Fireside
“Light blinds you; there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside.” —from Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
While reading Moss’s book, the above quote really struck me. What kinds of things are we missing by keeping to the lights, both physical and metaphorical, that exist in our lives?
I’ve long been fascinated by the darkness, sensing that there is so much more to be perceived outside our circles of light. In the physical world, whether a light comes from a small flickering candle or a massive radiant sun, it still only show us a portion of reality. We stick to these lighted places because we feel safe; we are primarily visual creatures after all, and the ability to see our surroundings gives us a sense of security and control. But how much more can we perceive when we relinquish our sight for a while, such as when standing in a dark place and listening, hearing the small and hidden things we ordinarily miss, and smelling, picking up the scents that tell our fellow animals more about the world around them than mere sight can? So much of our own planet is dark—the labyrinthine caverns underground, and the miles of dark sea beneath the waves; what we see on the planet’s daylight surface is only a thin veneer.
Similarly, I think the human mind tends to stick to certain well-lighted paths. We recognize only those areas that our spotlight of consciousness singles out while intentionally or unintentionally ignoring the rest. We rarely plumb the depths of the human psyche, remaining almost wholly ignorant of what Carl Jung called our “shadow.” How much of our instinctual or emotional behavior goes unobserved or unexamined? How readily do we avoid certain corners of our mind, afraid of what we might find there? Some of us, particularly those with an artistic bent, may tap into some of these dark places and produce works of extraordinary psychological understanding, but that is still pretty rare even among creatives.
Fear of the unknown can often be a healthy or even life-saving response—why else would evolution have programmed it into us?—but it also means that we miss out on lots of wondrous revelations about both the natural world and human nature. There is so much more to the universe, internal and external, that we have yet to uncover because we are afraid to look.
* * * *
“We sit upon our tiny spinning ball of dirt desperately building our own tiny suns, our own illuminating shelters from the truth of existence, clustering around them like insects, never realizing that they rob us of the revelations that come in the dark.” —from The Magnus Archives (episode “Dark Matter”)
Our universe is unfathomably vast, and cosmology currently estimates that observable matter and energy (including light) only make up about 5% of everything—the other 95% is dark matter and dark energy. This means that what we can see and measure with our standard instruments is only a tiny fraction of what exists in space. In a strange parallel, neuroscience estimates that only about 5% our of cognitive activities are consciously perceived, while the other 95% of brain activity goes on without our awareness. As such we are somewhat deluded in seeing ourselves as autonomous agents in full control of our minds.
Along these lines, my fascination with certain horror authors, namely H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti, derives from their emphasis on (respectively) cosmic and philosophical horror. Both authors eschew the normal monsters-and-murderers shtick and instead call forth more profound terrors: Lovecraft forces us to stare into the abyss of our vast, indifferent universe and realize our insignificance, while Ligotti achieves a similar reaction by exposing the anxiety and nihilism that bubble underneath the mask of control that we so desperately wear. Both men are willing to push our light of consciousness a little to the side, where it dimly illuminates just enough of what lies beyond to trigger both fascination and revulsion.
Most people, upon glimpsing such things, immediately scurry back into the safety of the light and try to forget what they saw. In the end, being only human, I typically do the same…but not before I stare into the darkness a bit longer, trying eagerly to make out what slithers in the shadows.
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You, darkness, of whom I am born—
I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illumines
and excludes the rest.
But the darkness embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations—just as they are.
It lets me imagine
a great presence stirring beside me.
I believe in the night.
—a poem from the Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke
Not all darkness is sinister or fearful. There is often wisdom and inspiration to be gained by leaving the fireside and walking forth into the surrounding darkness. Religious mystics have long embraced various ways of seeking knowledge and understanding in the “darkness [that] embraces everything” which Rilke references. Experiences with both meditation and psychedelics have long helped humans loose the shackles of our minds, freeing us from our usual modes of perception and allowing us to understand things in radically new ways. We can realize that our sense of “I” is imaginary, that our bodies are not truly separate from the rest of the world, nor are our egos somehow segregated from the “id” or the “shadow” the we so vigorously try to disown.
Rilke mentions being born of the darkness, and indeed when we first appear in this world we don’t possess any of the categories or divisions that we soon learn to impose on our surroundings. As we grow we begin to separate things and bring them into our circles of “light,” excluding the rest as bad, or dangerous, or merely unimportant. This personal circle of light—this fire around which we make ourselves comfortable—is indeed useful and necessary for daily existence. There is nothing wrong with living in the light most of the time. It is only when we forget the darkness, and avoid it entirely, that our existence begins to suffer, and we lose our chance to engage with a world that encompasses far more than we can possibly imagine.
