Darkness in literature / Kathleen Jamie's Darkness and Light

Darkness in literature

Kathleen Jamie's Darkness and Light

This December, our seasonal reading series will concentrate on the theme of darkness in literature, beginning with a poet's search for 'starry dark' and solstice light

Sarah Crown
Tuesday 11 December 2012 08.02 GMT

During the long days of summer, it's easy to forget the dark. The slow, dissolving twilights and bright mornings have it on the run; by midsummer, you can go to bed at 10pm and wake at 6am and miss it completely. But at this time of year, when the northern hemisphere nights are pressing up against the window and we're filling our houses with lamps and fires and Christmas decorations to beat back the blackness, it's a different story. Daylight in December is pale and fleeting; by midwinter's day, we're spending two-thirds of our life in the dark. And as the nights draw in, the metaphors come flooding back, too: darkness as absence, darkness as challenge, darkness as threat. The metaphysical struggle between good and evil, dark and light – which Christianity codifies as the birth of Jesus, the light that "shineth in darkness" – is enacted daily.

In Darkness and Light, the thoughtful, beautiful opening essay to her 2005 collection Findings, Kathleen Jamie considers both the metaphors that darkness furnishes, and darkness itself: "dark as natural phenomenon, rather than as a cover for all that's wicked". It's midwinter, and in the midst of all the usual seasonal pother, Jamie skips out and takes the ferry north from Aberdeen to Orkney. She's in search of two things: "real, natural, starry dark" and, in the neolithic burial mound of Maes Howe, a beam of solstice sunlight that, if conditions are right, will creep through the darkness and illuminate the tomb, as it has done every midwinter for 5,000 years.

In the event, she finds neither. Even at sea, where Jamie had been "secretly hoping for a moment where there was no human light … wholesome, unbanished darkness" there's always a light somewhere: coastal towns on the port side, oil rigs to starboard. And Maes Howe itself is a complex anticlimax. Not only does the sun neglect to perform, but the tomb is filled with surveyors, mapping the walls with lasers to check the progress of worrying cracks. When Jamie emerges from the entrance tunnel she finds that "inside was bright as a tube train, and the effect was brutal … At once a man's voice said, 'Sorry, I'll switch it off,' but the moment was lost." Darkness and light, Jamie shows us, aren't really locked in a dialectic at all, particularly not since the industrial revolution. Maes Howe, sunk in the dark for countless generations, is these days being held up to the light. Try as we might, we'll never experience darkness in the way its builders did.

But if Jamie admits to a throb of disappointment, there's no ersatz nostalgia here for a state that no one born in the 20th century has ever known. This isn't a lament for the oppositions that electricity's stolen from us; she's far too sensible and interested for that. "My ventures into light and dark had been ill-starred," she says. "I'd had no dramatic dark, neither at sea nor in the tomb, and no resurrecting beam of sunlight. But lasers are light, aren't they? Intensified, organised light. I'd come to Maes Howe at solstice, hoping for neolithic technology; what I'd found was the technology of the 21st century. Here were skilled people passing light over these same stones, still making measurements by light and time."

I first read this essay in high summer, when Findings was published, and was astonished at how effectively it conjured the atmosphere of midwinter. Physical dark, thick and limiting, with curtained windows and Christmas lights gleaming against it: this was what I came away with. But I've read it many times since, and with each rereading I take greater satisfaction in the way Jamie responds to the subtleties and gradations of a duality that appears at first glance to be black and white. "For five thousand years we have used darkness as the metaphor of our mortality," she says, towards the end. "We have not banished death, but we have banished the dark. We have light, we have oilfields and electricity and lasers. And by the light we have made, we can see that there are, metaphorically speaking, cracks … We look about the world, by the light we have made, and realise it's all vulnerable, and all worth saving, and no one can do it but us."

Five thousand years on from the construction of Maes Howe we still have darkness, we still have light, and the two of them still fit together, hand in glove. But in the hands of Kathleen Jamie, the metaphors they offer slip and slide and grow in complexity. If you're looking for a read to get you in the spirit of midwinter, this is it.

THE GUARDIAN

Les Murray
Poster by T.A.

JM Coetzee on the "angry genius" of Les Murray

Sarah Crown
Wednesday 14 September 2011 13.10 BST

Wonderful New York Review of Books piece about The Angry Genius of Les Murray, by none other than JM Coetzee.

I first came across Murray at university, when we were set a poem of his, "Comete". Brief (13-and-half lines; a not-quite sonnet) and simple, it fixes on a single image: "Uphill in Melbourne on a beautiful day" it opens, airy and light as a feather, "a woman is walking ahead of her hair." I found the combination of its clear focus and rippling, rich metaphors haunting, and in the years since have pounced on everything else by him that crossed my path.

Coetzee's piece, then, is a real treat for me. A 4000-word consideration of the muscular talent of the son of New South Wales dairy farmers, who said of himself "it's my mission to irritate the hell out of the eloquent who would oppress my people, by being a paradox that their categories can't assimilate: the Subhuman Redneck who writes poems", it's a fine piece of criticism: sympathetic, celebratory, but at the same time clear-eyed, alive to the poet's blindspots and inconsistencies. Though only lukewarm about Murray's recent output ("the new poems have the feel less of urgent utterances than of demonstration exercises in how a poet's gaze works"), his admiration for the poet is clear. "If there are a handful of purists who for political reasons will have nothing to do with him or his works," he concludes, "so much the worse for them — the loss is theirs.

Hear, hear. If you don't know his work, I'd seriously urge you to have a flick through the 'poems' section of his website, and take a look at this piece by Daljit Nagra, from the Guardian Review not two weeks ago, in which he explains why Murray is his poetry hero.

THE GUARDIAN

Robert Frost / Mending Wall

Robert Frost

Mending Wall

BY ROBERT FROST

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Poem of the week

This week, something from Robert Frost.

Sarah Crown
Monday 14 May 2007 17.01 BST

'Something there is that doesn't love a wall ... '

Good afternoon, poetry fans. Let me begin by apologising for the tardiness of today's blog - it's been ridiculously busy here since I got in this morning. Another weekend would be very welcome at this point ...

It was with not a little relief, therefore, that I finally turned to today's poem, Mending Wall by Robert Frost, nominated by joedoone, who says of Frost, "he has always been one of my favourite poets, ever since I came across Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening at school. I love the way he writes about the physical world, making it seem both fresh and timeless, and Mending Wall is one of his best."

I'm inclined to agree. I've always found Frost's poetry soothing; his spare, clean New England landscapes join with the lilt of his lines and encourage the reader to slow down, listen and reflect. In this poem, Frost uses the image of the boundary wall - forever disintegrating, forever being rebuilt - to explore the paradox created by our desire to protect ourselves and our simultaneous longing for connection. The image is such a simple one that in the hands of a less skilled poet it would almost certainly have drifted into banality; Frost, however, sustains it effortlessly, turning its simplicity into a virtue. Here it is, in full.

THE GUARDIAN