Darkness

My daughters are still very young, but they do not use a nightlight to help them sleep. We have arrived at a point where they have abandoned it, preferring to snuggle gently into the inky blackness of the night. When I awaken to check them, I pick my way carefully to their bedsides, wary of any discarded toys lurking underfoot. The total absence of light means that I reassure myself of their safety by gently touching them rather than through vision.

There aren’t many moments for us modern humans when we are immersed so thoroughly in darkness. Once I pause to allow my senses to work, I often realize that absolute darkness is not really at all. Usually, there is some light mingled into the murk, and given time, my eyes adjust and send distinct pictures to my brain after all.

Just now I looked out the window into my night-darkened yard upon a beautiful arrangement of lawn chairs and bushes made visible by the stars. Painted by the night, the familiar landscape becomes a strange and fantastic scene. At some intuitive level, we know that there is a gift in darkness, a gift in this revisioning of the ordinary into the unfamiliar. We seek this gift from the darkness almost as much as we resist it.

Lately, I have refamiliarized myself with the rhythms of the unlit hours. My normally solid sleep schedule has shattered, perhaps through contact with a new friend, perhaps because I am going through a period of change and growth. I carry a sense inside myself that I am transforming. I awaken two or three times during the night. Between 2 and 3 am, I usually begin to hear the beginning of a piece of writing persistently tugging at the corners of my mind. I know that to try to sleep past that is to delay myself in a miserable limbo of wakefulness. So I arise, and write my way through the darkest hours of the night.

I miss my sleep. But I also appreciate the gift of the quiet, wonderful solitude when the night draws around me and my work. We run from darkness on so many levels. We can provide light at a moment’s touch, and we do without thought. But darkness offers us some things that we can find no other place. It offers us silence, contemplation. It offers us a deeper awareness, below the level of visual input. When I walk quietly through the blackened rooms of my sleeping house, I am freed from being the person I am throughout the day. I sense myself to be spiritual, a ghost gliding from place to place. My other sensations heighten, and I feel the comfort of the soft carpet cushioning my bare feet, of the comfortable air sliding across my skin. I hear the quiet nighttime sounds as a soothing song.

All of us have had our moments where we must journey alone, face to face with our innermost selves, and we must do it in the dark, only carefully picking our way along, and unsure of finding a path in, or finding a path back to the light. This darkness is the one that we flee from most of all. When we click that light switch, or cling to sleep, this is the deeper darkness that we want to chase away. But just as the night offers our eyes a respite from the sun’s brightness, and a different way of seeing, so too does our inner darkness allow us an opportunity to know ourselves from a different perspective. There is a gift in being able to accept the darkness within and to balance it against the light.

Margaret Atwood, that brilliant yet difficult author, commented on darkness in her 2002 book of essays about writing, Negotiating With the Dead: “Possibly…writing has to do with darkness, and a desire, or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light. All writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down…by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.”

Once I took a tour of an old lead mine that plunged deeply, deeply into the earth. At the bottommost point, the wide tunnels opened into a spacious cave which contained an absolutely black, cold lake. There was not even the faintest hint of natural light. Only the lanterns and flashlights of those who explored there. And still people journeyed from miles to dive below the surface of that black lake and to cast some light on its secrets.

That was one of the most psychologically and physically frightening things I’ve ever considered, the terror of that lightless, freezing water waiting below the weight of all the rock pressing above our heads in the stale, motionless air. Just to look at its inky surface crushed my lungs and compressed me. It was a tangible embodiment of symbolically facing the inner unknown, the plumbless depths of the human soul. We hold our breath when we think of the dark, and reach for that light switch.

But still, I am here now. The dark creates these words. The dark creates a space and strength inside.

There are visions worth seeing even without light.


9-26-06