Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

160 Pages·2015·3.03 MB·English

by  Clark Strand

Copyright © 2015 by Clark Strand
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of
Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
ISBN 9780812997729
eBook ISBN 9780812997736
www.spiegelandgrau.com
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Susan Turner
Cover design: Alex Merto
Cover photograph: Yann Mingard
v4.1
a
And Mary answered and said,
“What is hidden from you, I will proclaim.”
—THE GOSPEL OF MARY 5:7
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
PREFACE
Part I • HOUR of the WOLF
Part II • A DARK MANIFESTO
Part III • The BLACK MADONNA
Part IV • GOSPEL ACCORDING to the DARK
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOURCE NOTES and RECOMMENDED READING
By Clark Strand
About the Author
PREFACE
When the people of my small mountain town got their first dose of electrical lighting in
late 1924, “they were appalled by the brightness and crudity of the resulting
illumination,” wrote local historian Alf Evers. As Christmas approached, a protest was
staged on the village green denouncing the evils of modern light.
“Old people swore that reading or living by so fierce a light was impossible.” Besides
which, it was a matter of pride: “Every flaw in their household furnishings was shown
up.” That much light invited comparisons. It threw everything in sharp relief. It was an
advertisement for the new, the rich, and the beautiful—a verdict against the old, the
ordinary, and the poor.
A few days later the naysayers got their way. The power failed, and Christmas on the
village green was celebrated with nothing but candlelight to pierce the solstice, the
darkest time of the year. I’ve searched the annals of the town to see if there were any
further protests before it went fully electric a year or so later, but I haven’t found any.
Here as elsewhere in early twentieth-century America, the reluctance to embrace
brighter lights was a brief and halfhearted affair.
People sensed there was something wrong with the new technology. They just
couldn’t say what it was. All but the most cantankerous felt foolish to oppose a product
as clean and cheap as electrical light. It was so cheerful and convenient and downright
wholesome that any argument against it seemed wrongheaded, maybe even evil. After
all, what good Christian would argue in favor of the dark?
There was no stopping the century of progress for which Edison’s invention was
literally the guiding light. Who could have known it was the worst thing that could
happen to the planet? We don’t know the value of darkness until we have destroyed it.
We don’t know what a soul is worth until it is gone.

Part I
HOUR of the WOLF
I am not afraid of the dark.
My wife insists that this is the reason people listen when I speak on spiritual matters.
I spent years studying Zen Buddhism. After that, I immersed myself in spiritual
practices from all over the world. But none of that made me wiser or more enlightened
than anyone else. It isn’t the reason people listen.
From childhood on I have woken up in the middle of the night and sought out the
darkness. Not only am I not afraid of it, I love it more than anything. That’s what people
are drawn to without knowing it. It’s important to them for reasons they find difficult to
explain. It’s as if I’ve reminded them of something they once knew, but can now no
longer recall.
As a young child in Alabama, I began slipping out into the night whenever I could.
We lived in a small town in a house only one block from the golf course. I loved the big
heady silence of the starry fairways and the pockets of darkness in the trees between the
links that almost seemed absolute.
Once, when I was caught coming home, my mother demanded to know what I had
been doing, and I pretended I had been sleepwalking. I wasn’t a noticeably eccentric
child, but I knew there was something strange about my nighttime wanderings. My
mother believed the lie, or probably she just chose to believe. After all, I was wearing
shoes. But it was just as well. What drove me on these midnight rambles? I would have
been at a loss to explain, even if she had asked.
By the time I was a teenager, I was often walking five miles or more in the middle of
the night. I strolled through backyards and graveyards, found my way through fences
and fields. I felt profoundly at home in the dark. We moved so often when I was a child
that it was hard for me to find the kind of comfortable footing with friends and teachers
that most children take for granted. So my inner home, my dream home, became the
darkness itself.
I went to a college situated atop a large plateau and surrounded by thousands of acres
of wilderness. I hiked at night, discovering caves and cliffs. I climbed water towers and
visited abandoned barns. I felt protected, not just by the bounds of the university, but by
nature itself. Out in the fields under the stars alone, I had no one to please but myself.
I never carried a flashlight. The nights were rarely so dark, even in the country, that
you couldn’t feel your way along a path or road. I once hiked up a mountain in
complete darkness on a summer night with a thick canopy of leaves blocking out the
sky. There was no moon. I listened to the sounds my feet made on the pebbles of the
path. If I stepped on leaves, I corrected myself and found the trail again. After two
hours I arrived at the summit and finally saw the stars.
It was a wonder my health didn’t suffer from lack of sleep, but it never did. Even
then I was on the verge of knowing something about darkness and the human body, and
about consciousness and our relationship to the divine and how they all depended on