To Go in the Dark
Whatever happens next week, and I hope what happens will bring us before and into some great and formidable wedge of light, leaving us blinking and gasping, whatever happens, we will need to adjust our eyes. We’ll need to continue refining our seeing. We’ll be squinting as we come into the light, or closing our eyes a little as the darkness shudders. Which perhaps sounds dramatic. So be it.
Four years ago I was listening to the then new Leonard Cohen album, You Want it Darker. It seems like yesterday, it seems like 12000 years ago. We know the darkness now in thousands of different ways though we would rather that we didn’t.
To Know the Dark
by Wendell Berry
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
The world has been asking us for our strength, and as Hirshfield says in the next poem, we have given it.
The Weighing
by Jane Hirshfield
The heart’s reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.
As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
I mention Leonard Cohen on the regular on this blog. I should probably mention him more. I wonder what he would say about this very moment. What new things he would tell us about the light. It’s for us to write now, though, isn’t it?
We let a lot of things into our guest house these past years. Things we would never have entertained before. Crowds of sorrows, sitting on the arms of our chesterfields, putting feet up on coffee tables, and leaving wine and coffee rings on our favourite books. They might be guides from beyond, but it would help to clear the house for a while so that we may parse them.
The Guest House
by Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Who hasn’t been thinking about Plato’s cave these weird days?
From The Parable of the Cave, Plato’s Republic Book VII
“Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he has a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.”
The late C.D. Wright quoted from Pema Chodron, reminding us that gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. C.D. Wright says:
“We need to lower the veneration around the terms of communication and expression and aim to see better — and to see better we have to move at whatever pace we can tolerate in the direction of our blind spot, else learn to recognize its advance toward us — which is usually where we are most smugly and snugly ensconced.”
She reminds us not to “expect any grand vista.” She reminds us of what the Buddhists would have us do: “stay right there with whatever comes through the door.”
Whatever happens we need to see better, write about what we see better, refine our seeing, our saying. We’ll need to be steadying each other as we go into the light or the darker dark. Either way, it’s going to be a while for our eyes to adjust.
For right now though, I can only keep singing the lyrics of the Jason Isbell song,
There can't be more of them than us
There can't be more
I know you're tired
And you ain't sleeping well
Uninspired
And likely mad as hell
But wherever you are
I hope the high road leads you home again
To a world you want to live in
To a world you want to live in
