Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich, Adoration of the Shepherds
Spiritual Sunday – Christmas
Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Birth of Christ” emphasizes the simplicity of the event. “Were you expecting something greater?” the poet asks before observing that God “moves straight through all measurements we know, dissolving them away.”
The theme continues when Rilke observes that the gifts of the Magi are less astonishing than the baby in Mary’s arms. That gift does not “drift for a moment on the air” and “leave behind a vague regret.” That gift is the joy that is remembered forever.
May you all receive a taste of this joy during this holy-day season. Merry Christmas!
The Birth of Christ By Rainer Maria Rilke Trans. by H.D. Herter Norton
Without your simplicity, how could this have happened — what shines now in the dark of night? The God who thundered over the nations makes himself mild and through you enters the world
Were you expecting something greater?
What is greatness? He moves straight through all measurements we know, dissolving them away. Even the path of a star is not like that.
Behold: these kings standing here are great and drag into your lap rare treasures that each believes to be the greatest.
Perhaps you are astonished at their gifts. But look into the blanket in your arms, how He already surpasses all of them.
Amber that is traded near and far, rings of gold and costly spices that drift for a moment on the air: these are quickly fading pleasures and leave behind a vague regret.
On December 21—the darkest night of the year—Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a very Advent message to the American Congress. Advent includes both an acknowledgement of our grim present and the promise of a transcendent future, and the Ukrainian president touched on both.
On the one hand, Zelensky pointed to Russia’s assault on Ukrainian civilians—and as if we needed further confirmation, the New York Times has just published new information about the Russian paratroopers who carried out wholesale slaughter in Bucha last spring. On the other hand, Zelensky reminded Americans of the higher ideals, which led them to stand up against the British in the 1770s and against the Nazis in the 1940s.
Some of the best Christmas poems are those which look at the grim times in which Jesus was born. Given the Bucha slaughter, my father’s poem “Witness” is very timely. In it, one of Herod’s soldiers refuses to participate in the slaughter of the innocents, which was to include Jesus.
Witness By Scott Bates
When it came down from HQ The order to shoot the kids We were stunned I mean really rocked And I remember saying Jesus we can’t do that and some of us Felt like walking out but you don’t do that In the army you don’t quit without a court-martial So that was it we had to do it And a lot of us did and it got very messy And not pretty at all but we had to follow orders You got to have discipline or you can’t do anything Except me I couldn’t bring myself to do it I couldn’t explain it I knew I was disobeying orders Maybe it was because I have three kids myself and one Of them is under two so when I found these poor people Hiding in a barn with a new baby I couldn’t do it I sure as hell couldn’t do it I told them to cool it hit the road take off For Egypt or somewhere and fast and not go back for anything I took off pretty fast myself because the rest of the patrol Was coming back and I would have got it for insubordination And no questions asked bothers I would have had it I mean for good But I’m not sorry I’m not sorry at all He was a cute kid I hope they made it
Meanwhile, at a time when almost three million Ukrainians have fled their country, Malcolm Guite’s sonnet “Refugee” reminds us that Jesus too was a refugee when his family fled the slaughter. Both poems put us in mind of the true Christmas spirit.
Refugee By Malcolm Guite
We think of him as safe beneath the steeple, Or cosy in a crib beside the font, But he is with a million displaced people On the long road of weariness and want. For even as we sing our final carol His family is up and on that road, Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel, Glancing behind and shouldering their load. Whilst Herod rages still from his dark tower Christ clings to Mary, fingers tightly curled, The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power, And death squads spread their curse across the world. But every Herod dies, and comes alone To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.
Imagine the following blissful scenario. I build a roaring fire in our wood stove, treat myself to a glass of eggnog laced with a shot of whiskey, and settle down with a book about…narratology.
“Narratology?!” I hear you say.
To be more specific, I settle down with Yale Professor Peter Brooks’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative.
Actually, I don’t only read literary theory before said wood stove. Last week, in preparation for my talk on Charles Dickens’s Christmas stories, I settled down with A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Christmas Storms and Sunshine.” I’m not always a dry academic.
Still, I must admit that I’m enthralled with Brooks’s book, which touches on many of my own concerns. You’ll be hearing some ruminations on the book in forthcoming posts, but today I focus on one of the dangers that fiction poses. We live in an age, Brooks observes, where story is threatening to overwhelm reality. Concerned by how large swathes of our population are surrendering to QAnon conspiracy theories and claims about a stolen election, Brooks writes,
Swamped in story as we seem to be, we may lose the distinction between the two, asserting the dominion of our constructed realities over the real thing.
Brooks is particularly concerned by how authoritarians impose constructed realities upon populations. To make his point, he looks at the famous Jorge Luis Borges short story, “Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”
The story is about a world that has been invented and snuck into pirated copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. As Borges explains the caper, the project to invent an imaginary place is pushed and financed by an atheist American millionaire who, while not believing in God, “wanted to demonstrate to this nonexistent God that mortal man was capable of conceiving a world.”
Unfortunately, in the story this fiction is so compelling that it starts to take over reality. Writing in 1947, the narrator notes that humans are easy marks for believing in Tlon since they have had recent practice in succumbing to the totalizing ideologies of communism and fascism:
Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlon, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws—I translate: inhuman laws—which we never quite grasp. Tlon is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.
Tlon proceeds, therefore, to disintegrate the world of adherents, just as QAnon, Trumpist fabrications, and other authoritarian fantasies have done so in our own time. The narrator elaborates what’s involved in people submitting:
Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) “primitive language” of Tlon; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty—not even that it is false.
Brooks’s recurrent theme is that we must always remember that fiction is fiction. What Borges describes, by contrast,
is what happens when stories become myths: when their status as fictions, ficciones, is forgotten and they are taken as real explanations of the world, as something other than “as if” constructions, as the object of belief. On the basis of such fictions become myths we erect theologies. Very much including political theologies.
And then, in what works as a commentary on much contemporary political reporting, Brooks adds,
But even without that fearful and all too present outcome, we may find ourselves inertly accepting the notion that all is story, and that the best story wins.
In other words, if the political press does no more than report contending stories—as opposed to truth checking those stories—then it has surrendered to fiction. We would do well, Brooks says, to listen to Borges, who
put us on warning that we must remain critical of the all-encompassing claims of story. We need to oppose critical and analytical intelligence to narratives that seduce us into the acceptance of dominant ideologies. We need as listeners and readers to resist a passive narcosis of response.
In the book I have just completed, I differentiate between literature that speaks only to the passions (the heart) and literature that speaks to head as well as heart (and I add spirit as well). That distinction, I contend, is what differentiates great lit from not so great lit. Brooks is getting at something similar although he focuses more on the reader making ethical decisions (head decisions) than on the quality of the work itself.
But more on this in future posts. For the time being, it is noteworthy how dangerous unbridled fiction can be. Indeed, Brooks opens his book with a cynical line from Game of Thrones: “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.” The observation is delivered by the dwarf Tyrion as he elevates Bran the Broken to the throne. We Americans have witnessed in our own recent history how far an unscrupulous man can go by relying upon nothing more than the fictions he tells.
This year’s winter solstice occurs at a time when the country anticipates a major blizzard, which promises to wreak havoc on holiday travel. For this bleak midwinter moment, here’s a bleak Robert Frost poem.
Forget about the loneliness of animals smothered by new snowfall, Frost tells us. And forget about feeling small when facing the vast reaches of interstellar space. If you want to truly scare yourself at the prospect of emptiness, you have but to look within.
Initially, I was puzzled by Frost’s symbolism. When I imagine staring into an inner abyss, normally I color it black, not white. It so happens, however, that my faculty group has been discussing Moby Dick, and Melville does something similar to Frost with the color white. In “The Whiteness of the Whale” chapter, narrator Ishmael reports feeling a “nameless horror” at thoughts of Moby Dick before concluding that it was “the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” Later in the chapter he elaborates:
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, forever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper…
“[O]f all these things,” Ishmael concludes, “the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”
I can well imagine Frost having this passage somewhere in his mind when he wrote his poem. Ahab’s quest is motivated not so much by revenge against the animal that deprived him of his leg but rather revenge against a universe that threatens to be about nothing more than death and annihilation. Similarly, for Frost, snow-covered nature proves to be nothing more than a metaphor for (borrowing from Ishmael) “the charnel-house within.”
George Richmond, 1851 portrait of Elizabeth Gaskell
Tuesday
Yesterday, I wrote about the enormous popularity of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol in 1843. Of course, whenever a publishing venture proves so popular, other authors will follow. One such story seems particularly applicable to today’s America: Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Christmas Storms and Sunshine,” written in 1848. (You can read it here.)
It’s applicable because it speaks to political polarization. With worker unrest on the rise, 1848 was a particularly volatile year. Revolutions broke out all over Europe, leading Marx and Engels to write The Communist Manifesto. Although England itself didn’t experience a revolution, it was still a charged time, which may be one reason why Gaskell penned a story about two newspaper men, one Tory and one Radical, who happen to be next door neighbors. The story begins with an account of their newspaper rivalry:
In the town of —- (no matter where) there circulated two local newspapers (no matter when). Now the Flying Post was long established and respectable — alias bigoted and Tory; the Examiner was spirited and intelligent — alias new-fangled and democratic. Every week these newspapers contained articles abusing each other; as cross and peppery as articles could be, and evidently the production of irritated minds, although they seemed to have one stereotyped commencement, — ‘Though the article appearing in last week’s Post (or Examiner) is below contempt, yet we have been induced,’ &c., &c., and every Saturday the Radical shopkeepers shook hands together, and agreed that the Post was done for, by the slashing, clever Examiner; while the more dignified Tories began by regretting that Johnson should think that low paper, only read by a few of the vulgar, worth wasting his wit upon; however the Examiner was at its last gasp.
The story, however, focuses on the wives of the editors rather than the editors themselves. It so happens that the Tory wife has a cat but no children whereas the Radical wife has a child but no cat. That’s because, overwhelmed with motherhood responsibilities, she’s not always careful about keeping her larder carefully locked up, which makes it the target of the neighboring cat. Shortly after the story begins, said cat spoils the mutton she is serving for dinner.
This in turn causes the mother to beat the cat, thereby drawing upon herself the wrath of her neighbor.
I won’t go into all the various ways that the enmity is overcome but it involves the baby becoming ill, at which other points of contention fade into insignificance. By the end of the story, the two families are dining together. At one point, we see the Tory wife rocking the baby and the Radical wife stroking the cat.
At work, meanwhile, each man becomes more open-minded about the other. Now, they still don’t agree about their fundamental principles. But they don’t abuse each other to the extent they once did, leading Gaskell to conclude,
If any of you have any quarrels, or misunderstandings, or coolnesses, or cold shoulders, or shynesses, or tiffs, or miffs, or huffs, with anyone else, just make friends before Christmas, — you will be so much merrier if you do.
I ask it of you for the sake of that old angelic song, heard so many years ago by the shepherds, keeping watch by night, on Bethlehem Heights.
At our church’s Sunday Forum yesterday, I talked about Charles Dickens’s vision of Christmas. While I pushed again the recent movie that contended that the novelist was “The Man Who Invented Christmas,” I did acknowledge that he helped to re-invent it. Of particular interest to me is how his view of Christmas evolved.
First, I noted that Christmas was alive and well 1000 years before Dickens came to it. The 9th century’s King Alfred, for instance, said that the Twelve Days of Christmas should be a time of celebration and no work.
To be sure Christmas, which probably has deep roots in both the Roman saturnalia and also in winter solstice celebrations, was banned by the British Puritans when they came to power in the 1640s. These religious purists, suspicious of the raucous feasting, ordered fasting to replace gorging. In a reverse blue law, shops were ordered to remain open on the day.
Charles II reestablished Christmas when he was restored to the monarchy, but the Puritan fear of wasteful extravagance never entirely went away. This became especially true when power shifted from the landed class to the mercantile class, with their Protestant work ethic. We see some of their language in Scrooge’s invective:
What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
Later he tells Bob Cratchit that Christmas is an excuse for “picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!”
In my talk I contended that a new emphasis on Christmas arose not only in reaction to the middle class focus on profit but also to industrialization, urbanization, and atomization. Suddenly there was nostalgia for the old gentry and their communal Christmas festivals. Dickens didn’t invent the new fervor but he did provide enduring and memorable narratives to go along with it. Let’s say that he supercharged Christmas.
In doing so, he harkened back (I’m pretty sure) to Joseph Addison’s description of Christmas, written 140 years earlier. The fabled editor of the Spectator reports a supposed conversation with Sir Roger de Coverley, a country squire who,
after the laudable custom of his ancestors, always keeps open house at Christmas. I learned from him that he had killed eight fat hogs for this season, that he had dealt about his chines very liberally amongst his neighbours, and that in particular he had sent a string of hog’s-puddings with a pack of cards to every poor family in the parish. “I have often thought,” says Sir Roger, “it happens very well that Christmas should fall out in the middle of the winter. It is the most dead, uncomfortable time of the year, when the poor people would suffer very much from their poverty and cold if they had not good cheer, warm fires, and Christmas gambols to support them. I love to rejoice their poor hearts at this season, and to see the whole village merry in my great hall. I allow a double quantity of malt to my small beer, and set it a running for twelve days to everyone that calls for it. I have always a piece of cold beef and a mince-pie upon the table, and am wonderfully pleased to see my tenants pass away a whole evening in playing their innocent tricks, and smutting [kissing?] one another. Our friend Will Wimble is as merry as any of them, and shows a thousand roguish tricks upon these occasions.”
Depictions of such Christian cheer show up in Dickens’s first works, Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, both published in 1836. What will change by 1843’s Christmas Carol is Dickens’s view of memory.
In his Sketches by Boz essay, Dickens wants to banish bad memories from the holiday:
Look on the merry faces of your children (if you have any) as they sit round the fire. One little seat may be empty; one slight form that gladdened the father’s heart, and roused the mother’s pride to look upon, may not be there. Dwell not upon the past; think not that one short year ago, the fair child now resolving into dust, sat before you, with the bloom of health upon its cheek, and the gaiety of infancy in its joyous eye. Reflect upon your present blessings—of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. Fill your glass again, with a merry face and contented heart. Our life on it, but your Christmas shall be merry, and your new year a happy one!
Note how, in trying to rid the holiday of such memories, Dickens brings special attention to them. And as we will see in Christmas Carol, the potential death of Tiny Tim—revealed by the Ghost of Christmas Future—is important is converting Scrooge. Dickens, in other words, evolves to a position that, rather than trying to banish past darkness, one should face up to it. If the miracle of Christ is that love triumphs over death, then death has to be acknowledged.
Indeed, the Ghost of Christmas Past can be seen as psychological scarring. We are haunted by past trauma, which threatens to blight our lives. Christmas is miraculous because it becomes a time, not to ignore our previous suffering, but to see it as co-existing with love and joy. Through our experiences with and knowledge of suffering, we are able to develop a deep sense of compassion.
In fact, in a later Christmas story Dickens shows what would happen if we were to blot out traumatic memories. In The Haunted Man, the protagonist has a spirit erase his mind, after which he evolves into—well—a haunted man:
Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-weed, about his face,—as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity,—but might have said he looked like a haunted man?
Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man?
Only after a benign spirit reverses the wish and restores the man with memory does he develop a compassionate soul.
In my presentation, I noted how the great Christmas stories always feature darkness. I told the story of how, when my father, returning from World War II, attended Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life with my grandfather, my grandfather insisted on walking out of the film midway through because he found it too depressing. And indeed, the film is very dark—especially when George Bailey blows up at his family—which makes its Christmas ending all the more powerful. The same is true of film versions of A Christmas Carol, which I remember frightening me out of my wits when I saw them as a child.
In short, A Christmas Carol caught the public imagination and elevated Christmas because it wasn’t afraid to show images of death in its pages. Scrooge grapples with his mortality and, through that struggle, rediscovers his heart.
It took me years to realize that Mary Oliver’s poetry is shaped by her religious view of the world. Now that I am alert to this, and now that I know of her Episcopalian background, it seems self-evident. For instance, I now read “Bobcat” as an Advent poem.
Oliver describes herself and her companion unexpectedly spotting a bobcat on a night drive. For one who loves nature as much as Oliver does, that sighting has the force of miraculous revelation. Not only does her heart thud and stop at the sight of “those lightning eyes! that dappled jaw! those plush paws!” but she is put in mind of how, in the far north, the lynx lounges “in trees/ as thick as castles,/ as cold as iron.” In other words, in the darkest and most forbidding of landscapes, light blazes forth.
And then, like Robert Frost, Oliver finds a message in the moment, which in this case is an Advent message. We can think, if we want, that the “truth of the world” is “the miles alone in the pinched dark.” That does in fact appear to be our reality much of the time. But in this miraculous moment, she senses the Christmas vision: “the push of promise” and, because that hope renders us vulnerable, “the wound of delight.”
When we’ve had that experience, the world is no longer dark. Instead, “as though in a dream,”
we drive toward the white forest all day, all night.
Here’s the poem:
Bobcat By Mary Oliver
One night long ago, in Ohio, a bobcat leaped like a quick clawed whirlwind of light from the pines beside the road and our hearts thudded and stopped– those lightning eyes! that dappled jaw! those plush paws! In the north, we’ve heard, the lynx wanders like silk on the deep hillsides of snow– blazing, it lounges in trees as thick as castles, as cold as iron. What should we say is the truth of the world? The miles alone in the pinched dark? or the push of the promise? or the wound of delight? As though in a dream we drive toward the white forest all day, all night.
The World Cup final that many were predicting—Argentina vs. France—has come to pass, with most of the excitement on the Argentina side. (Full disclosure: I am a France fan who is going out of his way to be objective here.) After all, France won the trophy four years ago while the world cup is the one trophy that the sublime Lionel Messi has never won. Possibly the greatest player ever, the 35-year-old Messi scored the assist of the tournament when, rolling back the years, he took a ball at the midfield line, shed two Croatian defenders, turned one of them entirely around in the box, and slotted a tap-in goal to an onrushing teammate. How can one not root for more Messi magic in the final?
France, meanwhile, has played hunkered-down soccer, its defense absorbing opposition attacks with only an occasional counterattack. Most people felt that England and Morocco, who dominated time of possession, were much more exciting. For their part, French fans had to settle for their team only winning. Think of Les Bleus as Mary Oliver’s skunk cabbage.
In her poem about the perennial that smells like rotting meat, Oliver notes that “what blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.” Unlike the flowers that come later in the season, which she notes are “the last subtle refinements, elegant and easeful,” the skunk cabbage has a primal instinct for survival. Or as Oliver puts it,
Appalling its rough green caves, and the thought of the thick root nested below, stubborn and powerful as instinct!
And:
Not tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.
Plant biologists note that the plant’s smell attracts flies, carrion beetles, bees, mosquitoes, sow bugs and the larvae of butterflies and moths—referred to by Oliver as “a continual spatter of protein” (although I haven’t encountered any reference to the skunk cabbage absorbing the insects the way a Venus flytrap does). The plant can also generate heat far warmer than the surrounding air (up to 70 degrees), melting the snow around it. Nature’s first flowering plant, therefore, represents not only “the turning” of the seasons but a “dense and scalding reenactment” of death and life.
In France’s case, what is stubborn and powerful, what is daring and brawn, is the will to win. Some gave up on the team after it lost its entire midfield along with the season’s ballon d’or winner to injury, but out of those “deaths” has come new life. Don’t look for “tenderness” and “longing” in Les Bleus.
So while the rest of us dream about the soccer equivalent of “ferns and flowers and new leaves unfolding,” the French team “sling[s] its bunched leaves up through the chilling mud.” Here’s the poem:
Skunk Cabbage By Mary Oliver
And now as the iron rinds over the ponds start dissolving, you come, dreaming of ferns and flowers and new leaves unfolding, upon the brash turnip-hearted skunk cabbage slinging its bunched leaves up through the chilling mud. You kneel beside it. The smell is lurid and flows out in the most unabashed way, attracting into itself a continual spattering of protein. Appalling its rough green caves, and the thought of the thick root nested below, stubborn and powerful as instinct! But these are the woods you love, where the secret name of every death is life again – a miracle wrought surely not of mere turning but of dense and scalding reenactment. Not tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn pull down the frozen waterfall, the past. Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle refinements, elegant and easeful, wait to rise and flourish. What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.
In my comparison, I overstate somewhat. There is something dazzlingly pretty about an Mbappe run, a Griezmann pass, and a Giroud header. France would not have advanced as far as it has if it were it merely workmanlike. But once it has dazzled, the team settles down into skunk cabbage mode, its defense “attracting into itself a continual spattering of protein.”
Thanks to wind and rain, we lost power last night, which means today’s post is coming to you late. As Julia and I sat in the dark, I thought of Wendell Berry’s wonderful “To Know the Dark,” so that’s the poem you get today:
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.
I like to think the poem is about depression and am brought to mind of of the positive spin that psychologist philosopher Thomas Moore puts on the condition. In Care of the Soul Moore writes,
The soul presents itself in a variety of colors, including all the shades of gray, blue, and black. To care for the soul, we must observe the full range of all its colorings, and resist the temptation to approve only of white, red, and orange – the brilliant colors…. In a society that is defended against the tragic sense of life, depression will appear as an enemy, an unredeemable malady; yet in such a society, devoted to light, depression, in compensation, will be unusually strong.
Moore goes on to counsel us to “develop a taste for the depressed mood, a positive respect for its place in the soul’s cycles”:
Some feelings and thoughts seem to emerge only in a dark mood. Suppress the mood, and you will suppress those ideas and reflections. Depression may be as important a channel for valuable “negative” feelings, as expressions of affection are for the emotions of love. Feelings of love give birth naturally to gestures of attachment. In the same way, the void and grayness of depression evoke an awareness and articulation of thoughts otherwise hidden behind the screen of lighter moods…. Melancholy gives the soul an opportunity to express a side of its nature that is as valid as any other, but is hidden out of our distaste for its darkness and bitterness.
Moore also suggests using the older term of “melancholy” in place of depression and says that exploring melancholy is a powerful means to come to terms with aging and mortality. And while he never quite talks about darkness blooming and singing, there’s this:
Because of its painful emptiness, it is often tempting to look for a way out of depression. But entering into its mood and thoughts can be deeply satisfying. Depression is sometimes described as a condition in which there are no ideas – nothing to hang on to. But maybe we have to broaden our vision and see that feelings of emptiness, the loss of familiar understandings and structures in life, and the vanishing of enthusiasm, even though they seem negative, are elements that can be appropriated and used to give life fresh imagination.
All that being said, Julia and I passed up the opportunity “go dark” and instead found our battery-powered lanterns and retired to bed with our books. It’s good to know, however, that other options are available.
