Another Darkness. Another Light.

“So. Here I am. At the line between dark and light.”

– opening lines of The Terminator, Laurence Suhner, Swiss science-fiction novelist and author of the QuanTika trilogy.

I feel very much like the unnamed protagonist in this short tale, as she explores both inner and outer space on Nuwa, in the TRAPPIST-le system, one of the destinations for humanity’s long extrasolar exile. 

My tale, or this blog, is also a play on this line known as the Terminator line. Simply put, it’s the line that separates day and night, also referred to as the “grey line” and the “twilight zone”. It is more curve than light, and its shape changes with the seasons. Equinoxes, solstices are all influenced by the bends and turns of this curve. And the terminator passes through most locations on Earth twice a day, for a sunrise and a sunset, except near the poles. The rotation of the Earth along its axis, an imaginary line tracing the tilt of 23.5 degrees relative to its orbit around the sun, changes seasonally which changes the path of this moving line.

The Moon has a terminator too, and when we see it half in light and half in darkness, we are seeing the line going right down the middle of the Moon. And unlike the fuzziness of our terminator—due to our atmosphere—it is sharp and distinct.

In Orbital, the stunning 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel, Samantha Harvey writes about astronauts on the International Space Station reflecting on Earth, using this astronomical feature of the terminator line and the moving boundary between day and night on the planet. The astronauts constantly cross this line as they travel, providing a literal and metaphorical partition, and the scaffolding for their own thoughts and conversations in the confines of the station. 

She writes, “There are times when the rapidity of this passage across the earth is enough to exhaust and bewilder. You leave one continent and are at the next within quarter of an hour, and it’s hard sometimes to shake the sense of that vanished continent, it sits on your back, all the life that happens there which came and went…It’s only at night when you sleep that you’re relieved of this perpetual treadmill…And even when you sleep you feel the earth turning, just as you feel a person lying next to you. You feel it there…You feel all the fizzing stars and the moods of the oceans and the lurch of the light through your skin, and if the earth were to pause for a second on its orbit, you’d wake with a start knowing something was wrong.”

Why does all of this matter? Well, it matters to me because we are in a significant ‘changing of the season’ for our magazine Dark ‘n’ Light and the terminator-curvy-line-thing describes a lot of what I am feeling now. What started off four and a half years ago in May 2021 and has rapidly passed by many sunrises and sunsets later is now withdrawing into the shadows, into a twilight zone of sorts, which feels Hitchcockian and apt. The reasons are many and while it has been a wild, joyful ride, it has also come with its own burdens, limitations and struggles. And this year in particular has been a harsh one for us all in the team with illness, loss and grief casting long shadows over us.

So winter is coming, and we all need to bundle up for some rest and hibernation. In a book I re-read over and over again, Wintering, Katherine May writes, “There is not enough night left for us. We have lost our true instincts for darkness and its invitation to spend some time in the proximity of our dreams.” “Sleep”, she writes, “is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness—one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights.” For me, for our team, we will go into this dark cocoon, this well-earned sleep, this borderland, for some radical rest and restoration and open ourselves, I hope, to some new dreaming and maybe even some new scheming, if that is where it leads. And if nothing else, we will drink some hot cocoa, read good or even bad books (I do know my team and myself well) and continue to be good friends. For me, that friendship matters most of all.

A true solar gift, the Terminator and this planetary movement around the sun that gives us not just our sunrises and sunsets, our seasons and our circadian rhythms, also gives us our stories. Gatherings by the fire may have actually ignited the embers of culture and society. It was with the coming of dusk, the lighting of a fire, and under the light from the moon and the stars, that imagination and storytelling were born. Tales—natural, unnatural, and supernatural, all came from these embers. With the colonisation of the night, and our electrified lives and increasing electronic devices, we are unfortunately constantly bathed in light, it consumes us and destroys much in its blinding wake. 

But as Stephen King writes in Firestarter, “The world, although well lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.” And our magazine is in one of these odd dark corners. A few have found us. Many have worked and played with us. And this ancestral gift of storytelling passes on, an infinite relay of wild imagination, funny outbursts, esoteric wanderings and zany art. 

Part of this relay is also to come back down to earth. While this view from outer space and from the realms of our imagination should inspire us and help create something magical, we need to remember the ground, our only home, Earth. It was pictures taken of the Earth in the 1960s during the Apollo missions that led author and researcher Frank White to coin the phrase “the overview effect”. Alexa Firmenich in From orbit to intimacy: Beyond the overview effect, writes that “This refers to the significant cognitive shifts and experiences of self-transcendence, expanded identities, and profound awe reported by astronauts upon their return from space.”

Firmenich moves on to describe what she views as the new image that has the power to change us and powerfully notes, “It is not the embodied language of metrics, markets or guilt”, but the “lifeworlding effect”. People all around are placing themselves in the lifeworlds of other beings and as she puts it, “experiencing the persuasiveness of stunningly unique, complex, nuanced, and intelligent minds and personalities.” I find this so uplifting and persuasive as many of our own entanglements in this magazine have been both otherworldly, another-worldly and more-than-human worldly. As Jim Morrison of The Doors sang, “Day divides the night, night divides the day. Break on through to the other side.” Through re-inhabitation, coming to understand the interests of Earth’s diverse intelligences, we might be able to break on through to the other side. So maybe this is our new Terminator line, where we find new relational boundaries, moving through the dark and light within us all no longer at a remove from Earth.

The words “terminator”, “terminus” and “terminal” all derive from the Latin terminaire meaning “to limit or bound” and it feels good to have agreed together on this terminus for now, a station at the end of a glorious and sometimes fraught trip as all good trips are. With this journey ending, other journeys begin. 

I will close with T.S Eliot from Burnt Norton, where he evokes the ‘still point of the turning world’. This excerpt from the poem somehow just felt right for this moment:

“Except for the point, the still point, / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. / I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. / And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.”