Interesting conversation with [person] the other day about how long we would each last in complete darkness.
[background: some friends of mine are opening up a dark retreat in western mass. complete darkness! 24/7! for days! weeks! someone brings you your food. slightly terrifying to me but I think I get it.]
anyways: how long in complete darkness before I legit freak out. realistically: an hour? unlikely I am ever going to find out so who knows. it’s not the darkness itself that is worrisome it’s the what will my brain do in that darkness. what unfiltered aspects of my psyche would my brain suddenly demand I confront? pass! don’t want to think about it! don’t even want to
Once when the kids were young and I was single-parenting, all the electricity in Cambridge went out. A deer ran into a transformer or something? The whole city shut down, or seemed to anyway. It happened when I was just leaving work. I remember walking home and being like: something feels…off? Then noticed none of the stop lights were working & traffic was a nightmare. Then it started to get darker and there were no street lights.
I picked up my kids from a neighbor’s house and we went home. It was dark by then and I couldn’t find any flashlights that worked. The microwave didn’t work, the oven wouldn’t turn on. No idea what to do with these kids. So we just went back outside and walked. I thought maybe we could walk across the river, maybe things were better there? There were lights, way off in the distance. They were easier to see now that it was dark. Much more difficult to walk on the Cambridge sidewalks without overhead lights though. The sidewalks here are unfriendly, openly antagonistic, even in the brightest light. Anyways we just started walking. Figured we’d get to the light eventually, maybe find a restaurant that was open, and then…? Just figure out one thing and then figure out the next thing.
It’s otherwise always so bright in the city. Bright & noisy. Sleep on our street requires any pick-3 combo of dark curtains, eye masks, ear plugs, melatonin, white noise. You get used to it. I remember when we lived in the midwest it was so much darker but also so much quieter. the dark & the quiet tied together, the same thing, essentially. indivisible. Harder to get used to, somehow. Or what I didn’t get used to was the question of what is in the darkness, what holds its breath in the silence. Here, I know what’s out there at all times: very large rats, annoying 20-somethings walking home from the bar, my annoying neighbor on his goddamn moped. There, who ever knew what was out there in the silence. I always (continually) imagined a person hiding in the shadows, looking in through our windows, watching our lives. watching, doing what. nothing good
When I think about darkness, when I think about the night in the midwest, I remember the time I had to wait for a cab to the airport at 4 in the morning. Still completely dark out, standing in my driveway, looking up I could see every star in the sky. Then I saw one star moving very slowly in a straight line across the sky. 10 seconds of oh my god it’s an alien ship before I realized I was seeing a satellite for the first time. Just standing on the ground, looking up with only my eyes, seeing a satellite in space.
Maybe this is the part that scares me the most. The time between lying down and falling asleep is important to me. lying there in the dark, not reading or watching something, just alone with whatever happens behind my eyelids in the dark. This is where many/most of my ideas come from. phrases that might become stories. melodies that might become songs. as long as write them down. somethings I think creativity is nothing more than the discipline to write down the ideas as they occur to you. I can’t assume i’ll remember or they’ll come back later, I don’t and they never do. forcing myself back awake, writing the ideas down in a notebook or on my phone, is essential. without that what is there, what am I. I couldn’t do that if I was trapped in complete darkness for an extended period of time. I would keep having ideas and keep not being able to do anything with them. torture.