Illustration: Tatyana Apraksina, Hot White Night. Oil on Canvas, 1988. 28 x 25 in.

This song appeared just after Tatyana Apraksina and I returned from St. Petersburg in May 2022, leaving behind another lengthening of the White Nights into what many consider the city's most beautiful season of the year. As the White Nights approach, St. Petersburg evenings take on a spectral quality, as if the lingering light were rendering the city slightly transparent, mysteriously purified, ready to reveal new layers of inner content, disclosing formerly clandestine plans. Walking in the city toward what would have recently been twilight, but with broad daylight now continuing, I marveled at the spectacle of ethereal sunbeams on the facades of familiar buildings, whose essential strangeness now stood open for all to see. The people on the streets seemed similarly strange, as if moving with an unfathomably different calibration, channeled from their afterlives or hidden present fates. So these were the buildings we actually inhabited, the people we actually moved among, the lives we actually lived…

Sorry, as always, to depart for a time, I tried to have faith that the city's soul would be in good hands — including its namesake's — and that the light's ascent would reach its apex in ways that would work changes for the better, including in our own lives, even if we wouldn't be around to glimpse these changes quite yet.

The shadow of conflict beyond the horizon also occupied my thoughts, juxtaposed with the decorations hung along major streets to commemorate the May 9 Victory Day anniversary. If the current war continued to escalate or turned into a civil war, as some thought it might, I wondered whether even St. Petersburg could be a scene of military action, as during the Russian Revolution or the Siege of Leningrad, or as was planned as a Cold War contingency. As part of sublimating any tendency toward such considerations, which could feel alternately realistic or naive at any given time as the populace around me apparently continued to enjoy their lives as much as possible, I tried to recognize that in fact the Battle of Petersburg, Tatyana's and my Petersburg, had already begun and had been under way for ages already, in the form of a struggle between good and evil, for meaning against meaninglessness, for substance against the void, for mattering at all the scheme of things, versus obliteration by the dominant global narratives of the day. That is the battle sung of in this song, like an unconventional counterpart to America's Battle Hymn of the Republic, in this case purified of predicates in imperialism — simply acknowledging that "His truth is marching on," and expressing solidarity with this march, joining it however we can.

Just before we left our place in St. Petersburg for the airport, with various chores necessitating our forays to and fro across our building's foyer and courtyard, Tatyana and I spotted two youngish men with odd, glassy-eyed gazes, who appeared not to notice anything around them. They both held cans of spray paint, with which they proceeded to scrawl inscrutable jargon and symbols on the elevator cage, on the wall adjoining our editorial office, and in other spots up the stairs, out of our sight. They acted with great certainty, speed and coordination, with an air of conviction in the virtue of their mission — to stamp this space with a veneer of ugliness and chaos, as a form of protest corresponding with their understanding of the state of the outer world — and it was clear that they wouldn't think twice about doing harm to anyone who might interfere with their show of anarchy. Whether they were under other influences beyond those of activism was hard to say. They were sober-minded enough, however, to photograph their handiwork carefully, perhaps immediately posting these documents for others to admire. The street levels of the beautiful exteriors of many nearby buildings are covered with similar graffiti, but this was a deeper penetration by the phenomenon than we'd encountered before. With little time to assess what we were witnessing, Tatyana and I said nothing to the men. When I saw them one last time in passing through the courtyard as they left the premises, having deemed their job done, they looked at me haughtily, as if daring me to react. I wondered what they might make of the acknowledge that I was from America. Might they have assumed I would support them? Whatever the case, any interaction seemed repugnant. I felt violated but glad to be unscathed, and I carried that feeling with me as Tatyana and I headed out to catch our flight.

During our takeoff, bound for San Francisco via Istanbul that first COVID and then wartime had found us taking regularly, I looked out the plane window and saw the full moon shining down on St. Petersburg's jewel-like lattice of lights. This vision felt like a continuation of being in the city, like an initiation into a heavenly manifestation that could be equally accessible anywhere. Leaving for a time could be, as it always was, a means of beholding the familiar from a different side, a means of showing faith that whatever we are given never truly belongs to us anyway and should be offered up by us regularly to be taken away again and received anew as many times as may be necessary for its purpose in our lives to bear fruit.

We arrived in Istanbul at dawn, approaching that city just as the first sliver of a huge orange sun broke free from the eastern horizon over the Black Sea. This sun looked very powerful, wise, old and local — the same sun as might have risen over Byzantine Armies battling the Turks long ago. Was this the sun or war or peace, the sun of diplomacy, attrition or apocalypse? Maybe all of that in one. I carried that image back with me to California as well.

When Tatyana and I returned to our base in the Santa Lucia Mountains, one of my first acts was to check our one little orange tree. On that tree, I discovered ripe fruit waiting for us. Somehow the Constantinople sun and that orange fused into a single image in my mind, along with the flame of a Paschal candle we'd kept standing since the recent Easter and resumed burning upon our return. Observing the gradual dissolution of the figure of a lamb emblazoned in relief near the pillar's summit, I thought about the flame of the sun rising over Petersburg and encompassing the whole Earth, illuminating and accompanying the metamorphosis of the visible and invisible, and instructing each life in paths to greater victory.