I waited until evening to come to the cemetery today because I wanted to see it at night. I brought Stephen with me because I thought I'd be too afraid walking around by myself. The path to the clearing was dark, darker than I anticipated. There are no streetlamps or other lights in the cemetery.
In the darkness the landscape is pared down to shapes and silhouettes - white tombstones and black trees. The trees seem quiet and still as we pass, like they're holding their breath, but not in a menacing way. In contrast to my experience here at dusk a few weeks ago, the cemetery grounds feel completely safe. They also feel completely empty, at least of people. We don't see one single human. We do see several deer. The first one bounds up a hillside amongst graves and the second, with two slender single-pointed horns, stands stock still a few feet from the road. He seems to believe his motionlessness confers invisibility and maintains it perfectly even when we approach. I'm surprised at how calm and benign the cemetery feels tonight. Perhaps it's because of the unseasonably warm weather - in the sixties on a November evening.
The clearing is even darker than the road. I think I know this place so well now that I'm more aware of what I can't see. The sky is an expanse of uninterrupted cloud cover that seems to hold the light of the city and reflect it back amplified. In the day this sky would probably be flat Pittsburgh white, but by night it glows soft lilac, brighter near the horizon. From inside the clearing I feel encircled by bare trees, their delicate black script written from the ground into the dome of the sky, thinning as it ascends.
The sound of the wind through the trees is different now than it was before the leaves fell. Now it is crisper, smoother, more direct. It catches branches in its grip but doesn't hold on for long. Over the summer the wind roared through the trees, catching each individual leaf and shaking the heavy green limbs. I know that it will change again as winter deepens, growing harsher and raspier and more rattling, but tonight it feels warm and gentle.
The darkness makes the clearing monochromatic and until I take a flash picture I forget all about the colors. Looking at the picture is strange and disorienting and the colors don't seem real. It reminds me of watching an old movie that's been colorized: everything in the foreground is too saturated and the background is still in black-and-white. The color pictures don't represent what the landscape looks like so I will use black-and-white photos to approximate it. When I try to take close-ups, the flash hits the objects and makes them stand out white against a black background, resulting in an image that is the reverse of what it actually looks like.
The piles of dirt lose their sense of scale as I look at them in the dim light. They start to look like mountain ranges and gigantic hills. Seeing them this way makes me wish I had a flashlight so that I could examine them more closely, and makes me wonder why I've never looked closely at them before. I haven't gotten close enough to see what kinds of insects live in them or what kind of plants grow on top of them. One dirt pile near the marble slab collection hasn't changed at all since I've been coming here. The grasses growing out of it suggest that it hasn't been disturbed in a while. A few weeks ago I talked to some people that work in the cemetery's administrative office and they said that some of the old gravestones piled in this clearing have been here for decades. They don't know if they'll ever use them for anything but they keep them here just in case.
What a great idea to go at night, and to not be afraid! You are really articulating a fine intimacy with this place. And again, such lovely photos. Teake and I drove through the cemetery the other night and aI thought of you, told him of your project. The cemetery will be always connected with your project in my mind.
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