In The Yale Review, Lydia Davis writes about seeing the dark:
Absolute, unbroken darkness feels like one massive, enveloping substance, though it is not a substance and is not palpable. It feels close to the face, right up against the face. We need some light—even the faintest light will do—to create a perception of dimensional space. When there is no light at all, I have no depth perception, and so the darkness seems to press up against me. When I look into the near-complete darkness in my darkened bedroom at night, I sometimes see stipples, or pixels, evenly spread through the space, overlaying the dim shapes of furniture and walls, and I think perhaps they are coming from my eyes themselves.
The final sentence hints at a theory of vision floated in Plato’s Timaeus, on which the eyes emit rays of fire that mix with ambient light to brush the surfaces of things:
Now the pure fire inside us [the gods] made to flow through the eyes… [Whenever] daylight surrounds the visual stream, like makes contact with like and coalesces with it to make up a single homogeneous body aligned with the direction of the eyes. … And because this body of fire has become uniform throughout and thus uniformly affected, it transmits the motions of whatever it comes in contact with as well as of whatever comes in contact with it, to and through the whole body until they reach the soul. This brings about the sensation we call “seeing.”
I had always wondered what made this theory tempting: nothing in my experience of vision seemed to elicit it. Maybe Davis provides an answer?
She is surely right about the loss of dimensionality in utter darkness and the claustrophobia it can induce. In darkness one sometimes fears one cannot breathe, as though light were assurance of air—and to move is to risk discovering that one cannot move. No wonder darkness means melancholy.
Not long ago, I was lucky enough to hear Imogen Cooper play “Darknesse Visible” by Thomas Adès. It is a bleakly beautiful piano piece—so dark that Cooper felt she had to follow it, without a break, with Beethoven’s ludic Piano Sonata No. 31 in A flat major, just to lift the mood.
Yet, despite the gloom, Adès makes a gesture of levity in the programme:
This piece is an explosion of John Dowland’s lute song ‘In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell’ (1610). No notes have been added; indeed, some have been removed.
“No notes have been added; indeed, some have been removed"—why do I find that funny?
In part, because it conjures a simplicity bordering on laziness in a composition that is demandingly minimalistic—an indolence that might be sloth.
In part, because I cannot help but hear an allusion to Eric Morecambe, of the double-act Morecambe and Wise, performing his version of Grieg’s Piano Concerto with André Previn—a sketch that ends with one of the most-loved punchlines in British comedic history.
BONUS CONTENT: My brilliant colleague David Kaiser on the mystery of dark matter and primordial black holes in a recent LRB.
BONUS BONUS CONTENT: An unorthodox rendition of Dowland by the German band, Box of Chocolates.
Your first paragraph - my experience at night at Fort Davis, a city with very low light pollution due to the presence there of the McDonald observatory. It is a spiritual experience in the modern context where most of us see lights everywhere, even at night.
Tempting,maybe, because it introduces sympathy, a meeting of like for like, as opposed to an isolated 'İ' (eye) that looks out on an alien, soulless world ?