Luminosity
At high noon on September 19, 1979, a woman walked on the bottom of the ocean. Her name is Sylvia Earle. On that day she became the first human to walk untethered at this depth: the midnight zone.
(Something I love about Sylvia Earle? Her nickname is “Her Deepness.”)
She dove at midday off the coast of Hawaii’s Oahu island. Down Her Deepness sunk, the submarine passing through the sunlit area into what’s called the twilight zone where light lessens and takes on the same dusky quality as evening. At five hundred feet, shapes are discernable but little else. It might be a coyote crossing the street or just the neighbor’s dog. Six hundred feet: starlight. Now it’s like camping in a meadow, inky with some help from the stars. One thousand feet: midnight.
On the sea floor Earle stands a quarter of a mile below the surface, surrounded by 600 pounds of pressure per square inch. Here, it is always night—a thought that both fascinates and unnerves me. (Something else I love about Sylvia Earle? She felt no fear, just reverence.)
She takes her first steps in the dive suit, pressed on all sides by a roaring silence. The submarine headlights illuminate her path. In their beams she sees giant crabs clinging to sea fans. They move slowly in the current that still exists at that depth, “like shirts on the line,” she would later say. She turns and motions for the helmsman to shut the lights off. The world clicks into nothing.
They call this the aphotic zone: “photic” derived from “photon,” meaning particle of light. The zone of no light particles. But contrary to its name, in the aphotic zone, Earle found an illuminated world.
In Bulgaria’s Balkan mountains, roses are harvested in the dark. They will lose 40 percent of their fragrance by the time the sun is high, so pickers move among them like ghosts when the scent is strongest. Beneath the moon, petals glow pink as organs.
In her underwater garden Earle walks among strange flowers: sea fans and coral and organisms that float like pollinators. Luminescent fish set the darkness to glowing. As she moves through the deep she comes upon a bamboo coral, coiled and massive. She looks strange to the coral, this two-legged creature moving toward it trailing bubbles. She reaches out the pincers attached to her dive suit. Blue emanates from the point of contact, pulsing along its branches in rivulets. At her touch, the coral emits light like a fragrance.
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In fourth grade I stopped sleeping. It was simple like that: one night I could not fall asleep. The insomnia had no traceable cause, so at first it confused and then annoyed me. But after enough wakeful nights, I began to feel afraid.
I dreaded the sun setting, because I knew soon I’d be left to float alone in the dark. I developed a detailed list of prayer requests, a litany which my dad dutifully marched through before bed while I kept my eyes open, ticking them off on my fingers. It was superstitious and incantatory, and I clung to this ritual like a rabbit’s foot.
Left alone I lay alert in the dark with all senses firing. I felt untethered from the sleeping house, floating beyond reach in my private sea. After several months the insomnia faded—doctors chalked it up to my age, a time of developmental leaps and changes in the brain. But for years afterward, I recalled that feeling of isolation and the sense of darkness as a void.
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Day and night, dark and light. As far back as I can remember my imagination has been steeped in Christianity, a religion preoccupied by these motifs. The hymns and stories I was raised on spoke of a God who salvaged humans from darkness. The ancient creeds call Christ God of God, Light of Light. This Light arrived on earth in human form so that humans might also be transfigured into light. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,” the prophet Isaiah said. “Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined.”
This is the dichotomy I absorbed as a child: light and dark opposed each other. If light was good then darkness must threaten that goodness.
As a teenager I set my alarm to Belle and Sebastian’s song “Another Sunny Day.” This is what I aspired to—days of sun after sun after sun. During these teenage years I had a sense, both certain and naive, that my life would follow a generally upward trajectory; that things would get a little brighter each year as I learned to navigate the world as an adult. I imagined that I would grow up to live in a yellow house full of windows, and inside, yellow sunlight would coat the walls. There would be a backyard with citrus trees and chickens, and I would walk through grass to collect eggs. When I pictured this house, it was always morning.
Which is to say: it’s been easy for me to love the light. Especially in the morning at its most raucous. Something about the way it slides down the walls like honey, like paint splashed by a profligate painter. Something about light paired with that first cup of coffee, forever a luxury, forever tasting like the first cup of your life. I could watch the way light moves all my life and never run out of things to say about it. And yet even as I write this I know that it’s not light alone that I can see, but sunlight paired with shadows—light moving through not-light.
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One summer, when I was fourteen or so, I started reading poems in the dark. In an odd reversal of my childhood insomnia, I would wait until everyone was asleep and my nighttime isolation was absolute. Then I slid open the glass doors of my bedroom that led to the backyard. I carried a quilt and a worn copy of e.e. cummings poems to a bench. cummings was the first poet I read and loved. The poems had lines like, “believe me dear / clocks have enough to do / without confusing timelessness and time,” and, “quivers this miracle of summer night / her trillion secrets touchably alive.” Their frank emotion appealed to me. I underlined the words with a mechanical pencil and felt them hum around me. It was early summer; solstice was still teething. In my memory the air smells like jasmine, though the blossoms that opened that time of year grew in the front yard. But that is how I associate those nights: jasmine, e.e. cummings, and the velvety shelter of darkness.
With its lack of form and punctuation, cummings’s poetry mimics our thoughts in the liminal space between waking and sleeping. Sometimes when I am softening into that in-betweenness before dreams, I have thoughts that feel truer than their rational counterparts. There’s the sense of solving a puzzle or of a knot loosening. This is the hypnagogic state of consciousness: when reality bends and then dissolves. Psychologists call this state the “twilight” period of brain activity for the way it moves between shades of dark and light. Hypnagogic thoughts are associative and even hallucinatory. In my experience, hypnagogia often produces the same attunement I feel when listening to poetry read aloud.
I’m not sure why it seemed important to sit under the sky after everyone had fallen asleep or why I never told anyone about this habit. Those nights I expected good things from the dark, insight or a kind of presence that disappeared by morning. I was seeking novelty and a container for teenage emotions. In some ways—though I don’t know if I knew this then—I was seeking God.
There I sat: feeling small, feeling held. So I guess I know something about how to love the night after all.
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How much of the religious dark-light binary is a result of human imagination—our human distastes imposed on God? God does not fear the dark; God created the dark. Yet we’re stamped with an atavistic dread of this unknown.
When my grandmother grew old and her lungs betrayed her—impotent after a lifetime of smoking, useless as a pair of crushed moth wings—she suffered from panic attacks. Before she died she woke screaming into the night, fear clamping down on her final hours. The doctor assured her children this was normal, something he called “terminal agitation.” Often hospice patients experience lethargy during the day but become active at night, hallucinating and crying out. The agitation mounts as they approach the twilight hours. In my grandmother’s case, she thrashed against her oncoming night until the moment she softened into it.
The year that Sylvia Earle walked beneath the ocean, Annie Dillard drove to central Washington to watch a solar eclipse. In the seconds before the moon slid over the sun, spectators on that hilltop near Yakima saw the moon’s shadow rushing across the earth. Before the world went dark they watched this void hurtle toward them “hauling darkness like a plague behind it.”
“We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder,” Dillard wrote. “It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out.”
The umbra, this shadow cone of the moon, passes over the earth at a rate of 1,800 miles an hour. This speed is impossible to conjure. Beneath the umbra the light of midday simply blinks off like a cosmic switch flipped.
“Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anesthetic shoot up your arm,” wrote Dillard. “You can feel the deadness race up your arm; you can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of your own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.”
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My grandmother’s terminal agitation was contained to her final days, but she suffered panic attacks for decades. I inherited this predisposition to anxiety, which announced its presence most acutely in my early twenties. Previously unremarkable activities—driving or reading a book or sitting in the middle seat of an airplane row—could be hijacked by a surge of fear. The adrenaline would pour over me as if tipped from a bucket. This kind of physical response obliterates rational thought. Melanie Challenger, a researcher of animal and human nature, describes the sudden terror of panic attacks as “an animal shadow sweeping over the human form.” Even during steadier weeks a subtle current of fear hummed beneath my skin. It siphoned saturation from the days and blotted out the childhood certainties I held about my future, about my faith.
During the worst of it I could not pray with words; I could only sit in their absence. In bed at night I listened to my heart thrum. I would push my fingertips into the space between my ribs and feel it jump. Most mornings I sat on our gray couch in silence. Rather than pray with words, I would sink into a velvety nothing that felt expansive enough to hold both me and my fear.
As years passed and anxiety gradually loosened its hold, I have continued to look for God in spaces unilluminated by words or certainty. I’m not sure exactly what I expect from the dark, but I am willing to wait here.
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God is light but God contains galaxies, so God must be darkness as well. (Psalm 139: “Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.”) In all those timeless eons before God created light, was God happy to dwell without it? Jesus rose before dawn to pray alone. When he went to the grave he remained there for three days, hinting that darkness holds its own power of resurrection.
For centuries people of faith have willingly entered the metaphorical dark—desert caves, asceticism, silence—to be transfigured. The church itself moves between shadow and light throughout the year. The liturgical seasons of Advent and Lent are extended forays into darkness. During Advent Christians wait for God to be born again among us, remembering that God’s human body took shape in the utter night of Mary’s womb. The forty days of Lent—known in the Orthodox church as the season of “bright sadness”—ask believers to sit in the lightless tomb for longer than is comfortable. The ritual of waiting for resolution implies that darkness can make you porous to God, if you let it.
Mystics have long insisted on a way of seeing that comes through darkness: a sight beyond sight. St. John of the Cross wrote of a “dark night of the soul,” a movement toward union with an unknowable Divine. Mysticism understands darkness as capacious, holding the potential to glimpse the God beyond our comprehension. Black theologians, too, have worked to reclaim darkness as a space of holy encounter. “God is known through the very bodies of the oppressed,” theologian Andrew Prevot writes, “their dark bodies and dark experiences carry the unconditional promises of love and justice of God.” This theological lens reimagines language around darkness and night. Instead of serving as a foil to truth and goodness, darkness can be a place where a mysterious God meets our deep wounds and longings. Speaking of the creation narrative, the Rev. Dr. Kelle Brown writes, “The vast and nurturing embrace of blackness birthed the light. I contend that the dark is where God begins God’s work with and in us.”
Perhaps a sustained reverence for both dark and light would have kept the church from assigning value to whiteness. Perhaps it would have pointed mourners to the comfort of unknowing, and seekers toward the answers that night can hold.
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In my early twenties, I read Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. It was June and the daylight stretched long. I remember lying on the grass as I read, the sun warming the back of my legs. Gilead is a series of letters written by a dying minister to his young son. In the letters, John Ames devotes what could be considered an excessive amount of attention to light. He turns to it again and again, as if he just can’t stop admiring the way it plays on water and grass and his son’s hair. His sense of light as a tangible, substantive element—“rest[ing] on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap”— mimics his faith. Ames embodies a solid sort of spirituality. Even though death is near, he trusts that he is about to be made imperishable. He looks forward to seeing his son again by the light of resurrection.
Ames’s theology might be called cataphatic. This kind of theology insists that God can be apprehended through image and symbol and words. The inverse of cataphatic is apophatic, the via negativa. In silence and absence, we know God only by understanding what God is not.
“God Whom I meet in darkness,” Thomas Merton wrote. “I have prayed to you in the daytime with thoughts and reasons, and in the nighttime you have confronted me, scattering thought and reason.”
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Years pass. Another summer, this one just beginning. My husband and I are staying on the coast of Oaxaca for several weeks, in a bungalow tucked among star fruit and mango trees. The kitchen and bathroom are both outdoors and during the day we take upwards of three showers to rinse the sweat from our skin. We sleep hard with a fan blowing ferociously and the windows and door flung open against the night’s heat, screens the only separation between us and the jungle.
In Oaxaca I pick up Gilead again. And I see what I had forgotten: John Ames loves the night. After the death of his first wife and baby, he passes decades in the dark: walking through town and studying scripture and listening to the radio under moon and stars. In the quietest hours he sits alone at the kitchen table with the lights off, his grief keeping company beside him. During the years of his deepest grief, I realize, when words and certainty were an affront, the minister who loved the light sought shelter in shadow.
Since I first read the novel I’ve thought a lot about the division, if one exists, between dark and light. About how they are not binary but rather shades that ebb in and out of one another. I read once that the Quran instructs those fasting during Ramadan to “eat and drink until the white thread of dawn becomes distinct to you from the black thread.” I tried to picture two distinct threads and couldn’t; because really it is a long graying in between, and there is no distinct line between dark and dawn.
Here in Oaxaca I feel the most inner quietness I have in years. The anxiety that once lived beneath the surface of my skin has stilled, if not disappeared. Yet more often than not I continue to reach for God in silence, without the illumination of words. Sinking into the no-man’s-land between waking and sleeping, I sense a presence that I hope is God tapping at the edges of my consciousness. Outside our bungalow an entire world moves under a blanket of stars, palms nodding like sea fans and moths floating through the air. Iguanas and cats shuffle through dry leaves. A squirrel skitters and clacks on our roof. A bird whistles the same high, piercing note again and again.
Toward dawn I wake and push through the screen door to use the bathroom, feet finding their way to my sandals, the sounds of night just as clear outside as within. I slip back into bed and pull the thin blanket over me. It’s woven with red and orange and indigo, like a child’s painting of a sunrise. We sleep beneath it until the sky lightens and the animals scream the day into breaking.
