You can still feel the community pack This place: it’s like going into a turfstack, A core of old dark walled up with stone A yard thick. When you’re in it alone, You might have dropped, a reduced creature, To the heart of the globe. No worshipper Would leap up to his God off this floor. Founded there like heroes in a barrow, They sought themselves in the eye of their King Under the black weight of their own breathing. And how he smiled on them as out they came, The sea a censer and the grass a flame.
—Seamus Heaney, ‘In Gallarus Oratory’
i. introduction
When I began this writing experiment one of my stated goals was to take my scholarly and practical engagements with the history of technology and spin them out beyond my particular academic focuses, out into bigger, wider realms of investigation and criticism. I have been reading the likes of Jacque Ellul, Ivan Illich, Lewis Mumford, and others of a similar vein (who not coincidentally tend to be very hard to classify politically) for years, but have struggled to find a way to articulate my own thoughts in a way that draws upon my particular areas of knowledge and experience. This essay, and the following installments (at the very least a part ii and probably a part iii), will tackle a subject at the intersection of technological criticism and of history that I have been thinking through for a long time to some degree or another, namely, the history of human interactions with the night and with physical darkness. It is easy to forget that night-time has a distinct history, and indeed it has only been in recent years that historians, primarily of early modern and modern Europe (a pattern that tends to hold true almost universally alas), have begun to sketch the outlines of a history of the night (for an overview of existing historiography see this lovely essay from last year, which I will cite further in a future installment). The history of darkness—which could be the darkness of night, or the darkness within a built structure, or within a recess of the earth—has at the same time attracted some attention of its own, often in parallel with the history of the night.
What I’d like to do in this series of essays is illumine—sorry—some aspects of this history which have not been previously drawn together, with a focus on the technologies of night and darkness—electrical illumination most obviously, but also including such things as Paleolithic cave illumination and art all the way up to the night-time flicker of our computer and phone screens. In keeping with the sensitive aesthetic of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (whose work I’ll discuss further below), I’ll leave much to the shadows, touching only briefly on the modern transformations of the night that marked the fossil-fuel powered revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or the early modern European transformations of the night that preceded the advent of mass illumination. Others have dealt with these things quite well—where they interest me is in comparative aspect and phenomenologically, as someone who has lived most of his life within the glare of electric lights (albeit from some dispositional urge always disliking strong glares and overhead artificial lights in general). To pluck out another metaphor from the realm of night and darkness, the following essays will be more like exploring a cave underground: a slow movement of twists and turns and crawls and short sprints, from room to tunnel to room, stopping to poke into the odd crack and dead-end passage.
In the end I think we will find that the history of the night is a fine example of how technological disruption and transformation did not, as it were, create itself: cultural conditions of early modern Europe set the stage for mass illumination, and not vice versa; but at the same time once those technological transformations got under steam and became part of the larger hegemonic structure of modern industrial capitalism they became self-reproducing on a global scale, and now fundamentally shape our apprehension of the world around us, of our own selves, even of other selves and of God. Technologies and technological complexes are not autonomous, we might say, until they are, but not absolutely—we can take the tools of modernity to begin a recovery of what has been lost in the process, and in a sort of dialectical movement come out with insights and awareness that would not have existed otherwise.
For this first installment I’ll lead us further into the subject with a couple of autobiographical anecdotes, experiences from my own life history that have shaped my apprehension and experience of night and darkness. I follow these exploration with a look at some choice passages from Tanizaki’s beautiful essay In Praise of Shadows (In'ei Raisan), finally summing up with some reflections on light, darkness, and their relationship to ritual and religious thought and practice.
ii. into the dark, into the night
The ground dropped suddenly into an erie green-blue watery chasm at the base of the sinkhole, the strange shapes of jagged limestone rising above the water’s edge, and a dark narrow fissure striking back into the earth away from the still silent water. I do not remember the walk down into the sinkhole, but I vividly still recall making my way through the long muddy tunnel that led from that fissured opening. I was six years old and this was my first experience in a ‘wild’ cave; a few months earlier, it must have been, our family had toured Ruby Falls on Lookout Mountain, but that was a ‘show cave,’ filled with electric lights and marked with paved walkways, interesting, but somehow inauthentic even to my young and scarcely formed tastes, and certainly not as visceral, I would discover, as the ‘real thing.’ Here in Devilstep Hollow Cave, at the head of Tennessee’s Sequatchie Valley, was the real thing. After a certain point the last glimmer of daylight behind us faded away, and when we flipped off our lights, the darkness was absolute, a true ‘core of old dark walled up,’ deep inside the earth. I have explored many caves since, and still always make a point of turning off the light and listening and feeling—not quite silence, for in the utter dark the sounds of the body are dialed up, particularly in those places far from the drip of water or the movement of air. The darkness feels dense and material, like nothing on the world of the surface. With the comfort of artificial lights at hand it is exhilarating; the prospect of finding oneself in such darkness without lights, terrifying. But the experience of the deep dark was not why were in this particular cave. Something else beckoned deeper within.
That something was one of the more spectacular assemblies of Mississippian culture cave art, dating back perhaps a thousand years, perhaps more, drawn upon the walls and ceiling in carbon black and ocher and with etching into the living stone. Strange creatures and symbols, all drawn from the repertoire of the Mississippian culture groups’ religious systems, whatever precisely they were—and all reconstructions are to no small degree guesses given our lack of textual sources—looked down in the twilight glow of our electric flashlights. Scorch marks on the ceiling bore further witness to the humans who had been here long before us, for whom this cave bore some deep significance and who further transformed the space with their images.
Of course at the time I had only a general concept of who had made these images and even less sense of why (the latter of course difficult for anyone now living to ascertain). I was familiar already with Native American cultures and history to some degree (another of my quite early memories, chronologically just a little antecedent to my descent into Devilstep Hollow, is of sliding, rather irreverently on mature reflection, down the grassy slopes of a burial mound in Moundville, Alabama). But this was different, and the phenomenological effect and its lodging in my memory was not primarily a matter of historical or even intellectual cognition. It was visceral, spiritual even, and, I think, close to what this place and so many places like originally meant for the humans that first hallowed them, or, we might say, sensed and supplemented the numinous charge already present at the interface of human experience and underground landscape. I have often thought since what such an underground space—and there are of course many other analogous ones, going all the way back to the Paleolithic—must have felt like to the Indigenous people who first ventured there, what they saw, sensed, and how these images and the darkness-rich chambered room meant to them. Where we could pour light powered by electric batteries, they carried flickering cane torches, the light dancing and glimmering, rising and falling in the stochastic rhythm of the flame.
In the above-ground world, one experience of the night—of true night, far from the lights of electrical civilization—stands out in my memory, a pin-point of experience that has shaped my thoughts and actions for years since, evidence if such is needed of how much a seemingly minor happening can reverberate for years and years to come. I was camping with my father and younger brother in the Great Smoky Mountains, in Elkmont I believe; when night fell, my dad insisted that we go on a hike along the nature trail that winds up from the campground onto the mountainside and then back down. He also insisted that we not use our flashlights, which seemed strange to my brother and I but we desisted from them anyway. Just as my father promised, our eyes and other senses gradually adjusted, and as we felt our way through the night, guided only by the light of the stars overhead—stars that could actually be seen through the trees, bright and glorious—the forest became less threatening and more present, in a way that had never been true when using artificial lights to illumine our path in the nighttime. We saw and heard creatures of the night as we quietly made our way up and around the trail, entering into the life of the nocturnal forest for a short time. I recall being a little frightened though not excessively, and the longer we walked the more natural and comfortable it felt.
In the years since I have made it a point to navigate the forest at night without artificial lights, and I have not always felt so peaceful and confident—there was a night in which I had decided to sleep out in the open, just my sleeping bag between me and the forest, and was awakened in the dead of night by a pack of coyotes howling in a circle around our camp. The darkness did not feel particularly magical at that point, instead, the sense of danger and threat was palpable, my throat dry, and I only with difficulty extracted myself from my bag and pulled up to our fire-ring, coached a fire back to life, and only then was able to return to sleep.
One final experience, rather more recent—from my college days—that has shaped my experience of the night and of its interface with modernity: in the course of a trip to Ireland during my junior year, I and a couple of friends walked from our lodging into the small town adjacent, somewhere in the southwest of Ireland, I forget now exactly where, for a drink. We returned around midnight I think. Walking along the sidewalk out of the town into the countryside, back towards our lodging, I looked up into the sky, and to my great surprise despite being on the edge of a small town, the stars were plainly visible, the great sweep of the Milky Way coursing along, bright and beautiful. Where in America a similar locality, even in a rural area, would have been drenched in light pollution, in this corner of Ireland at least, the stars could still be seen. It was a revelation, a realization that things could be different, that even within the fabric of industrial civilization, potentially, the stars that were hidden back home could be revealed.
iii. finding night and shadow in industrializing Japan
As far as I can tell, one of the first people in the modern world to really take seriously the place and meaning of darkness and of night in the industrialized, electrically-illuminated present was the Japanese author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s 1933 work In Praise of Shadows. Conventionally categorized as a work on aesthetics and cultural difference, while it does concern itself with both of those topics, Tanizaki ends up engaging in deeply sensitive and insightful historical, phenomenological, and even ecological critique, critically reflecting on the ways in which Japan’s route to industrial modernity had fundamentally transformed—not generally for the better in Tanizaki’s reckoning—how people perceived and moved about in their material and spiritual worlds. Most importantly, where traditionally darkness, shadows, and softness of light had been crucial to the arrangement and apprehension of the world, particularly interior spaces, the introduction and fevered embrace of electrical illumination had completely altered those traditional forms of arrangement and experience.
To summarize Tanizaki’s analysis, the traditional, pre-industrial Japanese aesthetic had grown out of the experience of darkness, shadow, and age, finding beauty and meaning and pleasure in limitations, in materiality, in the most quotidian and visceral. Industrial modernity disrupted the conditions that made that aesthetic possible, that called it forth, disruptions sometimes quite literal—Tanizaki describes a prospective moon-viewing excursion foreclosed by the discovery that the temple to which he had planned to go would feature loudspeakers set up playing the Moonlight Sonata, to which he imagined, probably correctly, floodlights would be added blasting artificial light into the night alongside the music. Beyond such aesthetic atrocities, Tanizaki identified what we might call problems of scale: the tendency of industrial modernity, whether in illumination or anything else, to end up being built not for humans but for machines, industrial production and infrastructure taking on a logic of its own. The electric lights of the 1930s generated immense heat, for instance, making interior spaces quite unbearable, seemingly cause enough to dim them. Tanizaki also notes the ways in which everything from food to urban transportation infrastructure were being increasingly dominated by the logic of the machine, scaled and managed for the machine, not the human.
There is much more that could be said of Tanizaki’s essay—despite being relatively short he covers quite a few discrete though interconnecting topics, to which we’ll have additional recourse in future installments—but for now I’d like to draw attention to one specific passage, worth reproducing in full, that gets to the experiential nature of darkness in the absence of excess artificial light:
I think of an unforgettable vision of darkness I once had when I took a friend from Tokyo to the old Sumiya teahouse in Kyoto. I was in a large room, the “Pine Room” I think, since destroyed by fire, and the darkness, broken only by a few candles, was of a richness quite different from the darkness of a small room. As we came in the door an elderly waitress with shaven eyebrows and blackened teeth was kneeling by a candle behind which stood a large screen. On the far side of the screen, at the edge of the little circle of light, the darkness seemed to fall from the ceiling, lofty, intense, monolithic, the fragile light of the candle unable to pierce its thickness, turned back as from a black wall. I wonder if my readers know the color of that “darkness seen by candlelight.” It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes.1
If in the modern world we tend to take darkness within interiors or in outside spaces and landscapes as a type of absence, or, at most, a feature of a particular ‘atmosphere’ (a romantic dinner by candlelight, or the setting for a horror film, and so forth), here there is a strong relationship between the built space itself and the experience of dark and of limited light, light that blended into and was constituted by the dense material dark of the space. The same space contains both expansiveness and intimacy, in Tanizaki’s rendering all of the details have significance and work together as an organic unity—all that can be seen, that is, as there were no doubt features of the room that escaped his view and hence did not contribute to his experience. We can imagine a very different experience indeed if the room had been lit by electrical lights.
There is a kinship, I think, between the sense of space and materiality of such a room and that of the deep cave beyond the sun’s reach; it is not precisely comfortable but neither is it utterly foreign or threatening. The specific technologies with which we approach and contrast the night and the dark can dramatically change our experiences and what is possible. Among the most bewildering darknesses is that generated by an abrupt transition from strong electrical lights to their absence, before one’s eyes can adjust, for instance. All darknesses are not, we might say, created equal, and what we do with and in any given instance of darkness can vary quite dramatically indeed.
iv. darkness, danger, limits, ritual
The human experience and interpretation of night and darkness has always been ambiguous and heterogeneous across human cultures, to be sure: in Scripture, for instance, we read of God’s creating both, as parallels to day and light, implying a relative autonomy of the darkness of night, which is praised at various points in Scripture as what we might call a balance to the day, a space in which humans rest and other creatures go about their business. Day ‘belongs’ to humans but night—distinct from the day, this being long before our electric light-drenched nights were so much as imagined as possibilities—is necessary for humans, even if they do not own it. As metaphors of course light and darkness are consistently paired, here the illumining and revealing nature of light within darkness being stressed, with spiritual darkness always a negative, just as spiritual death is. But just as with physical, biological death, literal physical darkness is often a good: the night is the space above all spaces for prayer; the Temple’s inner sanctum is dark and hidden; God speaks from within the cloud; and so on. Spaces of darkness provide for the realization of light, and hence point us towards the contemplation of spiritual realities. It is not merely an accident of architectural history whereby many, perhaps most, Orthodox churches in the world resemble the Japanese aesthetics praised by Tanizaki far more than those of, say, the Gothic. The candle flickering before an icon in a dimly-lit church contains both the allowance of darkness and the power of light; a candle in broad daylight, or under the glare of massive overheads, would not have the same resonances. There is some power, some deep meaning in the dark of ritual space, in the use of spare illumination that leaves much in shadow. As Tanizaki’s description above suggests, darkness can take on many forms and meanings, which the world of electrical power tends to reduce or void altogether.
Yet much darkness, particularly the darkness of the night and of the cave, signifies (or, in many places, once signified and might once again one day in the not-so-distant future) human absence, a lack of ownership, a lack of control. To walk in the deep forest at night without illumination beyond the stars is to enter into a space that does not belong to humans, that is deeply other. It is to step up against the limits of the human and of innate human power and ability. The darkness of the deep cave is similar, with an even more radical limitation of human ability therein. A frisson of danger is always present, but not just or only fear—the wolves (or coyotes!) might threaten beyond in the dark, but humans can also come to navigate and feel their way into the dark of the forest night. The night can be a realm of possibility, of contemplation; to reduce it to a threat to be maximally dispelled is to lose that possibility and to foreclose many others (there is I suspect a pathway here to a cultural history of blindness and how perceptions thereof have related to our history of the night).
Perhaps this is why dark spaces and dark times have for so long been spaces and times of ritual practice, of ritual states and conditions, charged with power and potency (for good and for ill—the night of prayerful vigil can also be the night of concourse with evil). This connection arguably runs as far back as the Upper Paleolithic and probably before, based on what certainly seem to be the subterranean material traces of ritual and something akin to what we call ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality.’ Ritual at its root puts the human in touch with that which is beyond the human, and to approach God, or to approach the spirits or even to enter into proximity with the core of one’s self is to court danger, to pass beyond the domain of human power and control into something more powerful. Perhaps also very fundamentally, as beautifully suggested in the poem by Seamus Heaney at the start of this essay, ritual in darkness can become a means of passing out into the light, into holy fire. Out darkness, light. Such a ritual movement from sanctified, ritually charged darkness—of inner spaces or of the night itself—can then prepare us for other forms of darkness, real and metaphorical, that are not blessed with ritualization and sanctification.
Well. If you have made it this far in the cavern, dear reader, let me give you a preface of the next installment in this series, namely, an examination of the history of the night in the early modern Islamicate world, something I have studied at some depth in the past and which I want to summarize and integrate with this wider narrative arc, so stay tuned for that! In the meantime, turn off some lights at night, permit some shadows, look for the stars or the glow of the snow if you’re fortunate enough to have such right now.
If you really wish to dive deep into this journey into the dark, I’ll be postfacing each installment with a media offering that I hope helps to illustrate the themes. For this week’s essay, please have a look at this gorgeous video of a Divine Liturgy celebrated in a cave church in southern Russia, the interplay of (candle) light and dark and space is beautifully captured:
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker (Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), 34.