A Well-lit Darkness
The Sun’s rays break through the clouds above Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda.
(Not farmland. Not dark. Likely hiding many a firefly.)
Eight years ago, I co-authored a blog with a friend. It was our attempt to get into the habit of writing regularly. We were students in different hemispheres with an intermittent connection. We published a few posts before our enthusiasm for the exercise was overrun by the demands on our young lives. She was navigating a dual major in Science and Fine Arts, while I struggled through a dissertation on language education in East African settings.
The blog ran its course fairly quickly. I had no patience or time to frequently journal and both of us were short on inspiration. Writer’s block compounded by the mental exhaustion of finishing our respective degrees and preparing for the next chapter in our lives; a blind preparation as we hurtled towards uncertain careers.
The entry below is a slightly edited republishing of a reflection that was posted to the blog in the summer of 2016. The memory it alludes to now 11 orbits past. It is a fond meditation to revisit. My feeling on the noisiness of life has not changed, nor my proclivity to intimate a greater reverie than the one I had perhaps experienced in the moment. The epilogue also echoes – silence remains a luxury, submitting to sleep still a strain, the perennial pressures of existence ever-present.
As I type these words, the night has settled. Snow rests lazy and comfortable on the treetops. Most are sleeping inside their warm abodes. No sharp sounds puncture the nocturnal. Everything is still.
I invite you into the dark.
Life is loud.
There have been moments in my life when I have been surrounded by silence. True silence – the type that even deafness cannot deliver. One that is governed by the dark. In those moments, I have realized and understood how noisy our daily lives are and the inescapable nature of such commotion.
– – –
Three years ago, in a cool, breezeless Ugandan summer evening, I found myself in this familiar silence. At the time, I was working with another student colleague (and friend) at a small community library in the village of Busolwe in Eastern Uganda. Having stayed at the library much later than usual, we began to walk back to the homestead where we were residing, 5km outside of the main village center. Midway through our trek, darkness fell. The only illuminations puncturing the night came from the stars, our flashlights, and the occasional fire off in the distance as we strolled past farms. Even the bodas had stopped whizzing by, while the shriller insects allowed nightfall to hush them up.
There is something unique to the silence that grows in the most rural and wild regions of the world. Unlike the brief quiet that accompanies heavy snowfall, or the peace of a soundproof room, there are no barriers that one can point to so far from city life, no walls that are reminders of the racket beyond. In these regions at these times, the silence is all encompassing; star-filled space itself, the numbest of all metaphors, is brought into one’s surroundings, its tranquility leaking onto the surface of the Earth. Such silence tiptoes into one’s mind and has the fantastic ability to calm thoughts and slow breathing by sole virtue of its existence. It blanks all worries, taking the difficulties of one’s life and painting them into the environment like blades of grass on the ground – present, able to be appreciated, but easy to cast into shadow or remove from one’s vision.
In these moments of soul-nurturing harmony, we are more aware of anything that occurs. Our senses become attuned to the silence and darkness. Every star is effulgent, the flashlights too bright, the firelight from afar as piercing as a candle held up the eye.
So it was during our stroll: the first firefly decided to imitate a shooting star as it briefly blazed up our path with its display. A green bullet that disappeared within a second, but caught us off guard nonetheless. Soon after, an oneiric vision decided to greet us on our walk home (a journey so often rushed through sweltering daylight, so often filled with heavy conversation of what had been done, what was being done, and what needed to be done in our daily lives).
At first, hundreds, then thousands of tiny green pinpricks ignited the dark. They flew rapidly in every direction, blinking sporadically, their luminescence a perfect compliment to the Milky Way above, drowning out none of the darkness but lighting it flawlessly. The sharpness of their flickering bulbs did not diminish with distance. The entire farming landscape, as far as we could see, was covered with their dance – like a blanket of shattered aurora that was no less brilliant in a million pieces than one.
And yet, the night was as quiet as it had ever been. Any conversations we were having halted while we gazed on at the peaceful lights encircled by the eternal silence of space, everything else forgotten.
At that point, I had been in Uganda for 2 months. It was not the first time I had experienced complete silence or darkness during my time there, but it was the first time I had found myself submitting to it.
– – –
I wish I could, through pure force of will, return to the serene mental states brought on by such visions. Memories, for me though, are too false and blurry to ruminate on entirely. And usually, the intensity of the volume of life makes these metaphorical silent spaces inaccessible.
To restate the obvious: life is loud. Currently, I am writing a dissertation for my postgraduate degree. This involves research: pilfering the tiniest scraps from a massive number of documents to supplement some form of original thought on a contested subject that no one agrees on. That is a deeply demanding reality. I am also expected to acquire work, either in Scotland where I am temporarily living, or abroad, in an ethically questionable field that defeats the most avid intellectuals into becoming academics, rather than dealing with the mess of the real world. Easier to criticize than act, correct? In addition, I am seemingly perpetually lost in uncertainty as to what I want to be doing on an annual basis, a condition made no easier by the pressures listed above.
There are voices that pull me in every direction, that coax me to act in certain ways and try to dictate my next steps. Family, friends, peers, colleagues, random acquaintances – everyone has an opinion. Everyone has to be heard. Self-imposed but necessary, externally influenced responsibilities wrest any control that I have of my life from me. Like gravity, these obligations drag me down several paths at once, making it difficult to complete any of them. During the day, I mechanically try to catch to the cues amongst the background dins that will help me clutch even a small amount of comfort for the near future, while at night I struggle with insomnia, choosing to drown out the stresses of daily institutional upbringing by engaging with music.
And this happens all around. Some people choose to be satisfied with the deafening loudness of life, complacent with their powerlessness over its rhythm, while others quite enjoy it – all their tangled narratives passing past me, ironically, in silence. It would be somewhat dishonest to state that we have a choice in which sounds to follow. Life’s noises, as mentioned, are like gravity. We are dragged in many directions, our will inconsequential.
What all this distills down to is the harsh truth of life: we do not have a right to silence (peace) in our lives. Rather, it is something occasionally stumbled upon.
So when those moments arrive in the well-lit darkness, when natural phenomena remove us from the embrace of artificial fears, the silence must be cherished. It does not come along quite enough.