Terminal Sunset

I remain emotionally involved with sunsets; the older I get the bigger the sunset. Out on the north fork of Long Island (the working fork) we watched the sunset through the forest, where the trees and foliage went deep greeny-black and irregular bits of sky turned flat and neon-lavender brightening to blaze orange. Night rolled up behind us from out of the sea. Something thrilling and uncanny happens in that moment: the forest becomes the set of a fantasy, where anything might happen, the mythic status of the sylvan fairy bower blooms outwards: a curious set-like quality emerges as if the trees and sky were a theatre backdrop to the start of Dionysian mysteries—an eternal yes to the night of earth—even while the night birds began calling, echoing in a vast chamber—as if we were in a tropical jungle. I felt that my heart had stopped up in my throat. The planet rolled under us. In moments like this one, the last moments of the falling day, my critical facilities become mute; the intellectual defense becomes useless. I get emotional, sentimental even, reverting to the mere romantic; struck by an ecstatic paralysis in the dying flaring day. On the one hand the aim of psychoanalysis is to process in words those experiences that are heretofore incomprehensible—even something as ordinary as a sunset—while on the other hand psycho-analysis admits that the ecstasies and terrors of life, in-the-end, cannot be comprehended or processed, but like the Dionysian mysteries of night, can only be affirmed as life. In the darkening forest the cicada’s began sawing their songs of desire. We might have been in Iowa, or the land of Oz even while we were surrounded by the sea. Then it was dark, the whole world reduced down to where the bugs died, flying into the porch lights.

Terminal Sunset (2020) photo by author