
Time stopped for a moment as the vastness of the sky greeted me, and the Moon seemed to me a mischievous king in that ensemble of stars. I thought of Máni, the Norse lunar deity, and how on this night he had evaded the wolves that are always at his heel. Seeing his respite in this moment of eternity, I knew that I had stumbled upon a secret. The ghostly light gave my skin an ethereal quality, and as I walked along the shore of the lake I felt as a vagabond in a jester’s dream.
I never forgot that night.
Until I did. The city replaced the moonlit night with its oranges and neon, lights which feel cold even in the hottest summer night. In the city, one can never see the Moon. One cannot see it, because there the night sky is too small. The glare of ice-cold electric light traps the spirit close to the earth; it is the light of the street, of the ground. The night shies away from it and you walk instead in that half-land between soaring dreams and waking life; the filth of the gutter, where every woman is a whore and every man a taxi driver, where every light is loud and every sound a shadow in the haze of too much cheap whiskey.
One never really lives in the city. It is instead the city which lives in you. The noise is so overpowering that you stop listening, that you forget that part of you which is found in silence. The crowd, too, is so overbearing that you cease to be a social animal, that you forget that part of you which is found in solitude. It is never quiet in the city, you just stop hearing it. And you are never alone in the city, you just stop feeling like you belong.
One never notices how much one has lost to the streetlight until one has returned to the moonlight. All that was forgotten with the loss of silence and solitude re-emerges with the silver-on-black. It was at another lake – the Moon is a goddess of lakes – that I remembered what I had lost. My friends and I were drinking and singing by a fire so hot the flames were blue in the middle. From the houses on the hill on the other side of the lake the warm oranges of home were shining from the windows. Sitting on a rock, looking about at the moon-shimmering water, at the dots of light from the houses and at our small rocky beach, I felt suddenly called. I arose and went to the elder grove where the tall trees grow, on the winding rocky path up the hill from the lake.
The moonlight shone through the tall trees, lighting an ascending path of stone. It was like a stairway of light suspended in darkness, and I made my way up to the summit of the night. The trees lining the path were like black pillars; their resin shimmered like stars in the darkness. I walked with surety up that path, feeling that same ethereal quality in my body as I had on that night in my childhood. Having become a thing as much of translucent night as of blood and muscle, I felt like I was floating through space.
Then the ghostly path I had walked gave way to the summit of the hill and to the clearing on the top. The thin band of silver was replaced by forest architecture crafted as if by ink on white paper, and the night was alive with the soft waving of wraith leaves in the winds of dreams. I stood underneath the immensity of the sky, which dwarfed my small pocket realm of night with its countless stars. The Moon, that lonely monarch, ruled supreme in the celestial ensemble, giving shape to all I could see around me; black shapes draped in eerie light. I had forgotten about my friends, about the blue-hot fire and the houses on the other side of the lake. I had been plucked from the world of campfires and thrown lightly into a vastness incomprehensible that poured out from the lonesome light. I stood there for but a short eternity; in that moment out of time, there was no I, no man watching the night. There was only the Moon, dreaming the lives of men.
That was when I remembered.
When I came back from that night, I resolved to visit the world of moonlight whenever I could. Before, I had stumbled upon the secret; now, I would go out and seek it. I have had many excursions since then, but one stands out as the most visceral: the first time I deliberately went seeking the Moon.
It was a cold November night. A thin cover of frost blanketed the world, making every surface glitter like pearls. I was making my way under streetlight towards the path I had chosen. I knew it well enough that I could find my way by memory if I got disoriented in the night, and it was close enough to the jogging tracks that most animals would stay away. I was apprehensive, more so from the streetlight and the town I left behind then from the moonlight and the forest ahead. I could see the Moon shining through the tree branches above.
I eventually reached the opening I was looking for. I stood before it for a few moments, trying to clear my head lest I miss the secret I was looking for. Without looking back, I entered into the silver-on-black.
The world I entered was eerily familiar yet distinct from the one I had known in daylight. The forest paths I knew could not be seen, replaced by beckoning streaks of light in a world of gleaming shadows. The crows were silent at this hour and only the wind in the leafless trees could be heard, joined by the sound of frozen leaves crunching under my boot. I walked awkwardly at first, doubting my step, but as I passed between streaks of silver and saw the glittering contours of the forest, my pace quickened. I began looking less at the ground and more towards the sky as I chased the Moon up a hill in the forest.
A moment of darkness in the shadow of a great tree gave way to clear sky and to what I sought; then she would dart away behind a branch as I followed her. I would round the tree, catch sight of my prey again and make for her; again, she would evade me. My quarry eluding me, I now began to plan my hunt. I leapt between shadows and into the open islands of glittering light where I knew she would be, hoping to outsmart her. Spotting a rock and an old tree I knew from before, and knowing where I was, I dashed through the whipping leafless branches, leapt on top of a rock and from there onto a cliff. Before me was now the circle of trees I knew so well, and the small clearing on the rocky hill that I was seeking. Here she would not elude me, and with triumphant steps I ascended into the light.
The surrounding trees were like pillars of black marble – like an altar was the rocky outcropping – as I entered this temple of the deepest night. My breath came heavily and hung for a moment in the chill air; my footsteps reverberated from the stone as if in some great hall. Above me was spread a fresco from out of time – the Birth of the Moon. Resplendent in the center of the tree-girded image, attended by the rejoicing stars and a wispy cloak of clouds thrown carelessly at her feet – so did the Moon reveal herself, with skin as white as silver and her hair raven black. Time ceased for a moment; the wind held its breath; and a frozen world shimmered.
Her hand seemed to reach from the heavens and pluck the moonlit temple from the forest shadows. All was suspended in living silver; the trees bowed and waved their branches; the rocks stretched toward the sky to join the celestial chorus; and the man drank of the ethereal light. Soon I shone from within, no nightly shadow remained, and the world seemed to lay itself bare before my sight. I had paid my respects to the Moon in this hidden temple, and she had granted me passage to her realm. I took a single step back from the rocky altar.
A sudden rustling in the woods behind me broke the spell. The lunar temple faded and I stood once more beside a moonlit outcropping within a circle of trees. Transcendent awe had been replaced by a more animal sentiment, and I listened closely for the crunching of frozen leaves. I could see nothing; soon enough I heard nothing save the wind. Invigorated by the sight I had seen on the hill, I swiftly went back into the darkness of the forest to continue my exploration of the silver streaks.
I had walked on a foot path for only a short while when I arrived at a crossroads. The spot itself was lit, but the branching paths all led into darkness. Unsure of which path to take, I settled for going deeper into the woods. The very moment when I left the light, I heard rustling five paces or so ahead of me. I froze: it was the unmistakable sound of an animal. The rustling stopped as I did; there was a tension in the air like before a thunderclap. I peered into the unyielding blackness, pushing against it, straining against the inky night. I inched forward, closer, closer…
Then the night shattered!
My blood was lit ablaze by the sounds of startling white and panicking red. From the abyss before me came a hideous baying that broke the blackness. All around me was the sound of wild barking and hurried thumping. The night had come alive and a cacophonous onslaught engulfed me in a world of screaming shadows. With the first rush of instinct, I dashed blindly towards an opening in the hellish chorus, and put a tree between myself and the attacking beasts. I braced for the impact, and then…
The sound faded. The thumping and rustling grew weaker, and soon enough the baying subsided into a periodic warning which called from the depths of the forest. The animals had fled, and though I had never before heard such a strange barking sound, I surmised from my knowledge of the region that it must have been the frightened yelling of a family of deer. Laughing that good laugh that only subsiding adrenaline provokes, I calmed my rushing heart, and continued into the darkness, away from the periodic baying.
After fifty paces or so I began to recognize which path I had ended up on after my haphazard dash away from the unseen creatures. I knew that it led down from the hill and onto another longer path which would take me to a forest lake surrounded by a rocky meadow. I swiftly made my descent onto this other path. When I arrived, the Moon had risen high on my left-hand side and was lighting up the whole right-hand side of the long path. What appeared before me was a long strip of silver which cut into the heart of the darkness, disappearing into a haze of glittering grey in the distance.
Perhaps it was the way that the rising wind whipped the tree branches and made the shadows dance; or perhaps it was how the shimmer suddenly seemed detached from the frozen surfaces; maybe it was just the biting cold. But as I made my way down that lonesome path I began to feel a mounting sense of dread. More than once the shadows came alive and stalked around me, only to dissolve once more into the night as my eyes strained to make them out. The shimmering frost took on a life of its own, choking me in a world without discernible shape or geometry. I began to wonder if I had not stumbled into some strange nightmare. Had this sliver of night been unmoored from time? Was I caught in the web of this sinister glimmer, some incomprehensible predator which fed on my body even as the cold stung my cheeks and fingers? The blackened half of the path began to open up before my mind, revealing a yawning abyss that made me fear the precipice at the edge of the moonlight. Soon my body grew numb, and the world vanished behind the veil of my misty breaths. I looked to the Moon; finding comfort in her solitary repose, I pressed on.
Even as the meadow before the lake opened up before me I could not quite clear the sense of foreboding still stuck in my mind. The shimmering had returned to the surface of the frozen vegetation; the dancing shadows now hid behind the boulders and rocky outcroppings that dotted the meadow. Only the wind was still present, gaining strength from the open space and animating the scene with an invigorating violence. Through the swirling force of the wind, the orb of the Moon hung motionless. Her light made of the meadow an alien landscape of rolling, shaped silver broken up by the occasional black contours of a boulder or outcropping. The space was illuminated as if it was day, a stark contrast to the undulating abyss of the lake. Aside from the silver-streaked waves, the only discernible feature of the lake was a frost-glittering jetty which swayed ominously in the wind.
Though I was now freezing, the wind had brought me renewed vigor, and I decided to make the view from the jetty my last sight before I returned back home. I marched over the alien landscape of the silver meadow towards the footpath which formed the border between the lake and the cliffs on the left-hand side of the lake. I followed the path until I came to the jetty; a sturdy wooden thing, covered in frost, connected with heavy chains to the bare rock at the edge of the lake. I was cautious of walking onto the jetty, lest I lose my footing on the slippery surface. Having determined that I could get onto the jetty without an unfortunate dip in the ice-cold water, I finally stepped onto the floating structure. Chains rattled and the wooden thing heaved under my weight, but it soon stabilized itself and I strode confidently to its outermost edge.
With the Moon at my back, the sight that met me at the edge of the jetty was one of impenetrable darkness. With but a few steps, I had walked into a dizzying abyss that stretched above me as much as it did below. The occasional shimmer from the frost on the far side of the lake joined seamlessly with the shining stars, forming an endlessly expanding view of deepest space. Throughout the black expanse was an awful ripple, the movement of some void-beast that howled and ripped and tore into my body, jostling me about as I seemed to fall ever deeper into nothingness.
I fell through that void for what felt like an eternity. My whole body had gone numb from the cold; my eyes saw nothing but the all-encompassing ink; and I heard nothing but the howl of the wind. I had ceased to think or register anything. I held my breath, and in that moment I ceased to be. I had met my end, sinking entire into the cold, endless void…
From this death-like state I was suddenly roused by a sound which caused some forgotten animal impulse to reawaken and revive me. It was the sound of footsteps.
Spinning around to see what monstrous thing might be approaching, I was startled to find myself back in the same abyss that had captivated me previously. All around me was impenetrable blackness, and it took me a moment to register that some void-beast had descended upon the Moon, blotting out my only source of light. I refocused my attention on the footsteps, which could still be heard approaching me. I waited in the sightless void, holding my breath, as step after step fell on the jetty…
But nothing came out of the darkness. Though I could hear the steps, they did not seem to come closer. Then it hit me. What I was hearing was the thumping of the water under the jetty, giving a rhythmic sound which to my hyper-alert mind seemed like the sound of an approaching assailant.
Relieved at this realization, I relaxed and contemplated my choices. I could wait for the Moon to return with the light, or I could venture into the abyss armed only with a vague sense of direction and a mental image of where I was. I resolved to take my chances in the darkness.
The darkness had become a world of surfaces hard and cold. My hand traced the cliff to my right, while to my left I searched for the edge of the lake with my boot. In this way, I made my way back on the path I had come, looking about me for any discernible feature to guide me. The void, before an alien and imposing force, had been reduced by my mind to a problem of direction, contour and shapes unseen. With no hint of fear remaining in my mind, I clawed at the darkness, strangling it, wrestling with it, no longer content with being jostled about by unseen forces and cruel claws in the wind.
I was making good progress when I was suddenly startled by something which streaked across my field of vision. It was some kind of strange wisp-like creatures, very small, that glowed with a red light. They had come from the darkness, danced above and before me, and then disappeared back into the darkness. I stood in awe as I watched these strange dancing things, and I began to wonder just what I had come across. What were these creatures? Was I just seeing things? I waited for another few creatures to appear, and quickly reached out to grab one, but it simply… vanished.
Though the sight of these midnight wisps was wondrous to behold, I could not shake an undercurrent of dread as I stood in the pitch black darkness, seeing nothing but dancing lights. It did not take me more than a moment to decide that I had to investigate. Surmising that the creatures came from up the cliff, I took off my gloves, thrust my bare hands into the hidden crevices of the void and began to climb. Thankfully, the ascent was easy enough, and though my hands ached I could finally see – and smell – where these strange wisps had made their nest. And I laughed.
There in the darkness, by a small tree and surrounded by stones, was the smoldering remains of a campfire.
With light steps I made my way to the fire and sat down on a rock with my back towards the tree. I had long since grown numb from the cold, and the warmth from the fire was sorely needed. I huddled over the fire, drinking greedily in the heat and the light and the smell of burning wood. My eyes quickly adjusted to the light, and as I looked out towards the lake and the howling wind, I could see nothing. There was only the fire, and the stones, and my aching hands. My world had shrunk: from the void of infinite space, to a small island world sustained by a dying light.
I didn’t think long of who had lit the fire – it didn’t matter much. What did seem to be of crucial significance, however, was that I had found it. Through my long journey into the night, I had been granted a small respite from the darkness and the loneliness. It was a world entirely for me, containing only me, in a vast and incomprehensible darkness. The wind howled around me, and I huddled closer to my glowing sanctuary. In that moment, I felt at home. Instincts from beyond time called to me, whispered of the countless ancestors who had peered over warm fires into the cold night. Of all the visions and wonders and terrors I saw that night, this was undoubtedly the most human.
Held afloat in the void by a dying light; huddled around a rare comfort; howling violence and unrelenting cold; drunk on the moment; a longing for home like a bleeding wound; and the wild dream that some midnight god will return to banish the eternal dark. By that fire, I had become so painfully, violently, desperately human. I never wanted to leave the light of that fire. It was the world; there was nothing more precious. It was the hopes and dreams of so many souls, the blood of so many ages and the innumerable tragedies and triumphs of life. A flash of light in the void, lost in eternity; yet still eternal, unrelenting and unceasing.
When the fire had died down to a barely noticeable pile of embers, I arose and looked about myself. A new world had been born from the fire, for now the blackness was replaced by silver shapes. The violent wind was once again invigorating – as the world opened up, the fears of the night dissipated, and I looked with great humility towards the resplendent Moon, architect of this strange yet familiar land, and my guide home.
The way home was uneventful. I looked mostly at the Moon, and was deeply pensive in that place where no thoughts are named. Soon I stood at the threshold to the world of streetlights again, and I turned one final time towards the Moon. I looked at her for some time, and I thought to myself how dignified she is, how sorrowful, how regal in solitude. I thought of how alike we are – lonesome travellers in the night, disturbed by no eyes. I thought of this and I smiled. Then I turned around.
Blood-like-ice heart-pounds-trembles gasping-panic-breath fur and teeth yellow eyes looking STALKING HUNTED RUN-RUN-RUN BLOOD EATEN DEATH RUN RUN RUN
It took me three panicked breaths before raw instinct translated into rational thought, and three more before I knew what had triggered it. I had not been alone with the Moon; I had been watched; and the sight of fur and sharp bone had triggered another memory from the blood, this one not of home but of being prey. The swirling fur-beast-teeth that the ape within had seen soon took definite form, and I looked into the surprised and somewhat confused eyes of a young stag, leisurely enjoying a midnight snack. Having been thoroughly humiliated by the denizens of the forest for the second time that night, I laughed a hearty laugh and exited into the streetlight.
Compared to the Moon, every streetlight is a blasphemy. There is no magic under streetlights, only the filth of cities and the pointless business of mundane life. But one brings a piece of the fairy wonders of night with oneself whenever one returns from the land of silver-on-black. One finds a life to the world that is otherwise absent, and a life to oneself that often lies dormant. There are no mysteries in desk work; but there is poetry in the Moon, and mysteries in the night, and sights both terrifying and wondrous in shadowy forests. And so I dedicate this Dionysiac rambling to the Moon, to the silver portal of night and to the hidden places of this world, be they within or without.
There are worlds one can enter only in superposition.
Lovely. Thank you.