Anam Cara

Light Has Many Faces—the Dark Has One

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.

Translated by Elaine Feinstein