Some mornings I bundle up and take a thermos of coffee down to the lifeguard’s chair on the beach and climb up to the crow’s nest for my daily matin with God. The raw actualities of the sea night provide a further, more permeable border of where I end and He begins than my living room chair. I’m like an anchorite up in his wilderness tree or desert tower, in solitary union with the infinite. Today at 4 a.m. the wind is blowing harder, gusts of 25 knots swaying the chair in its heavy wood girders. Incoming rollers are ragged, breaking their whitecaps far out; I imagine those pale occurrences in the mash of the sea’s shoreward collapse to be the tonsures of an order assembling here for first prayers, in this small chapel hidden from the world. That salvage boat still out there a mile or so, rocking in rough waters, nosing the black sea like a hound. Up and down the shore its empty and dark, no moon tonight (it’s overcast), all the beach houses and condos vacant or dead asleep, shuttered and black, scarabs inlaid on the coffin of some long-fallen hero.
I settle, sipping coffee, my thoughts woven into the wind’s muscular loom. This is no trade wind circulating warmth deep in the loins: it’s harder, approaching from the northeast. The breeze massages my face, probing, phrenologizing, querying; I can sense its far origins, back through the splayed knees of an Irish dolmen, up into Scandinavia and Iceland, back to the Hyperborean mouth of Thor, whose breath fonts the north wind, whose chest realms the empire of Infrann, that frozen kingdom which can only be accessed down wells and into the footers of abbeys, deep under the polar icecaps, a vivid lucent eerie spectral heart of hearts: A fallen, senile, morally exhausted keep.
What is the distemperment of age which so hoards its own spent youth? It’s a weird composition, this old man’s dream of the gambolling young fool, reveling in his furious hardon, drinking those memories like a satyr draining the cup of Bacchus, revealing depths of need still as ruddy and pent and aching though the years have dessiccated every sign of it from the flesh.
I sit in my tall tall chair, draining the last of my coffee from the thermos, settling deeper into my wrap of blankets, rocked by winds which know me though I will never be able to name them. There is a stage nearby (isn’t there always?) and the combo has started playing an old standard, ah yes, now that’s a tune, how it pulls out memory’s swollen breast, proffering its nipple’s font of dreamy enactments, staining cheeks and mind with the purities of encounter and love, far in the rooky depths of wrong nights. -- A slow, bluesy, meditative, all-night harrow which has an apt nickname: Noir ...
Noir is one of the heart’s favorite genres, the guilty pleasure of going low on the wrong side of town too late at night for any sweet savor to thrive, though it does, getting the silvergold ending, against all odds, winning the big one in the end. Noir’s bed lies deep in the night and is calyxed in the blue-to-black spectra of the senses: you know you’re approaching it when you hear the sound of distant traffic on the intercoastal highway, or a woman’s laugh in a parked car across the street, or the soft rustlings of the breeze on a faintly-crashing surf where somewhere nearby glasses clink, the safety of a .38 clicks off like a brastrap.
You can’t find any of its hot spots unless you’re willing to go down, way down, below any bottom you swore you’d never trespass. That’s what give noir its infernal heat and heart ... An opus contra naturuum, backassward, upside down, sensible to the underworld way which is reverse to our own, the way dreams reflect the day in a darkblue glass ... Bathysphere divers observe how light leeches away as they descend, the left or high end of the spectrum slowly fading to the right or low side.Reds are the first to go, somewhere below 100 feet -- speared fish leak green blood; next to desaturate are the yellow-greens, an absence which is marked by the surging presence of blues which leaden into darker and more bellicose octaves, slowly vaulting into pure violet noir, there on the bridge to absolute darkness, a hue matched by the absolute zero of interstellar cold, by the absolute moral entropy of desperate n'erdowells at night ...
I have had my bad season of placing all my chips on that felt, lamped by the eerie phosphors of the wilds that thrive there -- all dayside semblances dissolved by the whiskey, hungry party animal loosened at last from his cage of everyday light. Noir seduces the wolf end of libido with the scent of blood and pussy, drumming his heartbeat at the tempo of furious rock n roll -- I imagine here the windstorm of that Roxy Music anthem, “The Thrill of it All” centered by the thunderous hooves of the drummer pounding away on his kit while Brian Ferry sings, “I will drink my fill / ‘Til the Thrill is You.” ... Indeed. I have indulged noir as one of the headier opiates of my bad nights, reading its manifesto as the next grand excuse for immoral excess, my mind afire with “Miami Vice” art-deco last-light greens and corals, visual oratory to inspire anarchist appetites which blew myself up at every chance I got.
You would never know such a life exists, keeping to narrow rooms and heated similes, as Rilke put it. But stray or trespass to those depths out of curiosity or desire, and you’ll find a nation at furious play in the bathypelagic depth of three to five hundred feet, translatable to the hours of ten p.m. and closing time; fall even farther and you’re in the bentric zone of minus 750 feet, tearing it up in the bottle clubs and backroom poker parties and bordello cuntfests where a much wilder, darker, feral and dissembled tribe feeds with a frenzy wild in the doom of the coming of day.
And they only come out, or up, at night. The juicy nougat of the whole circular appetite of the sea centers in vast acres of plankton which descend to a certain depth by day, feeding on the sun’s light further down, and then rising at night, bouyed by the infernal ballast of hunger. The food chain follows, each feeding on and then fed upon by the next. You can’t see it from the surface until late at night when the sea gets an eerie lucence to its darkness and suddenly the wake is alive with the leaps and swirls of schools of fish feeding this way then that, sharks mashing through like hammers of teeth, chum everywhere on joyfully stained fish-mouths, all of those greedy flat eyes jacked and wild, spooned from the quicksilver black sea.
No wonder carnivals at night have such wild allure, winging into a patch of field just beyond a small town’s last border, setting up a garish infrastructure of abandon, beaconing dull citizens out of their hearthside torpor for a night on the wild side, offering delights big and small, innocuous and naughty. Gaudy neon cars whirling up and down, round and round, faster and faster, tearing terrified raucously laughing voices hither an yon, hurling loose chain and the occasional spout of vomit onto onlookers below. Teens throwing baseballs at ninepins on the fairway, miming their favorite big-league pitcher as they try to win rough-looking stuffed animals for their girlfriends, hoping such noblesse will cashier later into a further advance under pink sweaters and beneath poodle skirts. While in more private tents the undersides of pink knickers are lifted with a saucy smile by Miss Alexandria of Peoria, wafting a view of the closer and sweeter heavens across a hungry sea of men’s slackjawed faces, like a scent of Eden in full orchid bloom. That’s the noir voltage, verboten and thick-cabled; once the switch is flipped the jones for its earthy epiphanals is nigh-cathedral, black-massy, a blueblack riptide of devotion, hauling everything out in its wake. In the physics of noir desire, least is most and darkest is the secret lair of scalding enactment. Roguery is the lucre of the realm, calling for a certain deft touch and balance negotiating footfalls between abysms -- here is where heists and hijacks are pulled off or blown to smithereens in their tracks. Here is where hearts are thieved, thighs cracked wide with the seducer’s thin smile, gold snekey-peted out with all the honey talk of big-screen romance, only to be snuck out the back door in the deadest a.m.’s of the night before love in faith awakens to the hymenals of dawn.
No wonder the Greek god Hermes was honored by stacking stones (or herms) at the borders of things: He could steal bright Apollo’s cattle and then escape immolation at the hands of that outraged divinity by turning around and fashioning a lyre from a killed turtle’s shell, singing praises to Zeus in an aural magnitude that suckerpunched Apollo, art Father, with a jones for song. Hermes gave him the gift of song -- marrying desire’s mean and ends, coiling them round a caduceus which thralls all listeners with joy, tears and sleep -- and then went on his way with Apollo’s purloined purse in his loins, all that bullion to lay on the road, coins of passage, booty of wiseacres and fraud. That’s Hermes playing the blues in the in the honkeytonks after midnight, sweaty 12-bar progressions which you can also hear in those diners where each booth has a juke player, playing too from the radios of every roadster parked on a dark lane off the main highway where the players are in the back seat, dancing prone to the muddy waters and whiskey surf.
A music both smitten and blasted, blessing sin at its worst as it whistles away turning the safe’s dial, counting off the cylinders right and left, feeling for harmonics of: plunder, Pluto, plausible joy, each click signalling a revolve in the other way, over the same dark depth whose topographies and leys must be felt with the souls of the fingertips, that further border of touch, on to the next click, the return back the other way, sweeping pole to pole til the final click which cracks wide the heavy safe door, revealing a bright lode, or cashiers the last cylinder in the barrel where the bullet is found, Russian roulette concluding with a worlds-loud Amen, or the woman sighs and lies back at last, opening wide like a flower to receive the immortal freight of the the sun’s gold ...
But it isn’t just about desire and its beachheads, is it? There’s no accounting for noir without out its ebbings and low tides, its rip currents of departure and abandonment, all of those empty hours crucified short of embrace. Those waves coming in know the score, travelling three thousand miles to collapse and scatter their freight of: foam, salt, shattered whelks, Ophelian locks of seaweed. Always Eurydice here, gone, her voice remaindered in the surf, all that survives with the survivors ... I see Jan standing in this surf on one summer’s morning years ago, staring at me with her back to the sea, smiling, head cocked, eyes dreamy and pure following a night of engendering love -- we declared Brendan’s origin on that night -- her bikini somewhat loose on her, she having lost weight that year, subsiding more on passion than food, coming to our bed’s table with the same furious appetite -- how we tore at each other, trying to get into each other, beyond the boundaries of hip against hip, bites and scratches, rug-burned knees, sore pussy and raw cock ... A sea filling those early nights, fullest here, long after the last kiss, the fatal goodbye ... Ah noir must bear this blasted state, this salt obliteration of the heart, ferrying this human wreckage to every fateful harbor left on the main, til every mortal deed is at last done ... Limn the visage of our blackandwhite hero with this ebb tide, shape his eyes like driftglass, resound in his heart with that sighing, empty drone of waves spent and lost, gone, gone ... Without such exhaustion there can be no spark, no leap of impossible hope, the true gin of noir ... Not that I have it now, but in my imagination its small flame tenders, gestating with the knowledge that waves return and return.
As you can see, I have a heart for noir’s conceits if small stomach for its actual graveside ends. But that’s why noir is a genre, something to be read and recounted and reshelved, comforts perhaps for those who never quite leave their narrow rooms and heated similes. Readers of noir are like Ishmael aboard the Pequod, that black melancholy ship awash on voyeur booze. That book, you know, is noir gospel, its gnostic ship of fools like a neon green-and-red “Hit Me!” sign blinking out in the blackest arras of night. Ahab is the seared and stricken rigging in the later Bogart’s face, years after “Casablanca.” And Moby Dick is the Bergman he remembers, the big one that got away by dint of career arrogance and spleen, bearing a brace of his vaulting ambitions struck in her side, side up in the mess of other actors and directors and producers and casting agents and two-bit Hollywood gossip-mag reporters who tried to get a piece of her in their own salt tales. The malevolence of that whale is the night’s purgatory of her: wages of every carnal sin, backwash of hubris, jaws of one’s own wounded pride sawing clean through mortal pursuits, the sere humility of days ... They are fated to meet again so the story goes, breeched in some nameless assbin off the Straits of Japan, some indifferent next night off the maps of any decent trade route, in a dive where black-hearted men feast on whale steak and grog. There She waits, soft-lit and fragile among the sooty ochres of last year’s annihilations, smoking a long cheroot, listening with moist eyes as the piano man plinks out those lush bittersweet arias of lost love. You see nothing but another black night, an indifferent eternal wash of someone else’s tears -- the God of geologic heavens, that million-year downpour which filled up the seas -- awash on the cruel main of solitary passage: and yet She is everywhere, immanent, rising .... Stare down into those waters of noir long enough and you’ll see something pale and indistinct gather and sharpen in your imagination, clarifying as it rises, quickly assuming the shape of a heart-wide smile, with so many perfect pearlies that you haven’t finished counting the bottom row before the top row has guillotined down, cutting off the surface umbilicus of apparent passage, hurling you ass over teakettle down the stinkypink glottals of Love’s deepest world-shaker, depositing you spluttering and terrified in the reeky gut of consummation, the death of one enterprise, the beginning of another. Everything goes down to it, ship’s timbers split from below, sea filling the keel, spinning it round as it it falls down the maw, masts cracking like sea-biscuits, men screaming in a half dozen argots the less formal names of God, the air overhead a cacaphonous spiral of of sea-birds, camp-followers who up till that very last moment was there to feed on what gets tossed, carcasses of stripped whales, table-scraps, heads and guts of fish caught from on board ... all of that gone, and the birds protest a loss they are now free of, like a jazz combo playing on in the club after closing time, singing the night’s endless combustions into pure notation, riffs and bridges and solos honked and brushed and sung throatily and hoarse, angelic enough despite the steely blue grip of heroin in their fingers, predetermining runs and stops and death come first light.
Because noir is a revenant that shutters down at dawn, end of story, game over: Look out over the sea now, pearly and cerulean, coral and gold where the sun has lifted over the marge like a fat red jewel of fresh desire, the skies racing back to the left end of the spectrum at night’s paling, blues chasing violet up to the high surface of the sky, the night beast taking wing for those black heights, diving once again down the depths of the sea, down where its latest treasure and haul, the Pequod, lies like a bride on a buccaneer’s bed, the final plunder. Ahab’s noir dream comes true from within ... now gone. Just a few gulls hover over the rollers, squawking faint grace notes over the tide’s gleaming offering of shells, farming this next day’s waking enterprise in a graceful, dutiful, right-sized light, making the beach and the foaming ends of each wave gauzy, like the spooled-out ends of dreams, while a few lone early wakers walk in silhouette against in the sun, bluegrey ligatures of what remains, reading their own liturgies, about their own specie of matins. Far out I see the salvage boat, another dark blue shape to contend with, there at the far dazzling end of the rising sun’s gold trail, as if it were the source of all light, not the sun.
