Both/and

By Stuart Kestenbaum

Darkness and the Light Catalogue, 2019

The day I began to think about writing this, scientists at NASA, using the radio waves from multiple telescopes on our small planet, had captured the first images of a black hole 55 million light years away.  Because black holes are so dense that no light can escape, what we’re actually seeing is not the hole, but the light bending around it.  This is the darkness gathering in the light and everything that grows from it-- every history, breath, planet and star.  This is the way things begin and end and begin again.

It’s a thrilling, horrifying, and awesome moment where the scientific and the spiritual arrive at the same point.  It’s physics and parable. We are moved by this light that reaches us from millions of years ago, for we are made of light and darkness.

The day I began writing this I was sitting in my backyard, the light from our local star-- 93 million miles away and barreling toward us at 186,000 miles per second-- was shining in my backyard.  It’s a spring day more than a month past the equinox, our planet rotating and tilting into summer light.  On the patio, the shadow of metal chair with its faux woven back, makes rectangles of light on the yellow clapboards.  The chives, emerging from the earth a few weeks ago, are glistening in light.  Dandelions abound. The finches have absorbed the new light, and their wings have changed from a drab near-beige to a bright yellow. The roots are having conversations in the earth beneath me, absorbing water and minerals and nutrients in the dark, as much living taking place in the darkness below the earth as in the trees’ crowns above. The cloudless sky is deep blue, the water in the cove is moving in slight ripples, and the State road crew is spray painting new yellow lines down the worn asphalt.  

It’s the kind of morning that if you hadn’t listened to the news or looked too far beyond the yard, the world would be just about perfect. This could be the seventh day in the book of Genesis, after our world was created. In the Bible it takes a symbolic week to make everything, beginning when God says “Let there be light.”  If we read further, though, God hasn’t made the light, but “separated the light from the darkness.”  Because before that, the darkness and the light were one; they still dance today, so finely attuned, so calibrated in every way by every plant and creature, by every star and galaxy.  In our spiritual yearnings we may pray to move from the darkness to the light, but on a more visceral level we know that they are joined, and that it is a continuous and eternal journey.  The seeds that I plant in the garden would never live if not for the darkness.  It’s the place where they go to be born.

This balance is our first of many pairings—innocence and experience, knowing and not knowing, joy and sorrow, life and death.  It’s never the one or the other, but both together.  The poem, the painting, the dance, the music that moves us are always combining the two.  All makers know that if an artistic journey only goes into the known, then there would be no discovery. We make metaphors as a way of describing this passage into the unknown.  No metaphor can get us all the way there, but each one adds to our comprehension.  

A few years ago I visited the Kiyomizu- Dera Buddhist Temple in Kyoto, Japan.  Dating back to 780, it’s a stunning complex of pagodas and shrines overlooking the city.  One attraction written up in the guide books was a passageway underneath the Zuigu-do Shrine.  Walking through it symbolically recreates a journey of rebirth through the womb of a female bodhisattva. 

At first it seemed like a ritual turned into an attraction—take off your shoes, pay 100 yen and walk with giggling school kids and tourists from around the world.  But as I descended the narrow stairs, I was unprepared for the total darkness, where I could see nothing in front of me. I was lost. My fear may have been irrational, but it was deep. I wasn’t dying, but I wasn’t a tourist anymore. Along one wall was a railing made of oversized prayer beads—holding onto each bead as I walked was the only way for me to know where I was going and it became my life-line. 

Emerging into the light, I knew that I had entered a place of awe that had moved me beyond words, and I had come out on the other side.  Perhaps this is the way we are born and the way we die. I know it’s the way we go on journey when we are utterly lost—grasping one symbolic prayer bead at a time.  There I was in the blinding light of summer, on the other side of the world, a humid day where people were taking selfies and eating ice cream.