There is a touching innocence in the mystery of the human self. Even after thousands of years of experience and reflection, we still remain a mystery to ourselves. In the so-called ordinary person, there is something deeply unpredictable and unfathomable. We have never been able to definitively decipher the secret of our nature. Of course, every secret delights in the dark and fears the light. Regardless of how you might force the neon light of analysis on your self, it can never penetrate. It remains on the surface and creates tantalizing but ultimately empty images. Even when you approach your self tenderly with the candle of receptive and reverential seeing, all you achieve is a glimpse. There is something in the sacred darkness of the mind that does not trust the facility and quickness of light. Darkness resists the name. Darkness knows the regions which the name can never reach or hold or dream. The dark must smile at the proud pretence of words to hold networks of identity and meaning, but the dark knows only too well the fragile surface on which words stand. Darkness keeps its secrets. Light is diverse and plural: sunlight, moonlight, dusk, dawn, and twilight. The dark has only one name. There is something deep in us which implicitly recognizes the primacy and wonder of the dark. Perhaps this is why we instinctively insist on avoiding and ignoring its mysteries.
The human eye loves the light. Feasts of colour and varieties of shape continually draw towards the shore of its vision. Movement excites and attracts the eye. So much of our understanding of ourselves and the world finds expression in metaphors of vision: awareness, seeing, clarity, illumination, and light. To become aware is to see the light. It is interesting that, outside of poetry, there is little corresponding geography of differentiation or appreciation of darkness. Darkness is the end of light. We are confronted by the unknown. Though we peer deeply into its anonymity, we can see little. We speak of darkness as the domain of mystery. Darkness resists the eye. It is where all our vision and seeing becomes qualified and revised. Marina Tsvetayeva wrote an amazing long poem called “Insomnia” in which she recognizes the ancient presence of the night:
Black as—the centre of an eye, the centre, a blackness
That sucks at light. I love your vigilance.
Night, first mother of songs, give me the voice to sing of you
In those fingers lies the bridle of the four winds.
Crying out, offering words of homage to you. I am
Only a shell where the ocean is still sounding.
But I have looked too long into human eyes.
Reduce me now to ashes—Night, like a black sun.
Yet the eye can become accustomed to the dark. Country people know this well. When a city person moves to a rural region, she is often overwhelmed by the darkness of the night. Houses shine out like beacons, but all roads and fields are buried in pitch darkness. She discovers how brightly and magically the night sky shines through. With no light pollution, the stars and moon perforate the night with such lucid brightenings. When you leave a lighted room and go out into the night, you are almost totally lost and blind at first. Then, as your eyes grow more accustomed to the night, the outlines of things begin to loom more clearly; shadowed presences become visible. There is an inner depth and texture to darkness that we never notice until we have to negotiate the absence of light.
It is no wonder then that Nature supplies the most appropriate metaphors for the spiritual life of the mind. The fecundity of such metaphors is their capacity to disclose the slow creativity of the dark. The darkness is the cradle of growth. Everything that grows has to succumb to darkness first. All death is a return to darkness. When you sow seeds, you commit them to the dark. It must be a shock for seeds to find themselves engulfed in the black smother of clay. They are helpless and cannot resist the intricate dissolution which the earth will practise on them. The seed has no defence; it must give way, abandoning itself to the new weave of life that will thread forth from its own dissolving. A new plant will gradually rise, observing the ancient symmetry of growth: root farther into darkness and rise towards the sun. When the new plant breaks the surface of the ground, it is a gift of the hidden wisdom of the clay. She knows the mystery of growth. This wisdom finds such solid expression in trees.
