Twilight adaptations

In recent years, the London based artist Paul Elliman has organised a series of evening walks, listening to emergency vehicle sirens, observing foxes, bats and owls, detecting aspects of building security and urban policing, and occasionally spotting unmarked police vehicles. His essay reflects on how diverse features and different creatures of an urban ecology adapt as the city shifts from daylight into night. Or as he writes, things change at the end of the day.

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take
A.R. Ammons, ‘The City Limits’

A police car pulls out of the entrance of an industrial building each evening at sunset, only to run through its signal alerts for a few brief, bright and violently loud moments.

The front strobe headlamps produce a blueish emission spectrum, this makes the red light-bars glow fuchsia pink. The 100-watt siren horn is equipped with wail, yelp, phaser and hi-lo, at around 110-120 decibels. These are familiar sound and colour components of the urban twilight. Around the same time, under more visibly expansive pink skies, it is not uncommon to hear hawks, hunting in their fields, emit a signal cry to startle the prey as they dive. The hawk will use all the options in its toolbox just as a police car does.

The sky colours through shades of pink because the muted beams of sunlight are composed largely of longer wavelengths at the red, orange, and pink end of the spectrum, while the shorter wavelength of blue and violet light is dispersed by molecules breaking up in the atmosphere. On cloudless mornings and evenings there is no backdrop for coloured light to reflect from.

The police car is part of a shared ecology in which patterns of human behaviour can be compared with early evening fly-outs of predatory owls and bats.

Twilight is the period of time before sunrise and after sunset, in which the atmosphere is partially illuminated by the sun, being neither totally dark or completely lit. More specifically there are three phases of twilight, nautical, astronomical, and civil, defined by how far the sun is below the horizon. During the nautical phase the brighter stars are usually visible, making it possible to navigate at sea. Astronomical twilight is the darkest of the phases, at the earliest stage of dawn and the final stage of dusk in the evening. Civil twilight, the brightest phase, is when the Sun is just below the horizon, providing enough natural light to carry out most outdoor activities.

Twilight also describes an area where two different states of existence meet, as in the twilight zone between life and death. In this more euphemistic sense, the use of the term that seems, in the English language, to carry its heaviest implications, is in Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost:

As when the sun new ris’n …
In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds
...
Now came still Evening on, and Twilight gray
Had in her sober Liverie all things clad

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The secretive Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa was clearly interested in the changes that slowly start to occur at certain hours of the sun. Here he describes the strange atmosphere of a Civil twilight one afternoon in Lisbon, ‘Yesterday I left the office at four, I had to take care of some business and by five o’clock I was done with it. I’m not used to being out on the streets at that hour, and I found that I was in a different city. The soft light on the usual facades was uselessly tranquil, and the usual pedestrians passed by in the city next to me like sailors who’d disembarked from last night’s ship.’

As a receptacle of human desires and fears, the nocturnal world awakens contradictory feelings of desire, and fascination, intimidation, and fear.

A description of the following phase of twilight, 'The Light between Twilight and Dusk', is well known in a US legal context as the title of an academic paper written, in 1988, by American lawyer Jodie English. The paper discusses the enactment of the Insanity Defence Reform Act of 1984, when sweeping legal changes were introduced to diminish the option of federal insanity defence. Before the new changes, federal courts provided grounds for clearing alleged criminal behaviour for offenders who suffered from either volitional or cognitive impairments. The insanity defence of would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley, Jr., provided the Republican led impetus for legislation that restricts the availability of the insanity defence to defendants in a federal criminal trial. During the passing of the act by Congress in 1984, a statement against the so-called reform quoted from Herman Melville’s final novel, Billy Budd. When the sailor is hung for striking and accidentally killing his false accuser, Master-at-arms John Claggart, Melville writes of his own fictional character ‘who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends, and the orange tint begins? Distinctly, we see the differences of the colours, but where exactly does the first one blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.’

That line also covers the twilight spectra so well, varying, without steps, across a continuum.

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The police car is part of a shared ecology in which patterns of human behaviour can be compared with early evening fly-outs of predatory owls and bats. Or the bloom of a vespertine flower that opens so briefly and only in the evening. Vespertine instincts, a special category of the crepuscular, occur at dusk rather than at dawn or in full darkness, as many creatures, humans included, adjust to the changing light and atmosphere.

The installation of street lighting in Paris in 1667 under Louis XIV, introduced an extended urban twilight that would become common place in all the major cities of Europe by 1700.

Adaptive features of animal behaviour are mainly a response to selection pressures, anything that limits or improves reproductive success. High predatory activity or reduced foraging areas can result in changes of behaviour. Human activity can also be a major complication for non-human animals. This is more predominant in the daytime, and larger animals – the foxes come at night – will often adapt to crepuscular schedules. They could become matutinal, which refers to early morning activity, before sunrise; or vespertine, which is after sunset. Research shows this kind of adaptation rarely happens to the same species in places with minimal human activity. The main goal is to avoid the activity of any diurnal (daytime) predator, so a nocturnal schedule is safer. But dawn or dusk schedules have more advantages simply because of more light. Comparable forms of adaptation, moving for work, for example, or doing it at night, occur in humans. In his book Nights in the Big City, cultural historian Joachim Schlör explores the history and implications of street lighting, which extended the social life of humans by introducing an artificial twilight. But illuminating the cities at night has brought anthropogenic change that, while advantageous to humans, causes havoc to other inhabitants of a crepuscular urban world.

As a receptacle of human desires and fears, the nocturnal world awakens contradictory feelings of desire, and fascination, intimidation, and fear. The city at night, characterised by bars and streets lively with people, is a celebration of pleasure and entertainment. But it can suddenly give way to a more apprehensive atmosphere of loneliness, dark corners and sinister doorways. Twilight, a time of disappearances and reappearances, brings its own hierarchy of dimensions, a different contact with matter in the shadows and sounds, the dark sky and brighter lights of the city at night. Changes that are felt through the sensorium of all creatures and things.

The intention of some 17th century ‘improvements’ in Paris was to transform the urban landscape into a police tool.

Fascination and terror may cover two inseparably linked sides of the night, but twilight and its adaptations are more subtle. As East German poet Gunter Kunert once commented: ‘At the approach of darkness something strange and extraordinary happens to a city which cannot be exhaustively explained by such cursory formulations’. Kunert could also take a more generally sardonic view of duality. Observing life in his former Communist country under the eye of the dreaded state police, he famously described the Stasi as ‘all-knowing and at the same time thick as two planks.’ (Gunter Kunert, ‘Nachtblick’, 1986)

The installation of street lighting in Paris in 1667 by the ‘council for the reform of the policing of the city’ under Louis XIV, introduced an extended urban twilight that would become common place in all the major cities of Europe by 1700. In nineteenth-century Paris, under instructions from Emperor Napoleon III, Georges-Eugene Haussmann introduced a series of urban ‘improvements.’ It resulted in the demolition of entire neighbourhoods, the erasure of whole streets from the centre of the city out, to be replaced by the wide tree-lined boulevards that Paris is known for today. It was not motivated by aesthetics but was explicitly a police project – streets too wide to barricade, back alleys no longer offering an escape route, and light all through the night. The intention was to transform the urban landscape into a police tool. In fact, human adaptations to the artificially lit night would instrumentalise its modern features even more ingeniously for criminally minded activity.

In Detroit I learned a local version of ‘war dialling’ – driving around looking for data on wireless networks; then unlocking a car door and starting the vehicle with your phone.

In Detroit I learned a local version of ‘war dialling’. A form of hacking connected historically to below-the-radar urban communication relays, like the mythical whistling gangs of 19th century East London where I live. Also known as ‘war texting’ and ‘war driving’ – driving around looking for data on wireless networks; then unlocking a car door and starting the vehicle with your phone. But this Detroit version of ‘war driving’ required no advanced computer knowledge. Only a car and a pulsing sub-woofer – a sound somewhere between the body, the social and anti-social life of a city, and music. Both noise and signal at the same time, the powerful low frequency sine wave of the bass can set off car alarms and lights along the street, allowing the driver and passengers to note the un-alarmed vehicles for future reference, later the same night, when they come back and steal the car, which mainly requires only the friendly introduction of a screwdriver to a starter motor. I made and contributed a subwoofed version of the Alliyah song ‘(You’ve got that thing) I like’ to the war-diallers.

The activity appealed to me as a kind of urban phenology rather than criminal activity. The term phenology refers to an awareness of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena. It covers aspects of human sensitivity to the world around us that might seem to have been more prominent in pre-industrial times; an agrarian world when days were marked by natural light, and people lived off the land. Our phenological instinct clearly survives, an urban phenology still characterised by the perceptive awareness of fleeting appearances – changing modes of behaviour, speech, ways of dressing, the ability to identify brands at a brief glance. Phenology is also active in another vital and dramatic way closer to its earlier uses, in relation to climate change and concerns for plant and animal life. In a novel by Ruth Rendell, The Keys to the Street (1996), a homeless character named Roman knows his way around Northwest London by instinct. A rough sleeper, he has no watch but can tell the time by the stages of the light, the sounds of traffic and the movements of people.

I’m often curious about the past sounds of the city. In Nights in the Big City, Schlör describes the cries, whistles, and horns of the night watch at a time just prior to our so-called modernity of lighting and later emergency sirens. 'Nocturnal security is guaranteed by the patrols sent out by the military guard and the civilian night-watch. ... The night-watchmen have blue uniforms and are armed with a long staff. A whistle serves to announce the hours and a horn the outbreak of fire. They are responsible for nocturnal peace on the streets, the closing of buildings etc., and for watching over the public peace. And now one light after another goes out, the walls darken, the black shadows loom out shapelessly… Around the corner sounds the night-watchman’s horn, his night-song competing in its discord with the howling of cats that grows loud on the steep-sloping roofs.'

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As I write this the civil twilight of dawn is occurring between 05:32 and 06:08. The weather is overcast and the light slowly brightening, all is quiet and grey as the twilight passes.

From a few streets away I can hear an ambulance siren, I know the pattern of its cry, a rising wail, a version of the older air raid sirens.

In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram describes a deeply participatory relation to the world around us, a felt reciprocity to the earth, sometimes concealed behind our literate abstractions. Using forms of sensory awareness we listen with our ears, touch with our skin, see with our eyes and smell with our noses just like other creatures. The sensing body, says Abram, is an ‘open circuit that completes itself in the things of the world around it.’ From a few streets away I can hear an ambulance siren, I know the pattern of its cry, a rising wail, a version of the older air raid sirens, switching to a faster pulse of yelps, a whooping vow-vow-vow cry as it moves away.

As many others acknowledge, our notion of language is entirely anthropocentric – in one sense is it even language unless all things and creatures can participate in it? And in a more democratic sense, surely the signal implication of anything is language. The signs that a creature must follow to ensure its survival. The siren of an emergency vehicle. The signals of a firefly.