Into the Night Life

The words come from the dream section “Into the Night Life” in Black Spring. Its speaker moves through the compressed logic of sleep: the mind as Coney Island, a father at a window with a rusted razor, the request for worms and fishing, and images that recur without submitting to an ordinary plot. Miller copied the passage by hand for this edition, making the shape of every word part of the page.

Everything around that handwriting belongs to Bezalel Schatz’s design. The Morgan Library’s record describes the volume as entirely a serigraph or silkscreen creation except for Miller’s text. Across roughly eighty pages, printed color and abstract forms do not illustrate the dream literally; they provide its rhythm, interruption, and visual pressure.

Miller and Schatz conceived the object at Big Sur and produced it in Berkeley. The colophon limited the sole edition to 800 numbered and signed copies, but the project’s difficult production and storage history meant that only a portion were initially bound. Surviving copies therefore sit as much in rare-book and museum collections as on readers’ shelves.

A handwritten dream monologue taken from Black Spring drifts through night, memory, family, and the restless machinery of the mind. Its most concrete recurring scene places the speaker before his father, who stands by a window with a rusted razor and asks for worms so they can go fishing.

Schatz’s silkscreen forms turn the passage into visual movement. Color fields, transparent leaves, abrupt shapes, and the variable scale of Miller’s script control the pace; the reader handles a sequence of designed surfaces rather than a conventional illustrated chapter.