#surprisedbyjoy

To these nagging suggestions my reaction was, on the whole, the most foolish I could have adopted. I set myself a standard. No clause of prayer was to be allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied by what I called a “realization”, by which I meant a certain vividness of the imagination and the affections. My nightly task was to produce by sheer willpower a phenomenon which willpower could never produce, which was so ill-defines that I could never say with absolute confidence whether it had occurred, and which, even when it did occur, was of very mediocre spiritual value.

Here is a piece I wrote in January 2014 over about a week. I had just finished reading C. S. Lewis's Surprised By Joy, which I'd read from cover to cover in a short time (a rarity for me). The book is his autobiographical account of his conversion to Christianity and it enthralled me, as religion was something that I was then, for the first time ever, giving the time of day (prompted by a compelling religious friend).

Lewis is an emotional and poetic man, with a child's heart. His concept of 'Joy' spoke to me precisely and deeply: it described my experience exactly. Someone had at last given it a name. It was not his Christianity that interested me; rather, it was his enthused spirit that I fell for - and continue to revere - in him and whomever I encounter it in.

The piece is also aesthetically significant. Of all my visual art practices, it is my photography of late that has been the most accurate embodiment of my obsession with some very particular things: the night, geometry, the colour gold, chiaroscuro and the diaphanous play of light. (I had dismissed photography as lazy for so long, but recently time constraints forced me into it - and boy I am glad!) So here it is, a younger, more roughly-hewn HW:

And when the day melts down to a sleepy red glow, that’s when my desires start to show – Jimi Hendrix (who as I recall covered his windows with black fabric so that it would be 'night' all the time, bless him; I did this too on occasion as a teenager).

For C.S. Lewis, ‘Joy’ was initially brought on by something he called ‘the Northernness’. My own Northernness is something primarily brought on by the night: elicited by the hard and high edges of the city, its abandoned office foyers and carpeted hotels, electric light and reflective surfaces. So consider this piece an ode to the urban night and its spaces and atmospheres; my black Northernness.

In his words, "Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man’s life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself." Whilst not entirely immune to hyperbole, we could cede to him that this is indeed one of life’s great surprises: to have happened upon someone who so accurately writes of your own experience decades before you’ve even taken your first breath. No stranger to hyperbole myself, I will claim that there is nothing worse than writing when one has nothing to say; on this occasion I do have something to say, if only gropingly. And so to the Night.

What might this perennial, night-time enthusiasm be that wells up in me almost every evening? It is not unlike a steadily burning, gently mounting flame. Like clockwork, upon the striking of four or five o'clock pm – aided by coffee, or not – it begins. It grows and grows, engorging my chest such that it culminates in the ‘heart-swelly feeling’ as a friend puts it. Is this the famed 'fire in the belly'? The life-force? My soul? Whence my night-time enthusiasm comes I would very much like to know; what chemical process is responsible, I wonder? Prosaically, and perhaps correctly, I could say it is but the taking of comfort in the fact that wage work and errands are done for the day and my heart and mind are free to soar to the far reaches of time and space where, usually, something like Caspar David Friedrich's stormy landscapes are storming, or Wagner's Ring cycle is unfolding.

Sometimes it is the sub-atomic ‘rooms’ of theoretical physics or the unimaginable space between two binary opposites, but it is always in the presence of God as possibility. I daily possess an unadorned excitement in the face of sheer existence; the brute facticity of being alive and being able to think and talk about it.

This is my baseline condition, and it is amplified fivefold in the evening. St. Patrick's looks good during the day, but is so much more imposing at night. Walking by it, observing it loom now larger, now smaller, resplendent all the way in orange tungsten on a hot January night – one perceives that time has stopped. The infernal daily competition has paused, just to spread before you an Edward Hopperian evening desert; a darkened Jeffrey Smart causeway. Even alleyways and dumpsters look fancy at night; they are from nightfall endowed with secrets. Surely it is the mystery; everything is partially obscured at night: a mannequin is never just a mannequin, a tree never just a tree.

One of the most arresting prospects for me is that of a window, often high up, whether open or closed, that transmits warm-coloured interior light and perhaps a section of chandelier or ornate crown moulding. That right there is my Northernness, my perfect Joy. No reality I would find in such glowing rooms could ever be as satisfying (and paradoxically as creating of yearning) as wondering what they might contain.

Once aged sixteen I escaped a social function to sit in the cavernous lobby of an enormous hotel. By then familiar with the special effect hotels had on me, I whiled away a few hours ensconced in deep Chesterfields, admiring the lighting as it fell upon the polished wooden balustrades and the way the piano mysteriously played itself (I believe I also had a cigar with me, if memory serves). (Piano music is another source of Northernness for me, e.g. Hommage a Rameau, but that’s for another day, dear friends.) The staff cared not a lick what I did; I was off-the-record, free.

Even now, so many years on, the evening is always inviting, like an old friend – yet every time new. A time of dinners and cinema, of treat foods and yellow electric light on high rendered walls, of flashing shopfront jewels and high-shine leather bags, and the reminiscence of nights long ago - whether encountered in life or in films - that held the very same charms.  But words are sometimes insufficient; a nod from somewhere above confirms that despite one's best efforts to capture these things in words, sometimes they need no accompaniment other than the low hum of traffic, a coursing breeze or the glassy timbre of high heels on polished mosaic floors.