Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel;
II vient comme un complice, à pas de loup; le ciel
Se ferme lentement comme une grande alcôve,
Et l'homme impatient se change en bête fauve.
Charles Baudelaire, Le Crépuscule du Soir
Behold the charming evening, friend of the criminal;
It comes as an accomplice, a stealthy wolf; the sky
Closes over slowly like a great alcove
And the impatient man turns into a wild beast.
“Entre chien et loup” is a French expression which comes from the mediaeval latin infra horum vespertinam, inter canem et lupum and alludes to the momentary liminality between day and night, when a wolf can easily be mistaken for a dog.
It can also signify the instability of the world and mind - moments of transition, ambivalence, uncertainty. Across cultures, the threshold signals the boundary between the domesticated and the wild, the known and the unknown, and the psychological transformation that occurs when these worlds meet.
In Persian folklore, the wolf’s tail denotes the first light, the false dawn. Ingmar Bergman’s film The Hour of the Wolf describes the pre-dawn moment when nightmares intensify, fears peak, and the boundary between rationality and the irrational thins, yet this is also the time when new life and possibility emerge.
Just as dusk transforms and distorts the landscape, the liminal twilight state of the mind awakens the imagination.
