Nebraska Night, August 1, 2020.
Dear friends,
I hope this finds all of you well despite all the vitriol and volatility that 2020 keeps throwing at us!
We had planned on making these posts in a more regular rhythm, but a host of unexpected events—not least of all a road trip from California to New York and back again… more on that later—temporarily stymied these good intentions. But now we're back; and for better or worse, updates will be made on a much more regular basis.
There's been a lot of movement in the various and sundry projects that we are involved with: music, scholarship, visual art, and outreach, etc. For the moment, in this forum, I'd like to turn to one of the main themes that Kathryn and I have been driven to engage with over the summer months as we navigate the strange new territory of an (even more) unmoored manifestation of America.
In the wake of the dark times of the pandemic, we've been reflecting quite a bit on darkness—a term brimming with metaphorical, metaphysical, and moral meanings. Yesterday, we found ourselves at the Autumn Equinox. (Belated wishes to all for a creatively charged change of season; may it bring renewal!) The term "equinox" stems from the Medieval Latin equinoxium, which implies a sense of equality between the dark and the light, day and night. Yet, at least in mainstream western culture, darkness has rarely been treated nearly as favorably as its luminous counterpart.
From the separation of light and darkness in Genesis 1:4, to Plato’s promise of enlightenment from a world of shadows, the binary of light/dark animates many of the West’s sacred stories. Moreover, these metaphorics conceal an implicit metaphysics. Light signifies knowledge, morality, productivity, and other commodities; darkness is sinister, light’s other. Thus, this translation of natural phenomena into the cultural currency of metaphorical and metaphysical narratives conceals a subtle politicization of nature and naturalization of political ideologies. Understood through this filter, as a recent Reuters column has it, “the coronavirus is the dark side of a highly productive, urbanized, interconnected and increasingly prosperous world.”[i]
A primal image of chaos that collapses the distance between metaphor and metaphysics within a historically nyctophobic culture—and as Catherine Keller argues, “tehomophobic”—darkness speaks to the radical blurring of the existential and ecological that the current crisis portends.[ii] The language of darkness militates against teleological notions of reaching the light at the end of the tunnel as quickly as possible. It also rejects the triumphalist rhetoric that frames the experience of the pandemic in terms of waging, as the White House would have it, “total war on [an] invisible enemy” who will be “conquered” by “innovation and sheer willpower,”[iii] as well as the quasi-holistic (and necropolitical) logic of sacrifice for a greater good, as in Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick’s contention that Americans should be ready to give their lives for the sake of the economy, in order to keep “the America that all America loves for [our] children and grandchildren.”[iv]
To my mind, it is in these tenebrous times that darkness should finally be given its due. After all, in such dark times, there can be no “business as usual.”
Because of the fact that the virus exploits the efficiency of the neoliberal world order, short-term responses have focused on fighting the crisis by containment and armament. And naturally the situation demands protective withdrawal on personal levels as well. Paradoxically, however, if long-term changes are to be made, the ecological reality revealed by the pandemic—the interdependence of all life laid bare—calls for new practices of imagining openness, of learning how to be affected while trying to avoid being infected. What then might be gained by employing darkness as a lens? Might there be historical resources for staying with this present darkness long enough to adjust our eyes to a different ecological vision?
I tackle some of these questions in a recently completed chapter, "Viral Visions & Dark Dreams: Ecological Darkness and Enmeshment in the Time of COVID-19,” for the forthcoming Routledge volume titled Pandemic, Ecology, and Theology: Perspectives on COVID-19, edited by Alexander J.B. Hampton, which focuses on the multivalence of darkness and its significance to the current cultural moment. To quote the concisely worded press release, this volume addresses "the collective sense that the pandemic is more than a problem to manage our way out of ... [r]ather, it is a moment to consider our broken relationship with the natural world, and our alienation from a deeper sense of purpose and meaning."
I'm extremely honored to be part of the this timely project, as it touches on multiple themes that I'm passionate about and places me in the company of some truly remarkable scholars, many of whose work I've long admired. For more on the book as well as the other contributors, please click here.
In dialogue with my chapter, Kathryn, as part of the Bay Area artist collective, Collective Genus, produced a short interpretative film, which takes a line from the poet Wendell Berry as it title, "The Dark too Blooms and Sings." Alongside work from the members of her collective, the piece was projected large-scale onto various locations throughout San Francisco over Labor Day Weekend, September 4th-7th. The goal of this city-wide exhibition, given the context of the global pandemic, was to realize the safety and accessibility of an online exhibition, while maintaining the elements of space and place of a more traditional in-person format. For more information on Collective Genus and the exhibition, please click here.
An excerpt of Kathryn's film.
Stay safe out there! And don’t be a stranger.
[i] John Kemp, “Column: Coronavirus Is Dark Side of an Urban Interconnected World,” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-energy-kemp/column-coronavirus-is-dark-side-of-an-urban-interconnected-world-kemp-idUSKBN22Y17I.
[ii] The term references the Hebrew word “tehom” in Genesis 1:2, “abyss.” Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), 23–32.
[iii] Form letter from the White House regarding the economic impact payment, May 8, 2020.
[iv] The statement occurred on Fox News on March 23 as Patrick was interviewed by Tucker Carlson. For an introduction to “necropolitics,” see J.A. Mbembé and Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15(1) (Winter 2003): 11–40.