Opening Credits and Theme Music

The light that illuminates the world begins in Los Angeles. Begins in darkness, begins in the mountains, begins in empty landscapes, in doubt and remorse. San Antonio Peak throws shadows upon a city of shadows. There are hints of human insignificance; there are nightmares. But just at the moment of intolerability there’s an eruption of spectra. It’s morning! Morning is hopeful, uncomplicated, and it scales mountaintops, as it scales all things. The light comes from nowhere fathomable, from an apparently eternal reservoir of emanations, radioactivities. Light edging over the mountaintop and across the lakes of the highlands, light across the Angeles National Forest, light rushing across skeins of smog in the California skies. Light on Redlands, light on the planned communities, light on the guy tossing the morning newspaper from a Toyota with a hundred and ninety-three thousand miles on it. Light on the Santa Ana River, on a drunk sleeping tenderly beside its dregs, light on the Santa Ana Mountains, the San Bernardino Mountains, light on the Prado Basin, where a stabbing victim welters in her wounds. Light on East Los Angeles, on gangsters who haven’t slept yet. Light upon the unvisited downtown expanses of Los Angeles. An empty city bus idles at a red light. Light on the La Brea Tar Pits, on the Pleistocene and Holocene residents of the city, light on the system of viaducts coming down from the mountains, from the trickle of the Colorado River, light on the faint traces of the San Andreas fault, light on the cracked and empty sidewalks, light moving faster now, or apparently faster, the Magic Hour of dawn on the tanning-salon faces coming out of endless parties from the night before. Light upon the freeways, light upon tinted windows, light upon limousines. Even the back lots are perfect with it. Cinematographers everywhere are awakened, as if light calls upon them to arise. Light upon the stray dogs and jackrabbits and condors and Mediterranean fruit flies, nestling in the valleys. Light surging toward the beaches now, toward the great and somnolent ocean, light upon lovers, light upon Manhattan Beach, light upon Hermosa Beach, light upon a pair of punk rock kids in leather pants smoking weed beneath the pier at Redondo Beach, light upon sleeping lovers on a beach, light upon all Los Angeles, and then the light beyond Los Angeles, until the city is a memory receding in the progress of morning, just a layer of auburn air and music pulsing from a dream, light upon the waves, faster now, or so it seems, light over surfers, bobbing on the waves, light over the channel islands, and then light in the immensity of the sea, giving up the comfort of the coast.

Light upon the great Pacific, upon the North Central Gyre, circulating clockwise through this immensity, illuminating the strata of the deep from the Aleutian Islands to the West Wind Drift. What was oppressively dark now has a greenish cast with hints of blues and grays: indigo, slate, milori, zinc, Sevres. Light upon the seawater, therefore, and its potassium, manganese, calcium, and chloride, the particulate of eroded rock. Light upon the invisible phytoplankton and all organic material. Light upon sea vegetable, light upon coral reefs, light upon the Pacific gray whale, wending its way south to warmer climes, and light upon other cetaceans, light upon the continental shelf, all the way down to the continental shelf, light upon the Pacific anomaly known as La Niña, for it is the new year of La Niña, with her particular weather madness. Light upon schools of Pacific marine life, light upon sharks, light upon tuna and other harvestibles. Fish are surging toward the surface of the Pacific with the enthusiasm that they have for feeding when it is light. What a beachhead the light makes here across the northwestern edge of the Hawaiian Islands, Kauai, Nihau, then up toward the atoll of Midway, known for its naval battle. Light upon guano deposits and seabirds perched about the buildings housing the permanent naval staff of Midway, a staff numbered year-round at twenty-three. Light is no respecter of the international date line, though any complete account of the instant of morning must include it, light hastening over the international date line. Were an ensign from Midway to travel out a few nautical miles, he would expunge an entire day, he would have one day less in his tour in the Pacific. Somewhere in the helter-skelter of this morning is tomorrow.

Light upon the western Pacific, where the trenches are, where the fish themselves are the light source. Eyes attached to long stalks that glow with some interior phosphorus or radium. Drifting, miles down, in a blissful state, free of man, in the heterogeneity of marine creation. Light upon all these trenches and all these scars and striations of the ocean floor marking the subduction of tectonic plates, where the molten earth bubbles up and makes its presence known in the indigo surface of the ocean. In the trenches, light is hope or fantasy. Light as possibility and as revelation.

Light upon the Volcano Islands of Japan, western Pacific. No more than five miles long, the archipelago, but large enough to entertain the most brutal of battles in the last global war. Twenty-six thousand lost, in aggregate. Light upon the Japanese soldiers still in the caves there, whispering their sutras, drinking condensation from the cave walls, awaiting word from the emperor, unaware of Japanese deflation and the three recessions in the past ten years. Light upon Mount Suribachi and the tattered American flag that once flew there before Iwo Jima was returned to the prefectural government of Tokyo; light upon the dark history and the porous volcanic rock of Iwo Jima, on its sulfur mining and its sugar refineries. There is also the briefest commencement of dawn on the Bonin Islands, another group of volcanic extrusions near the Tropic of Cancer, where, on this day, rosewood is to be harvested, with its streaky purple timber, for fine cabinets. Light upon the monsters of this island retreat, Godzilla, Baragon, et al., whose creation is owing to the nuclear history of the region, light upon the bright flash of the nuclear explosion, for now the rising sun of morning, streaming in the east, is upon the island of Kyushu, southerly in the Japanese archipelago, light upon the great expanses of green of Kyushu, and now dawn upon Nagasaki, where the second of the explosions was detonated, light of dawn reflective of that other light. Light on the island of Kyushu as source for the growth there of tobacco crops and tea leaves, light upon the tip of South Korea, light upon the Yellow Sea, light beginning to make itself felt up and down the peninsula of Korea, upon Inchon and Nampo, the comparatively shallow Yellow Sea, illuminated in viridians, light at the speed of light on an axis of rotation, toward the Chinese coast, toward Shanghai, where there was the tail end of a typhoon just last week.

Light upon the Nanjing Road, traveling westerly, on buildings of British design, light on the four-story French additions to the neighborhood, light on the high-rises that date back just ten years or so, light upon the glass boxes of Chinese capitalism, light upon the suburban areas that have filled in the farmland outside of Shanghai, light upon the factories, where the citizenry is busy this day making fax machines and semiconductors, light upon the railroads heading west, light upon political informers, light upon underground poets of Shanghai, light upon the faithful of China, and light upon the Yangtze, backward up its course, backward through Huize, Yunnan, Sichuan provinces, through the most populated parts of the most populated country, through industrial parks and endless agriculture, through poverty, through thousands of miles along the tributaries of the Yangtze, upward, for the Yangtze flows down from the roof of the world.

Now the light, bittersweet, amber, between the foothills of the Himalayas. Today the clouds have parted long enough that the tips of the Chinese peaks can be seen within the luxury of clouds. From a great distance, from jetliners traveling from Calcutta to Japan, light upon the peaks, first the lesser peaks of the east, on the Chinese border, and then light upon Namcha Barwa and Gurla Mandhata and Everest, light upon the valleys, light nosing into the valleys, light upon the mouths of the Mekong and Ganges, and light upon the monasteries that have yet to be sacked by the Chinese government, monasteries untouched by the secret police, light upon a certain constellation of monks chanting in overtones, blowing on their summoning horns. Light upon the Himalayas, serene, unpredictable, where climbers are embarked with gear and sherpas, light moving westward, over the Karakorum Range, light upon the two pounds of plutonium that someone lost in the mountains here, as yet unlocated, light upon the terrain annexed by the Chinese, and light upon warring factions, light upon Jammu and Kashmir, where Hindus and Muslims have weapons trained on one another, light upon the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, above the tree line, light upon the Kargil region, light upon the Shia Muslims, light upon the Hindus of the Kargil region, light upon Srinagar, Badgam, Puilwama, Muzaffarabad, light upon Poonch, Rajouri, light upon the many tongues, light upon the many ethnicities, light upon the kids roaming in the streets of the cities, throwing rocks at occupying armies, light upon the conscripted young men from Bombay and Calcutta serving in the army in Jammu and Kashmir. Light upon the inductees who just want to get home in one piece, light upon the Kashmiris in the street, the members of Al Mujahid Force, Muslim Mujahideen, Al Barq, Al Jehad Force, Harkat ul Mujahideen, Hizbul Mujahideen. Light upon the Pir Panjal range, where freedom fighters are encamped and well stocked with rocket launchers and submachine guns.

Light upon the Madrassas, in Peshawar, the Madrassas as numberless as the petals on the lotus blossoms of the world. The Madrassas have taken in all the boys, light upon their affection for the game known as football, light upon the game they play this morning in a dirt lot near the Khyber Pass. Light upon the sheer cliff walls of the Khyber Pass, light upon the troops belonging to a military dictator bent upon keeping as many Afghan refugees on the other side of the pass as is possible, light upon fleeing Afghan refugees, light upon men whose beards are of insufficient length. Light upon fugitive barbers. Light upon the Silk Road, where Nestorianism took refuge when driven out of Constantinople. Light upon the afflicted rapists of Afghanistan who are busy, allegedly, defiling the boys of Dehi-i-Haji and Juwain. There are men who follow every wayward devil. Light upon men fleeing into the hills, light upon Tajiks and Uzbeks, and Kurds, and Arabs, light illuminating the plateau of Iran, over the mountains and into the Dasht-e-Lut, where the hills heave up abruptly, sheer, blue, gray. Not a soul to be seen, except these horses and their riders, fleeing. Though the smokestacks of a natural-gas facility are apparent upon the horizon as the light breaks over the desert, even here the conflagration in the east is hallucinatory. There is the sound of Kurdish epic poetry on the breeze; there are imaginary pistachio trees, with their delights. Up ahead on the rocks, an oasis, at least until the advent of further light, when all the riches of Persia appear instead to be part of memory. The sleepers in the desert are weary but cannot wake, and the dawn sweeps westerly over them, further into Mohammed’s country. As far as the eye can see, the prophet and his vision, the dawn is his metaphor. He seeks refuge in the Lord of the rising day. The Lord has no qualities and there are no words with which to name his qualities. Dawn is for all the peoples of Mohammed’s country: Persians, Kurds, Arabs, Palestinians; dawn is for Baghdad, dawn is for Mecca or Medina, or it is for Damascus or for Jerusalem. Here is the dawn, see the sky bespangled with the signs of the zodiac. Here’s the muezzin. Light upon the first cup of tea, light upon the faithful inclining toward prayer, light upon refugees in camps getting up to pray, how long until their knees give out from it, light upon believers, light upon the settlers of the West Bank, light upon them and their weapons and their certainty, light upon all the armed forces who refuse to serve, light upon Jerusalem and Beirut and Cairo, light upon the authors of Torah, light upon Talmudic scholars, all weepers at the Wailing Wall, light upon the remains of the temple at Jerusalem, light upon the Egyptian ruins, light upon the remnants of Mesopotamia, light upon the thousand and one nights, story without end. Dawn is more reliable than conceptions of dawn, so all of this splendor diffuses into the fog at the very shore of the Mediterranean. Weary is the morning, having come so far, weary of toil. Morning is eager to bathe in the sea. All the bathers on the scorched sands see it now, dawn, coming over the buildings, its fingertips brushing across the promontory at Jaffa; four thousand years this promontory of bathers, a million and a half dawns witnessed here, every dawn with a naked body to enumerate its colors.

As if to indicate metamorphosis. Light upon the twin halves of Cyprus, the Turkish half and the Greek half, the middle of the middlemost body of water in the middle of the world, center of the things. Omphalos. Ruins everywhere, ruins of Cyprus, Turkish and Greek. And then ruins in Turkey and ruins in Greece. Light upon the ruins, light upon the ferment of Turkey, and then light upon the islands of the Aegean, light upon Patmos, where Saint John hallucinated his revelation, light upon these allegories and riddles; light upon Rhodes, light upon Lesbos, light upon the islands through which Ulysses circulated, in loneliness and exile, to the very brink of Purgatorio. Light upon Crete, light upon Knossos, the knowledge of the light, the knowledge of the dawn, light upon the Neolithic past there, upon archaeologists with their tiny paintbrushes, creeping down ladders into the sites of their digging, light upon the dynasty of Minos, light upon the Minotaur and the labyrinth, the solution to which is simply to follow the light as it moves through the labyrinth. Light upon the westernmost edge of Crete, the city of Falassarna, light upon the occasional Albanian still trying to make it across the Adriatic on a rubber raft, light upon the Albanians ditching rafts on the coast of Puglia, light upon the beaches at Brindisi and near Bari, light upon the beached rafts of Brindisi, Albanians fleeing inland like the stray cats of Lecce wandering the Roman ruins, light upon the oft-conquered Puglia, and light upon Sicily now, with its light and darkness, its history of blood feud, light upon its hills, and light upon the Tyrrhenian Sea, and thus light upon Rome, all of the light beginning to peek through the streets of Rome, so that light is now visible, beginning to shine upon the Pantheon, that massive structure of such permanence that even a McDonald’s just across the square from it cannot spoil its perfection, light upon St. Peter’s, where the pope is trembling, light upon the Coliseum, light upon the piazzas and their Berninis, light opening its lens wider now, light hurtling up the longitudes, light upon Western Europe and a history founded on light as a mythological tool, light as a separation from night, light upon Milano, Firenze, Venezia, Nice, Monaco, Barcelona, light upon the church in all its incarnations, light upon all the cities of Western Europe and upon those up early to get to work in these cities, light upon those who wake to read the paper, a Parisian at a café, light upon a Spaniard in Pamplona, drinking a Turkish espresso, light upon Madrid, city encircled by fire, light upon Lisbon, and light farther north, in London, light upon the pigeons of Trafalgar, and light upon the pickpockets of Piccadilly Circus, light upon the orderly shops of the Fulham Road, light upon the bobbies and light upon the lorries and the black taxis, light upon the disenchanted royal family. Light upon Belfast, light upon the coils of barbed wire in Belfast, light upon lads scraping themselves up from the paving stones in front of a pub, a bit worried about an ominous van parked in front of that nearby bank, dawn breaking over the opera house, where there is considerable hope for improvement.

Cold and severe dawn falls upon the ocean once again, ricocheting in the play of waves; another ocean, stretching down toward the Falklands, down toward the Cape of Good Hope, this ocean of nuclear submarines whispering along ocean floors, this ocean of imperial vessels, of Erik the Red, of Christopher Columbus, of Leif Eriksson. Light upon the arctic frigidness of the North Atlantic, too, light upon the perpetual north of the North Atlantic, and light upon Iceland, therefore, light upon Mount Hekla, the volcanic peak of Iceland, held for many years to contain the mouth of hell. This time of year, dawn is late; the fishermen of Iceland are well into their tasks. In Reykjavík the prodigious revelers of the city square are just getting up from another binge, heading for thermal baths to try to blunt that sickness; light upon the expanses of volcanic rock between here and Keflavik, light upon the hot springs, the geysers, the black beaches of the south coast, light upon the mouth of hell.

Light upon the open sea, the Winslow Homer green of the North Atlantic, upon the blue whale, the right whale, the songs of North Atlantic whales, light upon the fish coming to the surface, light upon the currents of this well-traveled sea, light upon the circulations of the Gulf Stream, the North Equatorial Current, clockwise, into the light now, these currents, light upon Greenland, the light of the Inuits, the light of the many names for light, light upon the Nunavut territory, upon Baffin Island and Baffin Bay, light upon the coming of winter in the arctic, light upon the very end of the hurricane season, light upon the fishing boats coming back empty-handed from the Grand Banks, light coming down the coast now, where Leif Eriksson landed and turned back, light upon Newfoundland, light upon moose frozen in headlights on the highways of Newfoundland, light upon Cape Breton, light upon Nova Scotia, where the tides are so violent that the coast can come and go seventy feet in an afternoon, light upon Campobello, and light upon Eastport, state of Maine, United States of America.

It’s possible that the sleepers just beginning to wake know nothing beyond Eastport; they have stuff on their mind, there are car payments, there are mortgage payments, there are utilities, there is heat to worry about. It has gotten cold down east already. International concerns are not pressing. On the pier in Eastport, next to that deep water, a pair of teenagers in a pickup, having made out all night, having slept in the truck, hand in hand, are now watching the dawn fretfully. They are going to get yelled at. What a sunrise. The crimson sun beginning to dash itself on the islands. Autumn on the coast of the state of Maine, in New England. The light only tarries here for a brief spell. There have been snow flurries. The best autumn colors are in the past. People are getting their boats out of the harbors, up on stilts, in the Casco and Penobscot bays. Light upon the mariners of the eastern seaboard, light upon the mariners from here down the coast, light upon the fishermen of Kittery and Portsmouth and Newburyport, light upon Provincetown. Light upon the scrub pines. Light upon the towns of the Cape, from which the mariners of yore set out to hunt the whale, light upon the mansions of Newport and the designers of sailboats, and light on the lighthouse, for example, of Narragansett Bay, at Point Judith, the lonely lighthouses whose job was once to augur the dawn, light upon surfers of Point Judith, light upon Watch Hill, and then light upon the casinos of Connecticut, and light upon the nuclear submarine base at Groton, and from here dawn has a straight shot down the coast, a straight shot on the interstate clogged with truckers on amphetamines, infernal all the way through New Haven and Bridgeport. These towns are dead, and the light does nothing but show up the rubble. The light shows up their corrupt politicians, their pedophile mayors, their distracted suburbanites; everybody’s just trying to get past the cities of the dead, bent upon the gates of New York City.

How fast does it happen on this particular day? How fast does the sunlight rush westerly, dappling the world? The figure is 1,670 kilometers an hour, or about .23 miles per second, which is the speed of the rotation of the third rock from the sun. Day leaves no latitude behind. Therefore, twenty-four hours have elapsed, or twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes, all of this according to the quantum theory of light, as described by Feynman. Suddenly there is the behavior of sunrise on waves, like the light over the Whitestone Bridge, where commuters are trying to get a jump on rush-hour traffic heading in on the Van Wyck, past the airports, the dawn on their left. You can see morning from the bridge. Light upon the Empire State Building, light upon the Chrysler Building, light upon the World Trade Center. Light upon those gruff, show-offy digits. Light upon Shea Stadium, site of the recent Subway Series. Light upon LaGuardia Airport, the most congested airport in the country, light upon the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, light upon Floral Park, light upon Maspeth, light upon Inwood, light upon the Bronx Zoo, light upon Riverdale, light upon Yankee Stadium, light moving apparently instantaneously from here to the isle of Manhattan, its office buildings still illuminated with emergency fluorescence. Manhattan, New York City, beginning of another day.

New York City, noteworthy for its insomniacs. Light upon all the insomniacs, across this city, metropolis of insomniacs. They are there, in the despair of another night, out on the couch in the living room to avoid waking their husbands or wives, or insomniacs are in the tub, and they are reading, or they are thinking, or the insomniacs are regretting at the instant of the dawn. No one asks how they spend the middle of the night, no one who doesn’t suffer with insomnia wants to know. The insomniacs are the witnesses to the dawn, they are in the tub and looking out on the air shaft, through the one tiny window, where a tiny patch of sky is visible, or they are at the breakfast table, trying to read something so boring that it will put them back to sleep. Every block has insomniacs, and here’s the first light of a day in November breaking over them. A woman whose car is going to be repossessed, a guy who falsified his résumé to get an adjunct teaching position, an artist who cannot make her rent, a dot-com programmer whose company is about to exhaust its financing. The insomniacs! They welcome the day! One of them is about to take the dog out for a walk. One of these insomniacs is listening to the international news to see if the Japanese markets are up. A long, low moan escapes him when the intensity of the decline becomes clear. Whoever it is who made the dawn made it as a gift to these insomniacs, that they wouldn’t feel so alone, that they would have something to do in their apartness, namely watch the celestial display of first light. Some of them do it, some of them go up to the roof just to see the light caroming off the buildings in Jersey City. Even the insomniac will feel some hope at dawn, even the homeless man on the grates in front of the Eye and Ear Hospital may feel a bit of relief, even the guy who hasn’t been out of his apartment in years, even the racially oppressed, even the poor, even the unemployed, even they feel a transitory joy. Even the woman on the ground floor of the brownstone in Park Slope, who yanks back her blindfold, recognizing that she can put off rising no longer, rushes unsteadily from her full-size mattress, and makes a run for it, for the bathroom. A day of dawns. A jubilee. Morning, just after the election, year two thousand.