What does the sunset mean?
I was going to try and write something starting from the sunset, the cliché that still wraps its arms round my love and desire. Why do those colours make my heart jump like that? Other things that do this to my heart are the words ‘love,’ ‘desire,’ and ‘grief.’ I guess these words are alive in everyone’s life in some way, lingering in the notes app or in the corner of the room or at the end of the street. I’m not saying that those emotions are universal, but that the words are winking at us from everywhere. The sunset lingers and winks too, but it knows where it’s going. The lingering is a seduction, the sun says buy me a drink next time. And from a certain point in recent history onwards, I think, there must not have been one sunset that got away unphotographed. I wonder what day the last undocumented sun went down. My uninformed guess is a Thursday in 2001. Maybe there is an information management service that could help me with this query. Like all good pop songs the banality of the sunset’s lyrics, and the vastness of its resonance, are probably what makes it feel so much. Penelope Umbrico made this point about the sunset, and John Berger said something about song lyrics as little rivers opening out onto a vast sea of meaning, immense elsewhere.
A corner of Quora.com is full of questions concerning the emotions evoked by sunsets. “Why do sunsets evoke emotions?” or “Why do humans enjoy looking at sunsets?” The responses are spiritual, about the beauty of The Creator’s creation, or symbolic, about chapters ending and beginning, or sometimes making claims about how we’ve evolved to feel safe in these specific wavelengths of light, the warm glowing ones, but what about the wavelengths of light emanating from all the machines we can’t pull apart.
A surprising number of questions concern negative emotions, eg “Why does the sunset cause sadness?” or “I live near the sea and I often see the sunset at the beach. I feel very depressed whenever I see the sunset. Do others also feel this way or is it just me?” These are mostly responded to by people advising on how to live a life of positivity.
When I watch the sunset blazing around all these buildings, luxury flats that reflect the warm orange wavelengths of light, I think about telling everyone to get out get out because I’m gonna blow them up, sky pool shattering into luxury shards, I don’t want to hurt anyone I’m just trying to put my twenty four hours to good use.
Through the gates at the end of Heaton Park road with the strange ironwork, went left down the dirt path instead of right down the asphalt one. I’m listening to Songs: Ohia and fall into woods I didn’t know were there, somehow. Golden light, like what Amy and I were swimming in the evening before, pooling through the sparse branches, soft ground. The trees open out around me magnificently, unexpectedly, and centre stage, in the biggest patch of gold, a man stands alone. Outdated hipster dressed as a lumberjack, big beard, plaid shirt and boots, staring into the light, vaping. It is a vape ad, cider ad, car ad or life insurance ad, the vapour backlit bright yellow. Rugged but trendy man has profound wistful moment soaked in glorious evening light as the sun goes down between the trees. I hear the birds over my music, he turns to look at me and I just stare and try to say something I’m not sure what just a dumb wow with my eyes. He turns away, back to his serious moment. He thinks I am just a girl wandering through his scene, but whatever this is we’re in it together. I show him by taking off my headphones as I walk ahead, so Jason Molina’s faint tinny voice registers in his ears too. He doesn’t know this is my third vignette this week. Somewhere along the line I learned to not let the sun go down cos then the credits roll.
The sun going down is a Hollywood ending that happens every day, I watch it over trainline from my grandma’s old room with my feet in the new grey carpet and hear applause. There are two sheets of glass between me and the trees and the people on the platform. Hannah Black said art is the wrong place to bury your dead but I’m wondering would this photograph of Vivien dying in her bed last summer, with the little dark hole where her mouth hangs open, violate community guidelines?
I had in my left pocket this piece of paper. It was glossy on one side, printed yellow through orange through red through to deep purple ombre, I folded it and unfolded it in that space between the layers of denim. And all the while a short paragraph of sunset was being written in Google’s Saskatchewan town, gold cascading down Street View Main Street through the Fas Gas Plus, foreword and afterword both written by winter.
My uncle, leaning back in his chair, drunk, Christmas 2021, declared “I mean it was the moment. There were no other moments.” I was drunk too, I don’t know what he was talking about.
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