It’s called transverse orientation, navigation at night by keeping a fixed angle of orientation to a distant light source. In the natural world, salient nighttime light sources are invariably celestial and indeed distant, the moon, Venus or Jupiter, the waxing or waning glow on the horizon that precedes and follows the sun. The trigonometry changes dramatically with luminescence from a nearby terrestrial source, a streetlight, a porchlight, a campfire, and the resulting path of travel becomes an inescapable circular vortex, a nocturnal Charybdis. Moths aren’t attracted to light from the window, they are just unable to fly away from it because all plottable courses lead them right back to where they started.
I was visiting a cousin who lives in a corner apartment on an upper floor of a high-rise condominium in downtown Seattle. The view in both directions was heavy and angular. The iconic space needle, just a few blocks away, loomed from behind a cluster of buildings outside the window on one side, and on the other was the Sound, with docked container ships dwarfed by massive oil tankers resting just offshore. Objects in the distance were attenuated into vague impressions of themselves by the late afternoon fog. People pay a premium for this, for a private voyeuristic viewing platform, for a climate-controlled glass box from which to gaze at leisure upon an aerial pie slice of death and concrete.
Transverse orientation. People aren’t drawn to the city so much as they become trapped by their own navigational trigonometry, caught in a vortex created by the city’s consumptive commotion, failing to recognize its source of luminescence is the spark of life being violently extinguished; its siren’s song, a fading scream; its beguiling pulse, a death rattle. All plottable courses lead them right back to where they started.
