by Paul Bogard
The value of metaphorical darkness is told everywhere if we look for it—in our poetry, religion, literature, art. But the key word here is “if.” Everyone experiences the darkness of difficult times—if not depression, then loss of infinite kinds, including simply the everyday passing of time. To think that melancholy—which seems a natural response to the coexisting realities of beauty and mortality—is the same as clinical depression is tragically mistaken. Words like “sad,” “gloomy,” and “depressed” leave no room for the rich, dark quality of melancholy, which I’ve always seen as a sensitive appreciation that change is happening every second of our lives, that everything and everyone we love will die, and that in knowing this we have the opportunity to share our gratitude while we still do have time.
“I think that when we’re truly moved by something, it always feels sad,” Wilson says. “And it may not even be sad.… I love this folk band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, that old-time string band music. I saw them in Greensboro two weeks ago, and during some of their songs, I felt myself tearing up. It was really this sense of, life is fucking large and marvelous and weird and I don’t even come close to getting it. And I love that. I feel like something deep and inscrutable opens up for us when we see something beautiful. And there is that sense that, yes, this is transient. It will never be again. But there’s something else going on, too. It’s a darkening, but a darkening that suggests there’s more. It’s like the terra incognita, the unknown land on the map. I think that’s what the darkness is: We have places within us which can never be mapped.”
I have been to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in the past, seen the view, seen the smog, thought, Shoot, this isn’t right, and gone on my way. But I have not been to the North Rim before, and I have not visited this grand old park in search of the night.
I have plans to meet the full moon at its rise, and I will not be late. Coming into the park from the north through the beautiful meadows of the Kaibab Plateau, I pass herds of bison and stands of ponderosa pine, find a campsite, take in the canyon with the late afternoon crowds, enjoy dinner at the lodge before sunset, and saunter the paved path toward an east-facing lookout. I step from the path to climb gnarled beige rocks, and my lookout takes some scrambling to reach, but it’s not that far from the lodge, with its amber-lit windows against the fading blue twilight. The curve of night closes the day sky to a small half-dome in the west, and my fleece jacket feels good. The few lights from the South Rim seem the same size as stars, though they are pink from high-pressure sodium. They and a jet’s blink and contrail are the only signs of the human.
The moon first appears as a fire-orange flare behind the flat horizon mesa, then, like a red-pink ball burning toward me, devouring forest and moving west. Technically, we are revolving toward night at something close to 1,000 mph, but we never notice that. What we notice, if we notice, is the speed at which the moon rises: slow enough to make you impatient if you’re still on human time, but still fast enough you can see it happening. With the entire glowing ball well above the horizon, lighting these gnarled rocks beige-white, the moon seems smaller here than elsewhere, and the sky enormous. Then, I know why: I can see almost entirely around me, only back toward the lodge do rocks and pines disrupt the 360-degree flat horizon. Otherwise, my perch is a ship’s tower in the middle of the sea, smooth horizon all around, and above, a full bowl of stars. The view is vertigo-inducing and makes me wobble-kneed, swervy. I lie back on the rocks, rocks that in daylight appear full of ocean creature fossils, lie on an ocean floor looking up at the night sky.
During the day, there were obese Americans complaining about having to walk a hundred feet, a young French couple with their toddler in a backpack, a British girl clutching a golden teddy bear and telling it to not look down. But at night, now, almost no one—only two couples—shares my view of this grand moon rising over the full canyon, and I know of their presence only by their camera’s occasional click and flash. At night now in natural light the layers of rock are clearer, the sense of eternal time greater—the ancient moon on the ancient stone, and all of us just passing through.
Here, too, is the desert quiet—and quiet is a quality closely related to darkness. At least it ought to be. The relationship between light pollution and noise is such that if you find one, you likely find the other.
For me, the quiet of night has long been a friend. In college I would listen to my radio after turning out the light, my ear to the speaker so as not to wake my roommate. On Minnesota Public Radio from 11:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m., Arthur Hain hosted Music Through the Night, his low, calm voice perfect for nighttime radio. Lying in bed listening, I traveled to nights across oceans of water and time, once again a boy in the basement bedroom of my grandparents’ southern Illinois home, or eighteen and walking thousand-year-old European streets, or back up north at the lake, standing on the dock beneath great swaths of stars. Beneath the sun, the magic faded. During the day my little radio’s music sounded canned, artificial. But at night the very quality of the tiny speaker’s condensed sounds brought them close, as though I listened through floorboards to secrets whispered at a dinner party below.
The three tiniest bones in the human body—the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup—deliver auditory miracles all day long. So often we take them for granted and hardly notice. At night, I have learned to notice. Through my little radio, through my time outside, I have learned that the natural sounds of night are solitary, singled out, floating. Sometimes they seem meant only for me.
I am reminded of James Galvin’s beautiful memoir The Meadow. Galvin writes that his neighbor Lyle “told me he could hear different tones emitted by different stars on the stillest, coldest winter nights. He said he could tell which notes came from which stars. He couldn’t hear them all the time, just winter nights, and then, when he was about sixty, he admitted sadly that he couldn’t hear them anymore. Age, I guess.”
Sometimes, on a desert night like this, or on clear winter lake nights when stars stand in three-dimensional beauty—closer stars closer, farther stars farther away, and it feels as though I could reach my arms into them, or that falling from Earth would mean falling among them—I see how someone could hear stars. And I wonder, do I miss hearing stars because I don’t get myself into dark country often enough, or live surrounded by noise, or simply because I don’t pay attention?
Our world is filled with noise, which not only robs us of beauty but as an environmental cause of ill health is second only to air pollution. Exposure to excessive noise has been shown to raise blood pressure, disturb sleep, and stress us into illness. In response, the European Commission—the executive body of the European Union—has set guidelines for maximum levels of nighttime noise at 40 decibels, about as loud as a library. In the United States we lag far behind in protecting the quiet of our nights. President Reagan abolished the Environmental Protection Agency’s noise program in 1982, and since then there has been little action from the federal government to protect our country’s quiet nights.
Twenty-four hours a day in our cities the gathered growl of countless engines surrounds us, and even in forests and mountains and on country lanes, the solitary engine of a single vehicle or overhead plane interrupts the otherwise natural quiet. At least with noise—we haven’t yet reached this point with light—if your neighbors get out of hand, the police will respond to your call.
At least with a night like this, in a place like this, protected for every citizen in the world, there is still quiet.
I first met David Saetre when I moved to the northern Wisconsin town of Ashland to teach at the small college where he is campus minister and professor of religion. But those titles only hint at the vital role he plays in the community, both on campus and in town. Last spring, for example, when in the course of barely a month the gregarious dean of the college died of cancer and a beloved student, a senior I knew well, was struck and killed by a car on frozen Chequamegon Bay after midnight, the community leaned on Saetre in its grief. Da
vid Saetre is the kind of person who lives in every community across the country, across the world: a no one to outsiders, and everything to those inside. I know him as a deeply joyful, conscientious man, and I knew I wanted to talk with him especially about metaphorical darkness and light.
“I grew up on the edge of a small town, and there was a kind of freedom to rural small community childhood that I think we have lost, by and large,” he tells me. “I can remember from a very early age playing in the dark and being allowed to roam until bedtime in the dark. It seems to me that very few parents would allow children to do that kind of thing today. Not only was there a freedom to that, but there was a kind of acquaintance. I tell the same story if someone asks me about care and concern for the earth. Real care is a form of intimacy, and you have to cultivate that intimacy somehow. I was lucky to have grown up with it literally—in the woods, in the soil, in the earth. The same is true with the dark.”
Listening to Saetre talk about his childhood, I think of Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods and his argument that American children are now living a “de-natured childhood” resulting in a “nature-deficit disorder” that has serious consequences for both the children’s health and our society as a whole. We could say the same thing about children and darkness. As Joseph Bruchac told me, “I think we could talk about a darkness deficit, yes.” If we never have the chance to know literal darkness as a child—to play in that darkness—it would make sense that we would grow into adulthood without appreciation for either the literal darkness of our nights or the figurative darkness of our lives. As Saetre says, “We are not taught that not knowing is okay.”
Despite his official roles, Saetre has a love-hate relationship with organized religion. “My problem with Christianity and with most of the structured religions,” he explains, “is the attempt to say too much. They claim too much, especially in terms of what is clear, in attempting to destroy essential ambiguity.” He calls this an “obsession with a kind of false clarity,” the idea that everything can be “brought into some kind of pure light.” He continues to be drawn to the study of religion, he says, as a way to “try to understand those encounters with the paradoxical ambiguities of our lives that I think really are at the heart of our human experience.” In fact, he sees his role in the community as not only to suggest the possibility of the sacred in people’s lives but also to “maintain the dimension of ambiguity or of the question—the essential character of doubt.”
Doubt. Not knowing for sure. Being open to ambiguities. “Loving the question,” as Rilke said. Saetre had better not run for political office, at least not in the United States. We are not very good at remaining open to doubt in this culture, not very good at not knowing. We are very good, on the other hand, at the bumper sticker, that sticky product that reduces a complex issue to something simplistic, black and white, right and wrong. We want answers, the shorter the better.
Here’s a bumper sticker almost anyone would understand: “Light good, dark bad.” It’s the classic understanding of Christian theology, one that reflects the false clarity that concerns Saetre. It also happens to be woefully incomplete and overly simplistic.
In truth, the powerful metaphor of light versus dark—of dark as sin, light as good, dark as evil, light as godly—comes out of only a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. If you think about the experience of light and dark in the stories of the Bible, a different picture starts to emerge. In the Old Testament, for example, the night—darkness—is frequently the place where people experience the presence of God.
Think of Genesis 32, the story of Jacob wrestling all night with “a stranger” or “an angel.” Right before the break of day he gets the stranger in some kind of hold and says, “Bless me before I let you go.” The stranger blesses him and gives him a new name—in other words, a new identity. Jacob becomes Israel in that story. The way the story is usually interpreted is that Jacob wrestles with God, signifying that night is the time when humans encounter God in God’s most existentially vivid life-changing form.
Or think of the first book of Samuel, chapter three. Samuel is a little boy, and he wakes in the night to a voice saying, “Samuel, where are you?” He runs to his father, thinking that he is calling him. This happens three times. Finally, his father tells him, It’s not me who is calling you; the next time you hear the voice, be still. It happens again, and of course it’s God, calling Samuel to be a prophet.
“In so much biblical narrative,” Saetre says, “night and the experience of dark is not the place of evil and sin but rather the place where humans encounter the deep mystery of being. There’s something about the deprivation of light that allows the characters in these narratives to experience reality in its most profound and holy form.”
This is such a different picture of the Judeo-Christian tradition. There are many other examples: Jesus’s most profound experience of God as his Father occurs in the garden of Gethsemane at night. Jesus is referred to in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke again and again and again as going out into the desert to pray at night. Even in the greatest of the stories of the early Hebrew people—the story of Passover, and the Exodus—the angel of death comes when? At night.
“From a Jungian archetypal analysis,” Saetre tells me, “what the story of the Exodus is really about is a dying to the old ways, which are slavery, and from which a whole people is liberated.” I like his phrase, “a dying to the old ways.” He is arguing that night offers us the opportunity to leave old ways that have us enslaved—an opportunity to change our lives. As he says, “night is the time of liberation, the time and the place where we are set free from the overbearing presence of light. Or, in other words, sometimes light keeps us from experiencing the deep truth of things.”
Maybe the best example from Christianity of night’s being a time of significant experience comes in the literature of the sixteenth-century Spanish monk St. John of the Cross, from whom we have the phrase “dark night of the soul.” His first poem, “On a dark night,” is his most famous. St. John described this sensual poem as the product of divine inspiration.
Saetre loves St. John’s work. “In his poem, St. John wrote that his experience took place ‘on a dark night,’ with ‘my house, at last, grown still.’ The house of our lives is mostly experienced in daytime, and the daytime here is the life of obligation, and the life of obligation is so overbearing that it becomes oppressive. In order to experience the liberation of transformation—being loved this deeply transforms him, or, as St. John says, ‘Lover transformed in Beloved!’—we need the dark of night, because the daytime is so filled with the burdens of responsibility. The light throws us back into all the stereotype false selves that we put on, all the masks that we wear in order to fulfill obligations.”
Saetre smiles. “And we all have to do this—you can’t live all the time in the night. But our daylight selves are not our full selves.”
The dominant metaphor in the West is still that light is good and dark is bad. But Saetre argues that the night (and its darkness) is the place where the soul encounters the true self and transforming love, and the day (and its light) is the place of, as he says, a false clarity filled with burdens and toil and responsibilities. This understanding doesn’t associate light with evil—it’s not that old dualism at all—but instead argues that we need both light and dark, and that because daylight is the place of obligation, to experience the true self requires the night.
But what about God declaring, “Let there be light”? Saetre tells me that this famous passage from Genesis isn’t as clear as people think. In fact, “Genesis suggests that darkness precedes light, and it is only out of the dark that the creative impulse of that which we call God emerges, as if to say that darkness then contains an essential and necessary element in the creative process.” But does that mean Genesis gives us license to light up the world? “That is a false step,” he says. “It’s not inferred from the scripture.”
Somehow I have a feeling Saet
re’s message hasn’t reached Spain. While in the sixteenth century the cities in which St. John wrote and lived would have been as dark as any on earth, today they are as bright, lit with an overabundance of electric light. First in Toledo, outside Madrid, where John was imprisoned—the root of his own “dark night” experience—and next in the southern city of Granada, where he wrote his poem in the Alhambra’s shadow, I walked where St. John walked, wishing I could experience the inspiration for the “dark night of the soul.” And, even though I expected these Spanish cities to be lit as brightly as they were, it was still disappointing. Toledo, especially—the stone city on a hill; a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where the bells of its immense neighborhood cathedral echo along narrow winding streets—could be such a lovely nighttime attraction if its lights were under control. Instead, they glare as though lighting any city anywhere. For a poet writing today, there would be no great experience of literal darkness for inspiration as there was for St. John centuries ago. Somehow a milky-gray-washed-out-night-of-the-soul doesn’t have the same ring. And for future readers of St. John’s work, I wonder if eventually the idea of a “dark night of the soul” will even make sense.