Late nights lend thoughts a grandeur they seem not to enjoy at any other hour--'seem' because this sense of the grand is not because the thoughts we think at night are grander, but rather, because at night we naturally think more grandly, whatever be the thought.
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The source of this post-midnight majesty of mind is worth considering--and seems to me to be this: an empowerment by isolation--an isolation that secures for the lone thinker, 'sailing through strange seas of thought/alone' an exemption from daylight economies. These economies are sensible places where thoughts are exchanged--and so wherein thought is a product, and thinking a process of domestication, a cautiousness, a commodity. By contrast: in the dark and absence of others, thought reverts to something soaring, severe, solitary, all but indifferent to the social, even hostile to it. The interpersonal etiquette of thought is shucked off at nightfall, the way an over-socialized savage shrugs off his colonizer's starched, restrictive clothing, paints his face, and slips into the river, eyes gleaming, knife in teeth. In the thickening dark, thought steps outside of the social; the dangerous evening breezes are caught in mental sails which, in daylight, were spread downward, like nets, for knowledge. But now in the cool they billow--and the late-night thinker has altitude--carrying thought above and beyond the reproachful circle of well-lit faces. Lifted beyond accusing lights, thought alights--and crouches, claws out, breath quick, back arched-- breathes wild, alone, endangered, exuberant. In this dark, thought is removed from the exchange economy, where thoughts are engineered with a mind for trading--and becomes a kind of irresponsible and imaginative careening.
Suppose this is the phenomenology, then. What drives it?
The answers I am inclined to accept are in the description above, the crux of which is this: it is only at night and alone (one must be willing to be alone--to face the absence of every face) that we can at last think FOR OURSELVES. All are asleep; our thoughts cast about only for us, report only to us, return only to us--and often not at all. The crucial matter, though, is that all thought we might express to another involves common ground, and so must be mediated; yet, by engaging in thinking which expressly declines future expression--by devising a thought we have no intention to express--we permit that thought to be im-mediate. A thought of this sort--an unmediated thought-- is what we would think, absent the urge, always already internalized, to alter the thought in order to share it with another thinker. Yet this is economy socializes thoughts which otherwise come at us wild, rude, and naked. This is to say the economy of thought concerns itself not so much with traditional representation as with re-presentation of the most literal sort-- the concern that a thought will have to be presented again to another. It is always plumping wild notions for (perhaps unwanted) positions as propositions properly behaved; the economy of thought takes the savage we spoke of and seeks to civilize him--seeks to make of him a civil servant. And again, this mediating, socializing, civilizing, is due to the thinker engaging in thought under the prospect of a future sociality.
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Yet I am now up, and no others are stirring. Dark and sleep separate me--provided all others are gone! For even one more thinker is a market; preparing a thought for two constitutes mass-marketing. Yet, now that all others sleep, I may think under this notion: the markets are closed! All others have closed their stands and gone home to soma, to sleep, to others--perhaps even love. But we have not done this. We are alone. And what we think ALONE need not be given to another. We cannot, under these conditions, give the thoughts we have; and therefore we have them differently--have different thoughts--thoughts less sociable, more primitive, and, perhaps, and in some sense, more pure. A thought under these conditions is for no one--not even for me (I expect nothing of it, hold it to no norms) and therefore need not be homogenized--can be wildly and unapologetically particular--need not be ACCEPTABLE to anyone, and a thought unworried about how it will trade is the only thought which, to that mind, is properly considered indigenous. For only such unapologetically sovereign products of mind need not be bowdlerized and/or bastardized. They do not pander to a demographic. How could they? They have none.
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Yet of what sort of value, one might ask, are such thoughts? But the answer has to do, not with the value of particular thoughts, packaged, and ready for shipping--that was economy. Granted, it seems this thinking--this anarchic meditation--this intellectual dreaming--seems to have SOME sort of value--an extra-economic value. Yet the paradox is clear. Such speculations are not intellectual investments with a strange return--they are, as it were, an investment in thoughts that, with regards to returning, are under no obligation. To speculate in this way is to fund an exploratory venture which seems to make the speculator suddenly rich--yet precisely because this thinking need not give its sole investor any traditional dividend. Yet the abstract return here, surely, is the freedom from being obligated to produce one. The value is not a commodity within the economy, but, perhaps, the outer wilds that make possible the tame. This value is intellectual liberty in the strongest most undisciplined sense-- cut free from the economy which demands that our thinking be productive, improve the bottom line, please the bosses, turn a profit, produce for common consumption.
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And this world of consumption is where we labor all day. Yet every 3 a.m. brings about the overthrow of the values of economy. At that hour the mind enters a temple emptied, just after the table of the moneychangers have been upset, and all others have vanished. With lights low, the night a great, high-ceilinged church, an open-air cathedral in which all other parishioners are always absent, one is simultaneously free from, and vulnerable to, every blasphemy, and we feel ourselves uninhibitedly thinking our thoughts as ours. Answerable to no one, accepting a thought outside of the productive, deep night frees us to think without the daylight obsession with answers. We are, with no accusing face awake to tell us to be sensible-- to put us in harness--to MAKE something of our selves--to make sense-- we are at last able to wildly and irresponsibly cast about with a positive intent to catch nothing, lunge for branches we'll surely miss, sail for islands that may be myth, launch quests for conclusions we cannot reach, and, wholly apart from any green-eye-shade measure of productivity which daylight and the presence of others requires, relish the pure joy of the leap, heedlessly flinging forward our thoughts ("ever unreeling them/ever tirelessly speeding them"), our selves ("And you/O my soul").
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There is, of course, a dark side to this kind of adventuring. It presents a special danger. Some minds, too long absent from others--those whose 3 a.m. lasts too long--somehow confuse slipping into the dark with letting the dark slip into them. They set out at night as we do, yet in such a way that they never find their way back to morning. Their thoughts, never formulated under the gaze of another face, become terrible, faceless. In severe cases, there is even a rage/resentment against the faces that constitute the morning of the mind. There then arises, so as to make the night last forever, a desire to close all eyes--the terrible dream, in the nightmare of Lear, which Cornwall represents. .
But that the night-minded face such threats is hardly a point against our practice; for an equally terrible darkness falls upon minds who seem to grow blind by being subjected to too much daylight, too much sun, too much sociality. They are NEVER alone in thought--never think, free of other faces-- always think for others--and so come to regard the natural state of all thought as engineered for others; their entire mentality never escapes economy, and so they literally never think for themselves. Such persons operate the means of production, but no longer own it. All their thoughts are encompassed by economy, therefore all their thoughts are engineered 'for the people'--are genericized even before they are had. Such persons do not, strictly speaking, ever have their own thoughts; there is no thought of theirs which stands as private property. All is in common, and so is common--terribly common. Thus the dangers cancel out: the night-thinker's mind may collapse inward; but this is no point against it, as the day-thinker's mind may collapse outward--have its boundaries always and everywhere violated by an incessant light and the relentlessly prying eyes of others. When day-thinkers collapse, they do not explode, they dissipate-- become hackneyed, unoriginal--and by not exempting themselves from economy, come to that market offering nothing which might fully be called their own. By contrast to the collapsed night-thinker, the collapsed day-thinker is less seen than sensed; we sense that we know what they will say before they say it--know that whatever they say, we will have heard it before--know that, whoever it is that they are speaking for, they have somehow, and at the deepest possible level, relinquished the very capacity to speak for themselves.
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So there are dangers on both sides--respective dangers of both a social and solipsistic savagery. Why prefer our way, then? Why prefer insomnia?
For just this reason: there is, in our nightly leaves from considerations of economy, a possibility of a new kind of value. It is our intense provincialism, possible only at night and alone, that makes us valuable to others come morning. We wake late--we walk out, and into faces--faces welcoming, warning, suspicious--but we have been away--and therefore can be of value to them. We are returning from elsewhere and so, here in daylight, face others with something to offer. We are less domestic labor than importers; and the novelty of our imports is only possible given the exile from economy already described.
Might we push this further--might we say, in a bit of hopeful self-praise, that our alienation has interpersonal--that is, ethical--value? The thought would be this: suppose we had not accepted the utter isolation of night--had not accepted night in its fullness--had, when faced with its emptiness, declined it--or at least, declined its unique disciplines. What if, instead of being the savage we spoke of, who relates to--even relishes--the dark into which he slips, we had, like good civilized souls, warded it off with phones and family and friends which we clutch and wave against night, like the blinding torches one might wave at a bear, or a cross the character waves before an approaching vampire. Suppose, at nightfall, instead of letting all outer lights go out, we built blue ones--huddled before flickering screens, streaming the dreams of others--what would have been the result? Isn't it true that, had we warded off night rather than welcomed it--had we defended against its asociality rather then accepted it--we would have remained blind to what it shows us once our eyes adjust? As a result, would we not have destroyed the very indigenousness of thought it enables by thinking with and for everyone else? But now...everyone else... if we have not, in their absence, had thoughts which were made apart from them, and, as it were, without them in mind, what will we give them at a reunion? With what exotic and unprecedented gift might we present them, if we have not ranged far and wide? And yet: if dark is something into which we voluntarily, and with a thrill of fear (always fear!), slip--were our thoughts in the dark allowed to rage as a kind of noble savagery we were willing to risk--into which we might nightly immerse ourselves, into which we might nightly descend--if we had the discipline to sink into it--the discipline not to keep to the surface--the discipline not to swim--what extraordinaries might we now have to sell at the morning market?
This, it would seem, gives us reason to hold that, at times, the Western equivalence between thought and light fails us--for given the previous paragraph, it follows that the tendency to stay near the light is not necessarily excellent--even in an economic sense. The dark, a wild sea, must swallow us sometimes--and we may ourselves be complicit in bringing about this swallowing. One cannot sink out of sight for others--that would still be a motive of economy; but once one does it with no thought of others, one may for this very reason come to have something for them.
"But it feels that I might drown..." This is because you might; but this is true of anyone who, like the hopeful pearl diver, grabs his rock, holds it tight, and plummets to the bottom, where, amidst the colds, pressures, and inexplicable darks, stays down long enough, and maintains enough presence of mind--his mind-- to bring something beautiful up from those fiercely individual depths--up...up... to the easier, everyday trading which takes place upon a reassuring surface-- solid, sun-drenched, shared. He enhances the surface by breaking it.
