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Greek to Me
Because the Night
© 2009 by Michael Raysses
It’s 4:09 a.m. in Los Angeles. An oasis of darkness in a city renowned for its relentless sunshine. I’m up late, writing, trying to harvest ideas that tend to mushroom only in the night. But all I find are toadstools, leaving me teetering, half-present on the page. I am reminded of the time a few years back when my Father was still alive and going into the hospital early one morning for back surgery. I had stayed up all night in an attempt to bridge the 2000 miles that separated me from him in a time of need. Inadvertently, pulling an all-nighter triggered memories of an old love affair, one I thought I’d forgotten or at least had gotten over. Sitting here now, I know that’s still not true.
The relationship began innocently enough when I was a child. Growing up in the Midwest, our house wasn’t air-conditioned and during the hot summer months, blankets of hot air would force us out of our beds. So we would spread the patchwork quilt my Grandmother made across the living room floor and sleep on it to escape the crushing heat. There was an ancient clock in our living room that would chime on the hour; when it struck midnight, I could feel the world’s mood shift. It was in that silence that I first heard a distant thunder that rumbled within me.
Ever since, I’ve been in love with the night.
Not just that time when the sun has ceded its turf to the stars, but specifically midnight and beyond, when the moon would zigzag across the inky sky, playing chicken with the gloom. It was a time when while everyone slept, a roiling hush filled the air, posing the promise of things not yet created but there to be summoned if one had the courage to confess the desire and address the need.
As I grew older, my romantic notion of the night became tempered, quite literally, by steel—I went to work as a laborer at Inland Steel Company in Indiana Harbor. Every third week, I’d work midnights from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Nothing stripped the glint from the shimmering image of a night spent toiling in the shadow of the moon like a shift spent at the bottom of an oil tank with a steam gun and a respirator. But the night’s charm was so lustrous that even that didn’t dull the beauty of witnessing it negotiate its inevitable exit to accommodate the coming day.
Steel mills gave way to law school, where the act of staying up all night took on a redefined utility. I swapped shovels for textbooks filled with trivia fine as silt, seemingly designed to drive me into a state of suspended animation. Of all my late-night activities, this was the most difficult to bear. The abstract knowledge pouring silently into my consciousness while the rest of the world slept only heightened the theoretical nature of what I was reading, making it all feel hopelessly intangible and meaningless.
It was around that time that I came to a deeper sense of the night’s value. I got involved with managing a rock band; one night we went into a studio to record some songs. Starting at dusk, we didn’t emerge until dawn, accomplishing more than anyone expected. When we exited the studio into the first light of day, I felt an indescribable joy—I knew that while the sun made its appointed rounds, something had been born that wasn’t there the day before. It was then that I learned that the night was a time of communion with the prospect of what could be—something that the daylight blinded me to.
My experiences as an actor only buttressed this epiphany. Late-night rehearsals for plays that were coalescing into being and all-night shoots in out-of-the-way locations all deepened my appreciation for the nocturnal fields that the night afforded me.
It’s 6:31 a.m. now. Looking through the shades covering the windows, I can see that the night has lost its tug of war with the sky, as the moon readies itself to sleep. I reread what I’ve written, and I feel the night with renewed passion. It is my lover, my partner. As I close my eyes, we silently renew our vows…
Michael Raysses is a writer/actor/National Public Radio commentator living in Los Angeles. E-mail him at MichaelRaysses@hotmail.com.