Birth at Midnight, Death by Dawn: Incandescent in a Rich Black Mist Called Night
“Birth at Midnight, Death by Dawn” portrays my life when I was fallen prey to and became obsessed with the aesthetics of darkness. Living uneasy days after numerous crises in family, career and relationships, I have found myself in a condition called “Weltschmerz” (a combination of German words for ‘World’ and ‘Pain’): a frustration caused by the difference between one’s ideals and reality.
Faced with rejections and frustrations, I have naturally receded into darkness. My state of solitude was just as how Odysseus describes the land of the Cimmerians - the entrance to the underworld:
“The ship took us to the deep, outermost ocean and the land of the Cimmerians, a people shrouded in a mist. The sun never shines there, never climbs the starry night to beam down at them, nor bathes them in the glow of its last golden rays; their wretched sky is always racked with night’s gloom.”
In it, I was reborn and became obsessed with aesthetics of darkness: seclusive, immoderate, eerie, secretive, dark and melancholic. Then by dawn, by its roseate light, I was defeated, stripped of that vitality of night.
