BUT REALLY THAT'S OK.
Clara Wildberger, 2016
FROM OUT OF NIGHT
Darko Vukić
What lives long is not what lasts, but what lingers. Of Night—all compiled fine-print captures, these raw, authentic glimpses, are eventually ceased in silence. So now, I attempt to re-encounter them, not through explanation, but rather in their mute, raster, or bright condensation—like something you almost remember but choose not to. I will not seek to establish any deliberate point of contact, no narrative arc; such a gesture would betray the fragile expectancy of the known and the given. Instead, I consider that closeness, though it brings itself together, truly gathers itself from apart, haunting more thoroughly without origin or conclusion.
Familiarity—a referential toponym flattening high hopes and deeper expectations—exalts instantly through a sudden, unbidden sight of belonging. Yet this belonging feels like stumbling upon a home movie from a life not yours, faintly recognizable, conjuring a haunted quiet. To belong is perhaps to already overcome one’s own statual past, returning, as nocturnal time does, only to be met by a retaliated, narratively deafening medium—a persistent refusal to resolve, favoring the long, slow drift of impressions that never quite harden. Is any night potentially a life-spanned highlight, or does its underlying confinement render its quiet atonality into a sort of disappointment, or revolt—a stoicism in reverse, a softness that isn’t flaw but resistance?
White noise in this radio silence—absurd conformism, an existential affirmation of nihilistic youth adrift in mist, or the spectral hum of a dying transmission carrying more feeling than message? If, in a night, nothing much happens, maybe—perhaps—it is for nothing, and therefore ok. A scattered melancholy settles, the kind that doesn’t sting. Or it is a self-ignited influx, a zone slipped between time signatures, where looking at the past is not an enemy but part of the atmospheric weather.
For someone who hopes much, stretching the lux of expectancy in some internal, tribal grimoire far beyond life’s immediate reach, night unfolds as an endless, dispersed scenery of vast mundanity. A certain vagueness of essence, existence, of life itself. The night of your life—maybe it is like any other. But this tonight, or that night… it is ok, even if it is just like any other ordinary stretch of dusk when nothing urgent demands to be done. The life of this specific night, at least, feels valid in its beingness—that is to be. And maybe, just because it is not the ‘right’ night, the spectacular one, it becomes a night truly to be, present and unfinished.
In the final nights on the streets, at quiet parties behind condensation-streaked windows, amid deserted zones of dust where light feels like an afterthought—the night out, or the moment when someone leaves the silence of another’s diminished space—everything seems ordinary, yet not quite. There are those puritan nights, naked and unburdened, when neither the when of life nor the when of night seem to intersect. Deterministically bare—bare as night, stripped of meaning and gloss, holding only time—but nothing explicit is revealed. Night is precisely this: the vacuum of explicitness, the elsewhere within the now. A fog inhaled, sensed through touch.
Still:
To walk through such a night, one must sometimes see the ground shimmer, its uncertain plane folding under the soles. Music, too, can hurt a little in these moments. I adore notes, I’ll run paces just to hear one from an unknown house, ready to die on the spot, yet knowing it’s impossible. Notes stab too softly. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. It’s a tender caress that doesn’t ask for touch, just permission to arrive, finding you where it happens to. And even when listening, maybe especially then, something’s missing. A friendly sadness. If you listen close, tuning into this low-frequency longing, there are leylines in the reverb of silence, the soft hallucination of things that did not happen but pressed a dent in the air. The quiet tonality of moments held in suspension.
The transitional angst of young selves, perhaps, becomes the ultimate patri-format of ageism—unrepressed yet emerging, strangely inspiring—where a familiar dread transforms into a blissful, speculative fluff. A sense of night prone to a paradoxical stasis, a twilight inertia that unfolds. Ask me about anything else, but the night of your life—tonight—remains. The night is out there, elusive, stubbornly out of reach. And who knows—perhaps, eventually, there will simply be nothing more to it than its own quiet passage. At its core, maybe everything is blank, a screen awaiting projection. At night, everything lingers between.
In this scenario, this seeming lost cause for hope, the futile futurity of a night not chosen, not amplified, might just as well be the very night of our lives. We may like it, or we probably wouldn’t notice enough to form an opinion, which is ok. Because beyond all virtues and all vices lies a trembling obscureness, the absurd cascading of memory cliffs like unstable reels, and the lapsing narrative flares—the pause, the flash—of our immediate surroundings.
Don’t hesitate—a memory sometimes bursts like a propelled membrane, popping and scattering into a thousand spectral petals, only to reverse, collapsing back into a single point from which to zoom out—is a form that is from its-Out. Another century dreams inside this sequence. Touched, they might emit sounds like insects mid-hallucination, crystallised language from a lithic unconscious. Maybe someone has already left the room, or never entered. Maybe the night is the room. A journey into, not to. And the exit is not required, perhaps not even possible.
What if you found yourself again—not where you were, not where you thought you’d end up, but simply, profoundly, in between?
9.4.2025 Vienna