Dear friends,
Heartfelt wishes of renewal and renaissance as we approach the end of a very strange year! As the poet Theodore Roethke would have it, “in a dark time, the eye begins to see." On this darkest of days, I'd like to offer some thoughts on the metaphorics and metaphysics of tenebrosity (as well as a modest defense of creative vocations), via brief a reflection on his poem, "In a Dark Time" (1960).
A much more in depth reflection on this poem can be found in Joshua L.I. Gentzke, "Viral Visions & Dark Dreams: Ecological Darkness and Enmeshment in the Time of COVID-19," in Pandemic, Ecology and Theology: Perspectives on COVID-19, ed. Alexander J. B Hampton (London: Routledge), 2020.
Roethke’s full poem can be read here.
Into the Dark, Kathryn Ian, 35mm Slide (2016)
Theodore Roethke’s haunting poem begins with the evocative stanzas:
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.[i]
Here, the poet encounters a natural environment become strange; the resonance of his own doubled self calls back from within a shifting landscape. As signal and echo blur into confusion, the poet is granted a paradoxical mode of sight, rooted in darkness rather than light—a vision more visceral than visual. While composing the poem Roethke was, by his own admission, “in deep therapy…really scraping bedrock.”[ii] Yet “the deepening shade” is a harbinger of more than depression; the dark time is also the time of the “echoing wood,” a distended moment that shelters a “night flowing with birds, a ragged moon.”[iii]
If we take the poet at his word, this haunted, echoic vision of nature should not be read in a purely figurative manner; its mode of reality is ontologically unstable, metaxic: “both literal and symbolic.”[iv] Read ecologically, Roethke underscores the consubstantiality of the human and other-than-human world(s) by underscoring at once the material nature of the imagination, and the nonphenomenalizable dimension of the natural world; paradoxically then, here the imagination names the fluidity between the human and other-than-human worlds, rather than the poet’s ability to fix the world within images.
True to the perspective of the porous subject that arises in the dark time, the poet speaks from within the other-than-human world in a manner geometric metaphors cannot map - his state of "being within" is not akin to, say, an ice cube in a glass; rather, he is enmeshed and entangled with his environment. Likewise, the tree that receives his tears is not merely an object to be grasped by a subject; it too has a temporal openness that prevents it from being conceptually cordoned.
Roethke's tree is “a growing thing” he can “touch and feel.”[v]
More radically, the aerial and chthonic creatures that inhabit the poem’s latter stanzas are loosed from the weight of symbology as they interpenetrate the poet’s very being: “I partake of them all-heron and wren, beast and serpent. They surround me; they protect me; they are my nearest and dearest neighbors.”[vi]
In the final lines, another type of darkness looms. Rather than searching for a light within or beyond the darkness, the poet takes the darkness as a light, a sensual knowledge bound up with shadowy erôs:
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.[vii]
The poem closes with an evocation of mystical union:
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.[viii]
This is the divine darkness of apophatic or via negativa mysticism, a tradition seeded in the Platonic notion of “beyond being” (epekeina tes ousias),[ix] galvanized by Pseudo-Dionysius (ca. fifth/sixth C.E), and reimagined by Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and Jacob Böhme, among others.[x] Like Roethke’s shadowy epiphany, apophaticism eschews the luminous language of positivism in its devotion to darkness; it speaks paradoxically of the ineffability of its subject and fosters a unique constellation of ontological and epistemological positions.
Pseudo-Dionysius’ work theopoeticized the absolute as divine darkness: the traceless trace of a Godhead too wild to be caged by intellection or sensation. The mode of un/knowing proper to Dionysian apophaticism is not luminous certainty, but the gloom of agnosia—an experiential revelation of shadow rather than a detached vision of light.[xi] The initiate moves from the worlds of sensual and intellectual intelligibility into “the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.”[xii]
Roethke’s poem however does not transcend the sensual realm; even in its confrontation with the divine darkness, the poem winds back in echoic reflection toward a haunted, living nature, before coiling into the poet’s own desire. Within this dark dream, the contour of an existential darkness emerges that reverberates with an “ecological darkness”: a blurring of the divide between human and other-than-human worlds. This ecological darkness opens up to the transcendental darkness of an existence beyond the reach of concept or category.
Yet, neither poet nor nature disappears in this triangulation; rather, a shifting place opens that shelters an “ecological subject,” a sense of self, shot through with otherness, enmeshed with the elemental and the animal. The way I read it, Roethke is dramatizing a sort of subtle "darkness body," i.e., a flesh that is doubled, allowing for the interpenetration and reversibility of world and body-self. In doing so, he suggests an eco-erotic poetics, a language capable of expressing an awareness of self and world prior to the threshold of detached reflection; a state of embodiment that both shelters and affirms the "visceral vision" proper to darkness.
Like Roethke, we too find ourselves in a dark time, confronted by a crisis so massive it exceeds our powers of conception and appears only epiphenomenally. Within this darkness, we are haunted by the threat of a double blindness, at once ethical and epistemological. The pandemic has demanded novel forms of technocratic protection and control to be implemented. But this is not enough. In the wake of COVID-19, it has become impossible to ignore the extreme injustices that have resulted from the ways that we have curated and imagined our hyper-networked world. If the sociocultural changes we make are to be more than technocratically enforced fortifications, it is crucial, alongside employing Enlightenment-based forms of thought, to confront the shadow side of the situation. It is not sufficient to only effect change, but we must also learn how to be affected in new ways that respond to the reality of our radical enmeshment.
Part of the task of forging a new eco-ethics that honors human and other-than-human interdependence and reflects our shared precarity is imagining new modes of embodiment, individually and socially.
As Jane Bennett points out, “affect is central to politics and ethics.”[xiii] If, in the face of the sociopolitical, economic, and existential regimes that have moved us toward a state of ecological crisis, we are to catalyze lasting transformation, new practices of imagining and becoming otherwise will have to be developed. And it is in fashioning a new “counter culture of perceiving,” able to adjust its eyes to these dark times, that many of the vocations devalued under the aegis of neoliberalism—artists, philosophers, theologians, and poets—have crucial roles to play.[xiv] Here, outside of institutionalism, perhaps a decentered, patchwork conversation has the chance to be seeded. If we accustom our eyes to the present darkness and stay with it long enough to dream otherwise, we may, to borrow the words of Wendell Berry, “find that the dark, too, blooms and sings.”[xv]
[i] Theodore Roethke, Selected Poems (Library of America; First Edition: no city given, 2005), 116, lines 1–4.
[ii] Theodore Roethke, Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 218.
[iii] Roethke, Selected Poems, line 14.
[iv] Anthony Ostroff, ed., The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1964), 50. Italics mine.
[v] Ralph J. Mills, Jr., ed., Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 218.
[vi] Ibid. 50.
[vii] Roethke, Selected Poems, 116, line 19.
[viii] Ibid. lines 23–24.
[ix] Plato, Republic, 509b, 6.590b.
[x] “Apophatic” stems from apophanai, “to speak off or away from,” implying the paradox of speaking the unspeakable. See: Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
[xi] Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 1.3 1001A; CD II 144.10–15.
[xii] Ibid. 997AB.
[xiii] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xxi.
[xiv] Ibid. xiv.
[xv] Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998), 68.