After last week’s piece, I had some family and friends asking whether I was okay. I answered truthfully that, like most people, I hover between light and dark but am generally doing well. The fall has been a difficult season for me since tragedy struck at the end of November nine years ago. Still, there are many things to look forward to…
There is bad dark and there is good dark, and I think healing may have something to do with translating the former into intelligible terms in light of the latter.
This week’s piece is shorter, and a departure from my usual offerings. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
The bad dark is the dark that drags us down into despondency. It isn’t inspiring, it isn’t beautiful. It’s lustreless and mute, and clothes us in deadening sorrow. The bad dark is a distressing master, and we give into its compulsions slavishly. It feverishly cloisters us, weary of our escape, choking the light, unwilling to give us even the faintest glimpse of a way out. We get bound to the bad dark in a way that obstructs our air passages.
If you’ve been to the bottom floor and fallen through its rotting planks, then you’ve felt the suffocating dead weight of the dark.
You know the bad dark if the pit of your stomach is consumed by a fire that can’t be put out with disarticulated tears.
The good dark is like a compassionate cloak that occludes the cold but reflects the light. Its beauty is curious and enigmatic. The good dark is a gentle master, whose long fingers stroke our raw, naked skin with a temperate touch. There is no oppression in its shadows, only the outline of intimate shapes moving in a familiar choreography. The good dark is playful, even self-derisive. When our vision gets eclipsed by fearful, hurtling masses, its iconography tells a softer story of transmutation and acceptance.
Welcoming the good dark with arms extended, mercifully, is to raise grief to a state of exquisite longing, where tears trace shining, navigable rivulets across memory.
The good dark spreads itself thinly over our surface and cradles us, sleeping, in its ethereal arms.
Words I wrote many years ago and that have risen to the surface here…
So soft
and fast your
hands like feathers float
down flights
and flights
so scared of landing and
that awful weight
will fight
me like an achor
to the wet bottom floor
but just the beautiful
peace and dark down
here is like coal only
cold from the flames so
simple to
walk all over or
soar beneath flights
and flights
with fever and frigid
reason that rise and sink like
bottles full
of shattered words
sore from trying
to fight
their way to solid earth.
On a lighter note…
Éclaireurs of the dark:
My favourite maven of the good dark: Christine McConnell
A song to navigate between the darks, and a soundtrack for this piece: Song to the Siren by This Mortal Coil
I hover between both types of dark too, so this particular piece really resonates with me. I like to think of the good dark as a great work of Gothic fiction, probing and even heightening our fears while also entertaining us and appealing to our sense of the sublime and beautiful (like your exquisite prose). Remember what the wise Leonard Cohen wrote, “there’s a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. Wishing you light amidst the darkness, my friend.
I found this really powerful, Lianne. Thanks for chasing down the concern with more honesty rather than sugarcoating. Darkness is part of the human experience and you've captured it beautifully here. It's not something to hide or shy away from. Awesome writing as always.