Sunrise? (Tokyo)
I’m singing off on Sunrise Report.
I started getting sick of the sight of the word about a month ago and cursed myself for choosing such a lame framing device for my blog. As it turns out some things shouldn’t be written about, or explicated, too much. I guess sunrise and sunset are just one of those things. I was reading someone else’s writing – nature writing – and they were describing the sky. I read with horror as I realised, why on earth would you describe the sky? With words? Like using match sticks to illustrate a couple’s dance. It’s bizarre. Still I understand where I was coming from. When reading a body of work I want an intimation of a grand design. As a reader I like sequence, and repetition; it creates the illusion of order, and progression. It’s erotic too, the delicate expectation of, expectation. Of course I’m productive so I want to feel like I’m getting somewhere – and I’m vulnerable too, so I want to know I’m in the hands of someone whose considered my attention span.
I will continue to write Sunrise Reports and I hope more people will send them in but mostly they’ll function as inspirations to encourage the writings (and holdings) of friends; to connect with strangers online; to get myself to make random pilgrimages to higher places in the near-death of night.
So, I’m ready to admit it: writing about sunrise just isn’t that cool. Strangely it’s not about getting up early because sunset isn’t that cool either. When did they become so uncool? Who did this? Has it always been that way? What did the beat poets have to say? They simply called it dusk, or dawn, for sure. One problem perhaps is that it lends itself to trashy aesthetics like tie dye and ombré phone cases; is part of the stigma then just down to the presence of the gradient? That’s so unfair. Also because it’s kind of religious. It’s one of the easiest ways I can think of being “religious” without actually being, religious:
I can’t get over the fact it’s been claimed by the uncool though. Are we really going to stand around and let them have it? Maybe it’s just out of trend? Will it make a come back? I hope not. Getting up in the dark to watch sunrise is a private thing and god forbid it starts getting packed. Of course the real problem here is that no decent human can talk about watching the sunrise because at its heart it’s a completely fake concept. As you know the earth is spinning and either obscuring or bringing the sun into view. The fault then is in the name. The cool crowd are intelligent too. What about gleaning the earth tip or catching the ball rolling? You say hey I’m going to catch those moments where the spinning of earth is discernible and if this is England you’ve got a few extra minutes to explain what you mean because relatively speaking sunrise here happens slow. At least in comparison to Brazil where the earth spins at its fastest of 1675km/hour — it’s not just the cocaine. Remember: the further away from the equator, the slower the spin, the slower the sunrise, kids. So that’s one problem with watching the sunrise, it’s at its core accidentally earth-centric — or at least it is in the English language. All the funnier because it aspires towards an increased awareness of our position in the universe — yes the aliens have been laughing at us. We inherited the phrase from the Middle English “sonne-rys” when that’s what we literally thought and then because we love sibilance even when we realised it wasn’t correct we were like, but it’s nice? The s’s? SunSet; SunriSe. A word surgeon once asked me if you flip the S and put it on top of the other one what do you get? You do the non-verbal reasoning. Thank god this is English because there are synonyms. Synonyms for sunrise. The best one originating from Yorkshire ante 1828 with “sparrow-fart”. Ah, the inimitable “sparrow-fart”. Cliché and fast fashion will have a hard time infecting “sparrow-fart”. It also means a person or a thing of no consequence which really takes the pressure off and might be what I re-name this blog.
With love and new found nonchala,
Tili