The Space Before the Twilight and the Dawn
Van Morrison's "When the Leaves Come Falling Down" was one of the two songs Kenny Stabler was listening to as he was dying of complications of colon cancer in July 2015. The other was "Sweet Home Alabama", the state in which Stabler called his home. The All-Pro QB of the Oakland Raiders in the 1970's was a maverick, a super bowl winner and one of the most creative and clutch performers of his time. I was taken with an article paying tribute to Stabler by former teammate, David Humm, "I Got This." Click and read it before scrolling and reading on. If there's no time for that right now, the gist of the tribute is that no matter the predicament, the football situation, the bad luck, when asked about the situation, Kenny would always repond, "I Got This". And he ususally did, responding beautifully to adversity, finding seams in complex defenses, snaking and winning in pressure situations. But please go back and read the article for yourself. You will not be dissapointed.
Being the Van Morrison enthusiast that I have been the last 30 years and the Kenny Stabler fan I was as a young man, I decided to take a closer listen to that song Kenny decided to be one of the two last things he would hear before dying. It must be good, right? Take a listen: When the Leaves Come Falling Down.
It's one of those songs that get better the more you listen to it. Discovering the nuances, the rhythms, the simplicity of the lyrics, flow of the music and instrumentations. There is a refrain in the song, ..."follow me down to the space before the twilight and the dawn" that kept coming back into my thoughts. What is that space? How long is it? How big is it? Dawn and twilight; yep I think I know the difference, but is there a space in between? Let's explore.
According to timeandanddate.com roughly speaking, twilight is the time between dawn and sunrise. This morning I snapped a photo at twilight heading up to Chiquita Ridge to catch the sunrise, or perhaps the twilight. The nice little extra I received is the full or nearly full moon that was rising in the west. Notice the Ladera Ranch Christmas tree in the left center. So this is twilight...pretty sweet.
Anyway, back to the story. Come to find out, there are various layers or stages of both twilight and dawn. Each stage depends on how the angle of the sun is hitting the earth's lower atmosphere below the horizon, lighting up the rest of the sky and the surface of our own earth. It creates the beautiful and lovely times of day in which the earth is neither completly lit or completly dark, creating various times and layers of illumination.
Astronomical dawn is apparently the first phase of dawn the moment when center of the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon. Essentially, below 18 degrees, it's night. At 18 degrees it's astronomical dawn. Above 18 degrees it's phases of twilight; until 18 degrees at which point we have sunrise.
So, the question is: How long is the sun at precisely 18 degrees below the horizon, at astronomical dawn, before twilight? The quick answer according to google is about 4 minutes. It takes about 4 minutes for the earth to spin or rotate one degree. Is this the space between the twilight and the dawn that Van was so eloquently contemplating in the song? Is this considered a somewhat magical or mystical place or space that physically exists? Or perhaps this space exists more metaphorically, philosophically, maybe in our imagination or in a particular state of mind. Maybe this is where Van takes us when he goes Into the Mystic, where "we were born before the wind, oh so younger than the sun." Maybe this is where Kenny Stabler was that July day back in 2015.
The space before the twilight and the dawn? Yea, I got this.