A Walk In The Dark

Last night, in the spirit of Halloween, I walked into the darkness of How It Is, the Miroslaw Balka installation at Tate Modern. Moving up the ramp and into the blackness, slowly placing one foot in front of the other, I was hyper-aware of the symbolic significance of this experience. Balka writes;

How shall I move forward? you might ask yourself, as you stand at the threshold, confronted by the darkness ahead. The unknown can be terrifying, especially if it is also without light. How you approach it is unique, as your first encounter with anything can only ever be as an individual. Staring ahead into the black void may make you wonder whether to move ahead at all.

How It Is was inspired by the Samuel Beckett novel by the same name, published in 1964. Beckett conjures the image of a ‘man lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his ‘life’ as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him… The noise of his panting fills his ears and it is only when this abates that he can catch and murmur forth a fragment of what is being stated within… It is in the third part that occurs the so-called voice ‘quaqua’, its interiorisation and murmuring forth when the panting stops. That is to say the ‘I’ is from the outset in the third part and the first and second, though stated as heard in the present, already over.’

The title How It Is, is a translation of the original French, Comment C’est, a play on words meaning to begin. So what is the character actually beginning? Could it be a new way of being?

A contemporary version of the man crawling through self-imposed mud to finally emerge liberated, is the Guy Ritchie movie Revolver. The main character, Jason Green, finds himself committing to a journey that requires a heavy dose of faith only to be faced with the ultimate challenge of confronting his worst enemy in his most feared environment (a lift), his worst enemy being his very own ego. The lift, a perfect metaphor for spiritual elevation, cuts out in between floors, and Green is forced to face himself in total darkness. This is his purgatory, in which Green battles with personal demons, to emerge without fear, purified, with inner-strength to sink battle-ships.

Beckett’s I that is already over would appear to be the process of dismantling the ego in order to begin again in a new way, free from the mind-induced sufferings that plague us, most commonly rooted in fear. The problem is that not many of us are prepared to consciously confront our fears, and so life has a way of organising itself to make sure that we do. If it were without purpose, then we may be justified in our sense of victimhood, however, that would be to miss the entire point of life, the great transformer. How else does one expand emotionally and spiritually, other than to live out our experiences?
The most crippling of all is the fear of fear itself, the fear of living.
How many of us have lived in dread of a certain something, only to discover peace on the other side? How much time and energy do we waste worrying ourselves into an early grave? And can you imagine the possibilities if we were to drop our fears, by facing them head on, until they fall away like ash? Who could we be then?
Ceremonial darkness is an ancient shamanic tool for stalking the self, still being practised all over the world today, as a way of learning to see in the dark with our spirit self, rather than our often misguided senses, so that we may navigate through life from a position of self-knowing, and therefore truth. Darkness, for the Ancient Egyptians, was the The Hidden Place known as Amenta, a land between the earth and the heavens, whereby purification of the Self would be thorough and ruthless. This is a symbolic journey of transformation where the Self dies to the earthly world and is reborn conscious of its spiritual reality, ascending from the darkness, a creative spirit freed from the bondage of illusion.

The darkness, or void conjures in us the fear of the unknown, and as Balka states, it makes us wonder whether to move ahead at all. Why bother moving forward, I’m absolutely dandy where I am, right?
We can choose to stand still, but for how long? Over how many lifetimes? And at what cost too ourselves? Consider the effect of a dam on the river’s flow, where’s the freedom in that?

So here we stand, at the mouth of the void, in a year where dismantling the status quo seems to be the order of the day, how shall we move forward?

Be your own light in the darkness. Know that life springs eternal from the great void, there are new opportunities for us that we can’t quite make out from our current vantage point. Our approach is all important, we can either stand rooted to the spot in abject fear of the unknown, or we can choose to put our best foot forward with courage, in the knowledge that whatever we encounter, we will emerge a stronger, wiser, more spiritually-adjusted individual that knows no fear. Now that’s liberation.

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