A Thought on Darkness.

Helen’s change of name to Melanie has engendered some discussion on the quality of darkness. Let me quote my favourite line from Poe again:

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable Dominion over all.

This is true alliteration – not merely a coincidence of initial letters, but the suggestion of an overall tone. It illustrates how we in the west view darkness: as being associated with decay and death. We have a tradition of burying our dead beneath the earth where they decay in darkness. And we go further: we associate it with ‘evil.’ Light is the place of angels, dark is the place of devils. It’s inherent in the Christian presumption of duality.

But maybe it isn’t quite that simple. The colour of autumn leaves is the colour of decay, a process which begins in the high branches closest to the sun, and is completed on the ground in full daylight. And yet both plants and animals have their genesis in dark places – the one under the earth, the other in the womb. Even the Old Testament teaches that everything began with darkness. Darkness is the place from which life flows.

So maybe there is no duality, but only an unbroken continuum. Dark and light are essentially part of the same thing. It can be argued that both plant and animal only prosper when they break through into the light, but that’s no reason to dismiss darkness out of hand as something inherently bad. If it’s the natural medium for genesis, maybe it’s also the natural medium for rebirth when necessary. And maybe we all need some measure of rebirth now and then. In that sense, darkness is just as positive as light.

It’s a complex subject, and like all subjects of a spiritual nature, it eventually enters the realm of the unknowable where reason has no dominion.