Darkness

Darkness is shadow. The golden shadow of the incandescent bulb; the stainless shadow of the fluorescent; the quivering shadow of the gaslight (seek it where it lives yet; deep down in the oven, the pilot flame is the last gaslight). The footlight, the searchlight, live to dazzle, are stingy with shadows; but most generous of all is firelight, flicker and blaze, casting long shadows that strut and stride, the shadow players whose performance has never been commanded.

You will read that, for our ancestors, the succession of the long, dark nights of winter, solaced only by the wavering fire, relieved only by brief treks through a twilight world stifled with snow, gave on to a kind of trance, and that it is to the visions of the long winter that all superstitions may be traced. Now, the tropics have their own superstitions, but certainly the mind abhors a vacuum, and where there is nothing to be perceived, something will be imagined. Night by night, they overlaid the everburning stars with bold constellations.

Darkness is night. Morning and evening circle, glooming and gloaming, matutinal rise intersecting crepuscular fall at the liminal coordinate where the spectrum unfolds. Twilight that never ends while the night lights burn: mercurial moonlight over the fields, mercury vapor skyglow over the cities, and the noctilucent auroboros rattling the northern sky, over forests quiet and umbrageous as the shadow lands. The stones under your feet strike triboluminescent sparks. Fireflies constellate with the stars. Far ahead a porchlight shines, generous intent as harborless as a lighthouse.

Darkness is night, darkness is shadow; the one thing darkness is not is the absence of light. The retina is stretched like a drumhead, strung with tense nerves that toll every photon, an inchoate kaleidoscope so sensitive that it need only be pressed behind closed eyes to coruscate with phosphenes like the scintillas of cold light that kindle the eddies of the troubled sea. What light conceals from us, what we see in caves and face-down on the pillow is not darkness but eigengrau, the eyes’ gray, lightened by the twitches of our dreaming nerves. Seeing eyes have never seen full dark. Darkness is not even the opposite of light; it is only a mood of light.

Fragment With Minds

“As instruments improved beyond the impossible and became unthinkably sensitive, reality, examined with infinite precision, proved infinitely indistinct and absolutely malleable. Between the moment and the instant, the world was found to reflect not one mind, but every mind, every mind’s every passing thought; infinities of dreamers were seen each continuously remaking the world, their dreams overlapping and resonating or striking discords, flowing turbulently together, only canceling out in sum and aggregate to earthly matter and energy. Acts of imagination were caught remaking the universe: the Sun moving instantly to circle the earth as a mind struggles with Ptolemaic astronomy, the moon dropping down to meet an infant’s reaching, an old body becoming with infinite transience blithe and youthful as an old mind turns over a memory, stars and galaxies re-arranging themselves into cells, tissues, organs as the mystic feels the world in himself and himself as the world. And for the first time certain sensations of unease, certain shivers and starts of the mind, were traced to their sources, to the passing of cold fierce worlds reflecting minds not human and not kind.”

An Altar

When did I first encounter graffiti for myself? Beside a parking lot, just close enough to be noticed through the trees but too far back to recognize, a little up a slope, at the end of a trace left by its seekers – an altar.

It seemed to me like an altar – not a place for worship, but a place for rites. A low, long trapezoid of rain-dark concrete. From the unknown depth of the leaves that hid its base it rose like the peak of a buried pyramid. It may have gone deeper than I imagined: I later identified it (I forget how) as the base of one of the struts of a world war watchtower for German submarines.

The surface was covered in scrawls and scratches of nonsense and gibberish. There were English letters, English sounds and arrangements of sounds, but no English meanings – no regularity of language or code, only the dreamlike suggestion of meaning that can be grasped onto, but not held, smooth, slippery, bottomless. What promise of secrets! Surely if there were deep unseen machinery in the world this was the place to discover it.

I copied down a small page full of symbols and signs. I have lost it since – but even while I kept it I avoided looking at it. It felt like admitting an intruder.

Those who carved and marked this altar meant only secrecy, not mystery, and only privacy, not ritual. I was a child Kircher of small-town hieroglyphs, willing significance from mere meaning.

But to know that I was foolish does not cheapen the experience. Nature shows its dominion in more than overgrowth and decay. Nature guides the accumulation of anonymous and inscrutable human marks as surely as it guides the tracks of vines and the webs of spiders. Such places feel sacred because they bear witness to what we otherwise conceal: we, too, are part of nature. The god who loves his beetles is the same god who loves us. We are building his altars.

A Memory of Infancy

I believe that anything can be said. There are always words, if not always the strength to find and use them. Anything that can be experienced can be communicated. Communication from one mind to another cannot be perfect; but it can at least match the imperfect communication by way of memory between yourself then and yourself now.

This is a test case. I have what seems to be a memory of infancy. I do not insist that it is true; it could be a neurological glitch. Nonetheless, it is an interesting problem of expression.

I call it a memory, but I cannot remember it directly: I must remember being 11 remembering being 6 remembering. Eventually this chain must slip away from me; that it another reason to write it down.

I call it a memory because I have access to it by remembering, but it is not like other memories. It is smooth, hard, incapable of subdivision. It contains no data. In itself it is more of a feeling than a memory – as if at that stage the faculty of feeling supports not broad, generic emotions, but discrete pegs of experience. When I remember, the memory is not retrieved; it comes over me, I feel it as if I were feeling an emotion.

The senses are not distinct. They do not blend; there is no cacophony or synesthesia; instead, the senses are one – one unitary sensation that is not processed as sight or hearing or touch or smell, but absorbed as emotion. This one sense subordinates not only the usual five, but also proprioception – awareness of the position of your own body. There is a quality to the memory like marshmallowiness – an association, not a translation – that I think is the best my adult brain can do in rendering an experience recorded by such an alien scheme of proportions and powers.

Something happens – something unpleasant. My best guess is that I am receiving an injection. The memory somewhat resembles the nauseating feeling of a needle under the skin, but magnified until – fleetingly – it becomes my entire experience of the world and myself.

World and self are not distinct. Because no such concept as control yet exists, I have no way to tell what I can control – myself – from what I cannot control – world. I do not experience the world as part of myself; I do not experience self; I just experience. Note that while this is an unpleasant memory, the distinction in an adult between something bad that happens to you (with anger, indignation, or fear) and something bad you do without meaning to (with embarrassment, shame, regret and uncertainty) – this distinction is absent. The simple unpleasantness of something bad happening here compasses both – though, without future, I am without fear or uncertainty.

In this alien being that I was, I recognize only one thing.

Imagine that you have just begun to study something very interesting, but which you know nothing about. You throw yourself into it. You learn fast, getting your bearings, absorbing the terms of art, feeling out the areas of concern. It is like hunger – better, it is like a stomach: a void with agency, asserting its need.

This, infinitely amplified, is what I recognize: the absolute ravenous void where words would be.

The Twentieth Century

The idol is made of steel. The idol has no face: no mouth to explain, no ears to heed, no nostrils to stink in, and no eyes to witness.

The idol has two hands: a hand of bright steel, and a hand of dull steel.

In the bright hand of the idol is a key. All around the bright hand are the tokens of pilgrims who leave what the power of the idol has opened at their prayers: which are locks, bars, doors, gates, fetters, and chains.

In the dull hand of the idol – what is in the dull hand of the idol? The dull hand of the idol is tight shut. Around the closed fist of the dull hand are the tokens of penitents willing and unwilling: which are empty things (the dull hand only takes): bottles, boxes, chairs, beds, shoes.

They tell stories of the idol. They say the idol came from afar. Everywhere, it came from afar. It came from afar with two hands. It came loudly, without fear and without shame, and it touched everything.

What it touched with its bright hand that holds a key, was opened. The bright hand opened the bonds older gods left as they fled before the steel god. The bright hand opened the cell of night; opened the house of sickness; opened the prison of birth; opened the pit of ignorance; opened the veil of lies.

What it touched with its dull hand that is closed, was taken away. It touched the cleanness of the height and the quiet of the deep; it touched the peace of the valley and the pride of the peak; it touched the hope of the beggar and the pity of the rich man. It touched the dreams of dreamers, and the pride of makers. And lastly it touched cities, and countries, and nations, and it took them away.

This god has two hands – a bright hand that opens and a dull hand that takes away; but this god, who is blind, deaf, and dumb, does not know which hand is which.

What shall become of the steel idol, stories do not agree. Some say it is already dead; it is already rusting within; someday it will fall in on itself; the power that draws pilgrims and penitents is but an ember in ash. Some say it is resting; someday it will rise to touch and end the world – but they do not agree whether it will end the world with the opening touch of its bright hand, or the taking touch of its dull hand. Some say it has already sown the end of the world, and only awaits a harvest. Some say it is old and ashamed, so before it dies it will join hands and restore all it has taken; and some say it is old and ashamed, so before it dies it will join hands and close all it has opened. Some say it is lonely, and awaits another of its kind.

And some few even whisper: it shall not die. Into the soil it rests on it is driving roots.

A Prayer

Sojourning just outside New Orleans, I often walked on the levee by Lake Pontchartrain. Near the Causeway, there was a mass of debris washed up from the lake and jumbled together like a carpet. As I remember, driving south into New Orleans, you could see it to your left.

One day - the year was 2002 – I decided to comb the debris for any sculptural pieces of driftwood – an old New Jersey habit. These I found. And with them, I found a prayer.

It was a small wooden board, less than a foot long, and an inch and a half thick. There were holes in it as if it had been nailed to something. If it had nails still in it, I removed them. It was an ordinary pine board. Most likely, it was once a piece of building scrap.

On one side was written – marked or incised:

GOD SAVE US FROM THE STORM

This object fascinated me. Where had it come from? How had it come here? The nail holes showed that it had not been ritually thrown onto the waters; it must have been mounted to something – a dock? A boat? And a storm, a slip of the hand, a contemptuous heir had given it to the lake; and the lake had discarded it here.

Whether I took it with me, I do not now remember. I felt that it would be wrong to take it; or, having taken it, I felt that I had done something wrong, and carried it back. I walked around with it for some time, looking for a place for it. At length, landward of the levee, I lay it face-down beside a locked tool shed that I had never seen open.

It stayed there for a long time. Who took it; whether they threw it away, or kept it for themselves, or returned it to the lake – I do not know.

I tried.