Thursday
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.
