I have always been fascinated by the darkness.
There is something completely engrossing and simultaneously terrifying about being in the dark. As you stand at the edge of the unknown, looking out into the nothingness in front of you and wondering where your next step will lead or what will emerge, there is a shiver of electric anticipation that convulses through the body, even in places innately familiar in the daylight.
Within the darkness lurks the Alien, that deepest fear that gazes out through unfamiliar eyes (or, maybe more terrifying, through your own eyes) and watches, waiting for a chance to strike and take you from all that you know into a mortifying, whirling psychosis of change.
What little light is existent in the darkness is always enchanting. The moonlight that casts the world in a luminescent silver transforms the mundane into the magical. The candle's light flickers wildly, resisting with stubborn tenacity the embrace of the darkness that surrounds it. Even the trembling beam of a flashlight slicing through the blackness implies an impending menace gazing out just beyond the light's reach.
The darkness, to Jung, was often a symbol of the the unconscious and primal mind; the Shadow. It is that amorphous creature that speaks out of the obscurity. In Schaffer's book, Equus, it is that most terrifying beast of primal, guttural worship that modern man shrinks from and, in doing so, shrinks into an empty shell.
Moving through this darkness rather than shrinking from it results in an illumination and depth of personality that can only come from the other side of this type of experience. The ancient Greeks found transformation could result from seclusion into the suspended silence of the darkness underground, where they prepared for weeks for the moment of illumination that would come when they emerged into the presence of the gods at the Oracle, and countless tales from various mythologies from areas such as ancient Greece, Egypt and Sumer speak of Gods and men who take horrifying journeys into the darkness of the unknown to confront terrifying obstacles only to come around at the end a wiser and richer person.
My experiences with the darkness have been similarly transformative. While in the sacrosanct suspension of the blackness, whether it be alone in the darkness outside, confronting fears of what watches me from behind the nearest tree or bush, or confronting the vast mysteries and fear existant within the "inner space" of my own psyche, the darkness has transformed me. And I am better for it.
Worthy books about confronting the darkness:
In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Equus by Peter Shaffer
Copyright 2005 S.L. Olson
