There are seven parts of night: vesper, crepusculum, conticinium, intempestum, gallicinium, matutinum and diluculum.
1. Vesper.
“Evening is named vesper from the western star which follows the setting sun, and precedes the ensuing shadows”.
Vesper is the sunset of the West, announced more than a century ago and therefore now definitively accomplished. Thus, we are in the darkness which follows the setting sun, of which the dusk is the first figure. It is peculiar that since Spengler drew up his irrefragable diagnosis no one amongst the smartest readers has disputed its validity. That the West were mature for the sunset was then as now a widespread sensation, even if, then as now, we pretend that everything continues as before. Thinking about the end, even just being able to represent it, is indeed a hard task, for which we lack adequate terms. The ancients and Christians of the early centuries, who awaited the end of the world as imminent, albeit incalculable, envisioned an unprecedented catastrophe, after which a new world would begin — a new sky and a new earth. The fact is that thinking of the end as a punctual event, after which everything — even time — would cease, offers so little to thought, that we prefer to imagine without realising it a sort of extra time, in which we — who yet rappresentiamo it to ourselves — are non-existent. Spengler, on his part, thought of a morphology of history, in which civilisations are born and decline and, in the exemplary case, the West, whose decline would coincide “with a phase of history che will embrace several centuries and of which we are currently living the beginning”. The hypothesis I wish to suggest is that the West includes the sunset not only in its name, but also in its very structure — that it is, i.e., from the beginning to the end, a vespertine civilisation.
Vesper, the western star, continues to shine throughout the night that we believe we are getting through and in which instead we dwell; the sunset — being in every instant at the end — is the normal condition of Western man. For this his night does not wait for diluculum or aurora. But the sunset, the interminable crisis that he pursues and which he uses as a lethal weapon that he tries by all means to dominate, is slipping from his hand and will end up turning, as it is already happening, against him. Security has become his password because the West has long since ceased to feel safe.
2. Crepusculum.
Vesper, the western star, continues to shine throughout the night that we believe we are getting through and in which instead we dwell; the sunset — being in every instant at the end — is the normal condition of Western man. For this his night does not wait for diluculum or aurora. But the sunset, the interminable crisis that he pursues and which he uses as a lethal weapon that he tries by all means to dominate, is slipping from his hand and will end up turning, as it is already happening, against him. Security has become his password because the West has long since ceased to feel safe.
2. Crepusculum.
“Crepusculum is wavering light. We say that creper is “doubtful”, that is, between light and darkness”.
Isidore is copying a passage from Varro’s treatise On the Latin Language, where we read that “doubtful matters are called creperae ‘obscure’, because dusk is a time when to many it is doubtful whether it is even yet day or is already night”. It’s been a long time that we’ve been in the dusk, and it’s been a long time that we become unable to distinguish between light and darkness — that is, between truth and falsehood. Because who no longer know at which point they are, who are in doubt between day and night and no longer even know what is true and what is false and it is this doubt that one wants to entertain at all costs in the souls and minds. In this sense, dusk has become a paradigm of governance, perhaps the most effective, which mobilises the media apparatus and the culture industry at its service. Thus a whole society lives in the dusk, in doubt about light and darkness, true and false — until the doubt itself wears out and disappears and a lie repeated to such an extent that it can no longer be distinguished from the truth instaurates its desperate dominion in every sphere and order. But a life which darkens in the lie and lies to itself, constantly, destroys its very conditions of survival, it is no longer able to perceive the light, not even the “faint glow” of a match struck in the night. Even those who believed to rule over the dusk no longer know what is true and what is false, where is darkness and where is light; and even if someone insists on bearing witness to the light, that light which is the very life of mankind, it cannot listen to him. And if a lie that has become absolute is that condition in which hope is no longer possible, our vespertine and crepuscular time is desperate in any way.
3. Conticinium.
3. Conticinium.
“Conticinium is when all is silent, for conticiscere is ‘to be silent’”.
Why have you been silent? That times were obscure, that dusk reigned everywhere will not be enough to justify you. Why have you been silent? Even if you could no longer distinguish light from darkness, at least you should have said it, you should have at least shouted in the dusk, in the uncertain hour between dog and wolf. Yours was not the silence of who know they cannot be heard, of who, in the universal lie, have something to say and for this step forward and remain silent. Yours was the conniving silence of who, in the night, keep silent because everyone does so. “It’s true” — you will say — “It was unfair, but I kept silent because everyone was silent”. Yet the lie spoke and you listened to it. And your silence also covered the voice of who, despite everything, tried to speak, to get the third part of night out of its silence.
4. Intempestum.
4. Intempestum.
“The dead of the night, intempestum, is the middle, lifeless, time of night, when nothing can be done and all things are quiet in sleep. A time period by itself, tempus, is not understood except through human activities. The middle of the night lacks activity. Therefore the lifeless middle of the nights are as if without time, tempus, that is, without the activity by which time is distinguished. Whence also, ‘You have arrived intempestive (inopportunely)’”.
The time that we measure so carefully does not exist in itself, it becomes knowable, it becomes something that we can have only through our actions. If all action is suspended, if nothing more is to happen, then we have no more time, delivered to the false stillness of a drowsiness without dreams or gestures. We have no more time, because in the night in which we are immersed, time has become unknowable to us and the powers of the world keep us by all means in this intempesta night, “as if without time, tempus, that is, without the activity by which time is distinguished”. “As if” without time, because the abstract, linear time — the chronological time that devours itself — is actually present, but by definition we cannot have it. For this we must build museums in which to put the past and, as is increasingly the case today, even the present.
What is missing is the Kairos, which the ancients portrayed as a winged young man running hovering over a sphere, with a bald nape which leaves no hold to who try to grab him as he passes. He has a thick tuft on the forehead and holds a razor in his hand. Seizing the day is possible only for who suddenly stands in front of him, takes him by the tuft with a decided gesture and stops his unreal rush. This gesture is the thought, whose purpose is to grasp the missing time in the night. His gesture is inopportune, because each time it stops and interrupts the course of time. Hence the unexpected conclusion: “You have arrived inopportunely (intempestivum venisti)”. Turning the inopportunity against itself, the thought stops and catches time in the night “as if without time”. And this gesture of thought, sharp as a razor, is the primeval political action, which opens up the possibility of all actions just when in the middle of the night every action seemed impossible.
5. Gallicinium.
What is missing is the Kairos, which the ancients portrayed as a winged young man running hovering over a sphere, with a bald nape which leaves no hold to who try to grab him as he passes. He has a thick tuft on the forehead and holds a razor in his hand. Seizing the day is possible only for who suddenly stands in front of him, takes him by the tuft with a decided gesture and stops his unreal rush. This gesture is the thought, whose purpose is to grasp the missing time in the night. His gesture is inopportune, because each time it stops and interrupts the course of time. Hence the unexpected conclusion: “You have arrived inopportunely (intempestivum venisti)”. Turning the inopportunity against itself, the thought stops and catches time in the night “as if without time”. And this gesture of thought, sharp as a razor, is the primeval political action, which opens up the possibility of all actions just when in the middle of the night every action seemed impossible.
5. Gallicinium.
“Day-break is named gallicinium because galli, roosters, are the harbingers of light”.
The cry of the rooster does not announce the dawn. Its — if you listen to it carefully — is the heartbroken cry of who keep watch in the night and until the end do not know if the day will come. For this its chant — or, rather, its cry — is just addressed to us, who, like it, keep watch in the dark and like it we ask: “At what point is the night?”. The cry of the rooster is, like ours, only a probe thrown into darkness not to measure its bottom — it would not be possible — but to sustain and almost calibrate our wakefulness, the duration of which we don’t know. And in this there is something like a small light, a spark in the dark.
6. Matutinum.
6. Matutinum.
“The morning, matutinum, is between the withdrawal of darkneess and the arrival of dawn. It is so-called because this period is the beginning of morning, mane”.
Between darkness and light. Like vesper was between light and darkness. Inchoante mane, the inchoate morning: mane is the neuter of the adjective manis, which means “good” and applied to time signifies “of early hour”. The morning is par excellence “the good hour”, just as the Greeks called the early light “good” (phos agathos). “Mature” is what happens at the right time and Matuta, the goddess of dawn, was for Latins par excellence the good goddess. Matins is the thought in its birth, before it gets fixed in the round of formulas and passwords. It is better, in the morning, not to be a hurry, linger in the good hour, give it all the time it needs. For this in our world everything conspires instead to shorten the good hour and take time away from awakening. Because the awakening is the time of thought, poised between darkness and light, between dream and reason. And one tries, in all ways, to take time away from the thought — the matins — so that today many are awake but not conscious, shiny but not glossy. In one word: ready to serve.
7. Diluculum.
7. Diluculum.
“Dawn, diluculum, is as if ‘now begins the small light of day, diei lux’. This is also aurora, which precedes the sun”.
For now we can only imagine this “small light”. Diluculum, dawn, is the imagination that always accompanies the thought and prevents it from despairing even in the darkest and barbaric of times. Not because “there are so many dawns that have yet to shine”, but because we no longer wait for any dawns. Compline, complete, is the last of canonical hours and for us every hour is compline, it is the last hour. In it the seven parts of night coincide, they are in truth one only hour. And the one for whom every instant is the last one cannot be captured in the devices of power, which always require to suppose a future. The future is the time of power, compline — the last hour, the good one — is the time of thought.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Two little penguins “flipper in flipper”. Photo: Tobias Baumgaertner/Ocean Photography Awards/PA. |
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