They said on the radio this morning that 70% of the universe is made up of dark matter. Pretty much all that we know about it is that it's the stuff that pulls the universe into explansion.
I know I'm extrapolating directly from physics into metaphor here, but this just seems somehow significant:
1. Most of the world we think we know is made up of stuff we don't know anything about, and aren't even aware is there. We are, so to speak, completely in the dark about what's really going on.
2. It's the dark stuff that forces us to expand. Not the light, but the dark.
Both seem as true on the personal level as they are on the physical.
I like them because they help to reclaim the importance of darkness, and sever the link we have made between darkness and evil, negativity and death.
In the Far East white, not black, is the colour of death. Funeral corteges consist of mourners clad in bright white, colour of bones and loneliness. Someone once said white was the colour that he associated with "lost". Like the white fog in which you lose your way, or the over-brilliant, blinding glare of snow.
Dark is the place where the seeds lie buried in winter, until by the grace of that period of apparently endless dormancy, they invisibly begin to germinate, sensing the light and warmth they can now move toward. If they get to the light too early it can be dangerous--they can grow spindly, or be too shallow rooted to withstand strong sun. In the desert of New Mexico the native farmers plant the corn DEEP.
The dark is difficult. Or at least, the cold dark is. As winter fills the evening with frozen ink, I light candles and think of the soft, welcoming dark of tropical and Mediterranean nights, with the little lights strung out between the looming shadows of acacia trees, and the soft songs of crickets rasping in the background.
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I read this yesterday and though it's not directly related, it made me think of this post. The writer is writing about a total eclipse she witnessed in the US in 1979.
The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed--1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight--you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anaesthetic shooting up your arm. If you think very fast, you may have time to think, "Soon it will hit my brain." 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.
Wow, huh?
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