To Know the Dark by Wendell Berry

To Know the Dark

by Wendell Berry

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.

There are at least two darks in the natural world.  There is the dark of the surface.  In a woods on a moonless summer night when even starlight is occluded by clouds.  Turn off your flashlight and you are suddenly surrounded by noises unknown, scents not acknowledged, the gentlest of zephyrs.  In a moonscape, you can make out shapes and even motion, just with less certainty.  But in a pitch black environment, in the woods, it does still bloom and sing.

Sight tends to drown it all out but without sight, you become aware of how much there is still to sense.  Snapping of twigs, cracking of dry leaves, bird or animal calls, the near silent but encompassing stir of trees answering an unseen breeze.  Scents too become accentuated.  The smell of detritus, musky sweat of a nearby deer, even the bark of still trees.  There are glorious stories to be known without light.

Then there is the more profound darkness beneath the earth.   Being swallowed at the cave entrance and then hiking, crawling, sliding, and eventually squeezing into the deep bowels of the earth where there is no light and has not been during the span of man.  Making your way with uncountable tons of rock pressed upon you rib cage or head, the merest fractional subsidence of which might scratch you from the world.  

You reach an open cavern and establish your minimal camp.  And turn off your head lamp and encounter a whole new type of darkness unlike that of a forest or even a desert.  No life here to speak of, no breezes, few scents, virtually nothing.  But as you sit there on a rock, senses stretching and tingling to make something of almost nothing, there is almost some affirmation beyond the void.  Perhaps a distant tinkling of some subterranean stream or even only an occasional drip of water hours apart.  You begin to distinguish the scent of sandstone from clay.  

The temperature is unvarying and there is no movement of air, but your bare skin creates is own sensations, not traceable to any condition.  Comfortable to the point of unawareness and then awhile later a shiver from some imperceivable interaction with the environment.  

Darkness has its gifts.