Part 111 of Dark Matter

from Writing the Bright Moment – inspiration & guidance for writers

Hello my friends

If you have signed up for the aspect of my writing that is about writing, the creative and reflective never-ending journey of that, whether mine or yours, you may have already read Parts 1 and 11 of Dark Matter, from my book Writing the Bright Moment. Here’s the final part of that.

My time is now split between writing, and our current project, an experiment with veganic subsistence gardening and reforesting, out of which is arising a vegan cookbook. If you have signed up for following our adventures on the land in harmony with the other species whose patch we share, there’ll be another post for you very soon.

Here’s where I left the Dark Matter 11 post a little while ago from that chapter in my book Writing the Bright Moment. (Scroll down.)

Thank you for reading; I’d love comments.

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The Dark Fire, the other face of the angel
It is not the case, of course, that any piece of writing that is simply a raw expression of passion, a shapeless mass of chaotic feelings of rage, grief, fear, lust, love is also a creative work; or at least, not without a great deal of redrafting, preferably some time after the initial burst of writing. Yet strong writing, and the passion in a piece of writing, are often directly linked to these potent, difficult and frequently unconscious feelings, even though the end result may seem to bear no particular resemblance to the ‘trigger’ feeling or incident. It’s often in these private dark places that we find soul, and a sensitive reader has infallible antennae for the scent and music – or stink and dissonance – of soul. Literature has many faces and many functions; one of these is a doorway into the depths of feeling and of soul.

What does this mean for the writer? It means listening to the promptings of impulse, dream, feeling; it means being willing to just sit with difficult emotions and then to write about them, from within them. It may mean revisiting old pain and grief and rage in your writing. I’ve said that the things we turn away from often have great creative power, and lock up much emotional and psychic energy. It means to allow mud, and blood, and dirt into your writing – even if that writing is not ever shown to anyone else. It means to be aware of using things to distract us from discomfort: eating, drinking, drugs, chattering, sleeping, sex, television, music, books – whatever your avoidance mechanism is. (‘Stick at the business of being alive,’ says writer and creative writing tutor Graham Mort.) It means writing that’s centred in the body. It means not turning away from difficulty but using it as the grit in the oyster, gradually surrounding it with awareness until it gleams.

Robert Bly strongly advises our paying attention to reawakening the senses, and activities which encourage and support this: visiting museums and art galleries, walking, and activities which also support the senses of hearing and smelling – these senses are all too often sidelined in favour of sight; and we all know the impact and immediacy of smell as evocation of another time and place. Our senses, he says, form a bridge to our animal nature, and therefore also to the shadow. ‘The senses of smell, shades of light and dark, the awareness of color and sound, so alive in the primitive man, for whom they can mean life or death, are still alive in us, but numbed... by safety, and by years inside schoolrooms.’

Bly talks of William James’ warning that ‘a certain kind of mind-set was approaching the West – it could hardly be called a way of thought – in which no physical details are noticed. Fingernails are not noticed, trees in the plural are mentioned, but no particular tree is ever loved, nor where it stands; the hair in the ear is not noticed... Since the immense range of color belongs to physical detail – the thatness – of the universe, it is the inability to see color.’

It should be obvious by now that we are talking about a turning away from wildness (as in Bly’s definition, which is not to do with brutality and the savage or hostile), from physicality, from the natural world and ultimately from feelings.

There are many clues, giveaways, that the shadow is present in a piece of writing. One is that the passage or poem will have an ‘edge’ to it. Another, that the poem will be rooted in the world of the senses. And there’s a third: that the poem is resonant with feeling; and that’s feeling, not sentimentality; authentic lived experience. You will sense this in a poem that has a tone of mystery to it, maybe; some substance behind the words, something enormous hiding in its creases; and you will sense that it hooks your own feeling nature. This kind of poem is a doorway.

Any poem that leaps off the page with life contains this shadow. (It doesn’t have to be serious, by the way; playfulness is especially good for drawing attention to the presence of shadow.)

It seems to me now still, as it seemed to Bly in 1988, that we are seeing at the moment in the West a great desiccation in the world of poetry: thin language cut off from its roots of blood and sex and love and longing and nature and childbirth and death and the senses. What are these poets doing with their shadows? What does it say of their lives? ‘What has no shadow has no strength to live,’ said Czeslaw Milosz.

So the shadow is the Dark Fire, the other face of the angel; as necessary to the life of the soul as night is to day. Working with shadow-material in our writing has two strong pluses.

Writing is a way of integrating the shadow into your life. ‘[T]he person who has eaten his shadow,’ says Bly, ‘spreads calmness, and shows more grief than anger. If the ancients were right that darkness contains intelligence and nourishment and information, then the person who has eaten some of his or her shadow is more energetic as well as more intelligent.’ Dr Jung before him argued for the embracing of the opposites. A certain amount of creative tension is probably necessary for survival, full psychological health and certainly for creative productivity. This is how we come to wholeness.

The second is that it may make us a better writer: better able to pay attention, to notice the detail in things, to write in a more rounded way that includes the feelings, the senses and soul, to sustain a piece of writing through difficulties.

Writing that includes the shadow is not something that you can force; but you can practise it. Neither is it ‘too negative’ or necessarily ‘too self-indulgent’ as a practice, as I often hear people say – often those same people who are most afraid of their feeling nature. In fact, it may be an act of the utmost compassion, and of supreme responsibility: if you are willing to acknowledge your demons, you are less likely to unleash them, in their unconscious intensity, on the world.

It is also a way of acknowledging the existence of worlds beyond the surface, and of bringing yourself back to life. The cost of not doing so in writing terms may be uni-dimensional work. In your life, the price may be fragmentation, or the sleep of ignorance. Remember Sleeping Beauty? Her hundred-year sleep was the price she paid for her parents’ fear of inviting the Wicked Fairy to the birth feast. Who do you think the Wicked Fairy is?

So here’s the solid bit. You have to be willing to be changed by your own creations, says Bly. You have to eat the shadow, once you’ve recognised it; it is not enough to bring the shadow into your art; you have to change the way you live.

The alternative may be to keep your own work, your own creativity, split off from the rest of you.

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‘Think of the darkness as potentially healing. It may even be the appearance of what Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca called duende – the ‘dark sounds’ in music, dancing, poetry, [ritual]... the roots of all art. Goethe described duende as ‘a mysterious power that everyone feels but that no philosopher has ever explained’. It is the ‘dark and quivering’ companion to the muse and the angel, the other two sources of inspiration and mysterious gift-giving to human beings... For Lorca, the dark sounds portend the tenderness that emerges after a brush with mortality. It is deeper than the melancholy of the muse, the wistfulness of angels.’

Phil Cousineau

‘...[D]emonism and creativity are psychologically very close to each other. Nothing in the human psyche is more destructive than unrealized, unconscious creative impulses...’

Marie-Louise von Franz

‘From so much loving and so much journeying, books emerge.

And if they don’t contain kisses and landscapes,

if they don’t contain a man with his hands full,

if they don’t contain a woman in every drop,

hunger, desire, anger, roads,

they are no use...’

Pablo Neruda

The Leaving

They’ve clear-felled the woods –

the eerie stretch where I hated to walk alone

and the two great oaks are gone, though their roots

still writhe in the sodden earth.

Even at night now light is everywhere.

Nowhere to hide – for It, for mystery, for owls –

even for me. You can have

too much light.

Under the moon the village is silent.

                                                            Ebb tide.

Out on the mudflats the curlews’ calls

            whistle up unimaginable distances.

© Roselle Angwin