Three Versions of Darkness
This morning before the sun was fairly up I found myself thinking about the DeLillo I'd been reading the night before--Underworld, again, and with a little jolt I realize it's been almost a decade since I first finished it. If that's the word. I'd remembered the cover for what it suggested--an impressionistic spray of green and gray darkness--and not for what it was--the Twin Towers jabbing like horns out of the lowering brow of Manhattan. Not, maybe, for what it came to be. DeLillo's quick take on the towers, half fillip and half sneer--Klara Sax sees them rising over the early seventies like some kind of crass salesmen of apocalypse--makes it worse, not because he was wrong but because he was right.
My friend Robert quotes Kafka in his letters: "I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."
Cormac McCarthy, who is about to visit a new darkness, quotes Boehme as epigraph to Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West:
It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.
In a thirty-year-old Paris Review interview, William Gass opines wearily that "(t)o write sentences out of context is a fool's business, but I set about doing the fool's business." All writing, perhaps, is borne up out of its own darkness. Which makes four.
1 Comments:
Your talk of darkness and sorrow circles around in my mind with passages of and about W.H. Auden that I've been reading lately. They focus on his time in New York on as it was on the brink of WWII. The way the people, even the city seemed to change in attitude as well as image.
From his perch across the river in Brooklyn Auden struggled to find answers to his struggles with the oncoming darkness of the war, and of the darkness inside himself. His theory that there at the foundation of love is a darkness that one must embrace has some merit. He certainly found inspiration in both love, and the darkness at its core.
From September 1, 1939
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
*Note of interest: In a later 1955 edition the poet changed the final line to "We must love one another and die" in recognition to the mortality of all people, and the ultimately unavoidable dooms of death.
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