Edward Hopper⁣ Nighthawks ⁣1942 ⁣⁣“Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by “a restaurant on New York's Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet,” but the image—with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative—has a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of twentieth-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. Hopper's understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing on simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. (The red-haired woman was actually modeled by the artist's wife, Jo.) Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.””

 

On October 28th, 1995, while documenting atmospheric light anomalies near Lake Baikal in Siberia, our research team captured something we were never prepared for. Just before 3:00 AM, a brilliant inverted cone of light appeared in the sky, stretching down from a golden craft suspended high above the clouds. The light passed through the summit of a mountain below, illuminating a vertical trail of glowing symbols—each one unfamiliar, shifting like living code.

We stood frozen as the beam intensified, humming softly in frequencies we felt more than heard. Instruments around us malfunctioned. Compass needles spun. Then, just as quickly, the entire display vanished—leaving no trace but a faint warmth in the air and a blank column of static on our recorders.

No one ever explained what we saw. And none of us were ever the same after. What message was being sent that night? And why did it feel like the mountain was answering back?

 

                                                

                                                            

Jeffrey Fisher

When the Moon sleeps

Of what does she dream

Of cows jumping over

Or dancing in her beams?

Where do dreams take her

What places has she been

Has she gone to visit Venus

Or heard the Martians sing?

She's seen the World wide over

From high up in her bed

The loving and the lieing

The living and the dead.

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