Into the Dark E-Book

Jacqueline Yallop

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 317

Beschreibung

'Often poetic ... highly-researched and thought-provoking'New Scientist 'Gently and thoughtfully enquiring' The Spectator Can you remember the first time you encountered true darkness? The kind that remains as black and inky whether your eyes are open or closed? Where you can't see your hand in front of your face? Jacqueline Yallop can. It was in an unfamiliar bedroom while holidaying in Yorkshire as a child, and ever since then she has been fascinated by the dark, by our efforts to capture or avoid it, by the meanings we give to it and the way our brains process it. Taking a journey Into the Dark secrets of place, body and mind, she documents a series of night-time walks, exploring both the physical realities of darkness and the psychological dark that helps shape our sense of self. Exploring our enduring love-hate relationship with states of darkness, she considers how we attempt to understand and contain the dark, and, as she comes to terms with her father's deteriorating Alzheimer's, she reflects on how our relationship to the dark can change with time and circumstance. Darkness captivates, baffles and appals us. It's a shifty thing of many textures, many moods, a state of fascination and of horror, an absence and a presence, solace and threat, a beginning and an end. Into the Dark is the story of the many darks that fascinate and assail us. It faces the darkness full on in all its guises and mysteries, celebrating it as a thing of beauty while peering into the void.

Leseprobe

 

 

Published in the UK and USA in 2023 byIcon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

Hardback ISBN: 9781837730711 ebook ISBN: 9781837730735

Text copyright © 2023 Jaqueline Yallop The author has asserted her moral rights.

This is a work of nonfiction, but the names and some identifying details of characters have been changed throughout to respect the privacy of the individuals concerned.

THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON: READING EDITION, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make acknowledgement on future editions if notified.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India. Printed and bound in Great Britain

The mystery of what goes on inside the mind of another person becomes terrifyingly impenetrable in the final stages of dementia; twilight to pitch dark at the vanishing line between life and death.

Nicci Gerard

CONTENTS

Prologue

1. NEW MOON

2. WAXING

3. FULL MOON

4. WANING

Notes

Acknowledgements

Prologue

I have a distinct memory of the first time I encountered complete darkness. I might have been seven or eight years old, perhaps a little older; I was on holiday with my parents. We were north somewhere, the north of the Lake District or Scotland – that’s a detail I don’t remember. In those days, we would overnight in bed and breakfasts, rolling up in a small town where the staff at the local tourist information office would ring round a dog-eared list to find us a place to stay. Mum would sit in the car and I’d go with dad to the counter, listening to the woman chat on the phone to would-be hosts. Depending on the place and the time of year, the process of finding accommodation could be lengthy; we might be on page two or three of the list before rooms became available. On this occasion we must have been later than usual arriving at the tourist information, and the search must have been tricky, because it was late and dusk was falling when we edged along a narrow lane towards a remote farm. I remember the white walls of the house standing out from the deep shadow of the trees as we drove into the yard; I remember being hustled into the warm yellow kitchen. This wasn’t the usual B&B my dad would choose, a villa with a sign and a prim garden, pink bedspreads and clean bare furniture; this was a place of muddy wellies and pets and unwashed dishes. We’d been shoehorned into someone’s life here, presumably for extra cash. This was a real farm, rundown, busy, and would we like to watch the boys go after the rats, we were asked. And they did go after them as soon as night came, with torches and Jack Russells and sharp spades, the yard a squeal of noise and blood, bare bulbs in the dark.

As part of this ad-hoc deal, I was given a small bedroom at the end of a long landing, another child’s bedroom, with teddy bears and books, an old-fashioned narrow bed with a metal frame, and a ceiling painted with stars. There were clothes folded on a chair, others hanging loose from the wardrobe. There was a walking stick propped behind the door, socks around, as there always are. These walls, too, were yellow. I can picture it very well, this room I was stealing for the night from another child, even though I must have only spent a matter of minutes there settling into bed before mum and dad went to wherever they were sleeping. I don’t remember waking there the following morning; I don’t remember anything of breakfast or what happened next or where we went.

But I do remember the dark.

The light was switched off, the door closed, mum and dad went away, and there was nothing. For the first time, nothing.

I held my hand in front of my face and it wasn’t there. Swish, wave, fist, nothing. The socks and the stick, the wardrobe, the window, the yellow, all lost. I could feel the dark, a thing in the room. A thing of substance.

I don’t remember being afraid. But the dark was now real to me.

There, in a farmhouse I can’t name or place, in another child’s bedroom that probably no longer exists, that might have been where it started.

Since then I’ve taken notice of the dark. I’ve grown to know a delicate dusk in my fingers like cool cloth, and the full-grip darkness of night, sticky, burring to my skin and my hair and my clothes like goosegrass. I’ve ventured in moonless drizzle, shapeshifting. The dark has felt weighted, waiting. But it’s still been mostly a kind of aside. It wasn’t a thing that mattered.

Then something happened to my dad.

A couple of years ago, an ambulance came to take him to hospital where he was diagnosed with delirium and, subsequently, with dementia. The delirium kept him busy, coming and going from the nurses’ station, helping out. He’d worked for the ambulance service for many years and he simply thought he was back on duty again. He was comforted by the sepia familiarity of old habits. But when he came home, his relationship to the dark, as to much else, had changed. There was a metaphorical element to this: the world reduced and blackened, darkness began to hound him, the inevitable closure of night over day. But the difference wasn’t only in the figurative sense. He also demonstrated a physical sensitivity to the dark. His illness manifested in an obsession – a bodily preoccupation – with darkness. Early on, he became acutely susceptible to sensory stimulation, to hot and cold, sound, the widening or tightening of space, and particularly to light and dark. He wasn’t noticeably afraid of the dark so much as now constantly attuned to it. He became newly alert to shadow. Boundaries between light and dark – the visual transition between sunshine and shade, for example – perplexed and disorientated him, but also transfixed him. He would stand, motionless, and stare at the dark, seeing something, feeling something, the rest of us could not. In unlit corners of the house, he inhabited a kind of new dimension in which darkness allowed for a different configuration of time and space: a sneaky elf-man peered out from behind the sideboard most nights; his parents came and went, briefly spotlit; he heard and smelled a world of things hidden by the dark but immediate and vivid. As the illness got worse, he needed the certainty of constant light levels, an unchanging environment that didn’t surprise or confuse him, a monotony of time and place which left no room for the multiplicities of darkness.

Watching dad took me back to the farmhouse bedroom. For him now, as for me then, this was a raw, new, demanding dark, strange and tangible. From the start, inevitably, it had the better of him. This dark was cunning and lithe. As he edged towards it, it circled back on him; it was deeper and darker than he could ever have imagined. There’s no way of holding back the dark. It slips through your fingers, pools beneath your feet.

My dad never talked about, or even admitted, his dementia. He didn’t ask for help. Perhaps he knew that I couldn’t help him, that no one could. Perhaps he didn’t want to draw me to that place he was in. But watching over dad’s shoulder, I became newly aware of darkness and what it might be; I began to think about it more fully. What had been little more than a careless fascination seemed newly urgent. I had questions: What does it mean to experience the dark? What even is the dark?

With dad by my side, I set about trying to find out.

CHAPTER 1

New Moon

Consider utter darkness. Imagine it. It’s not as easy as you might think. It’s not a matter of just closing your eyes. Even if you screw up your lids, light leaches. There are dots, shadows, colours. The imprint of the lit world blotches and bleeds.

Turn off the lights then. That’s better; that’s a start. But it’s not that simple, is it? At first your unlit room feels properly dark but before long, a shape emerges, a texture. Light squeezes behind the curtains, from the street or the moon, from cars or houses. Your phone glows, or the little red dot on the charger; the digital clock pulses. The room regathers itself, settles, solid and predictable.

This is not darkness. It only hints at it.

Start again. Take a deep breath and imagine somewhere darker. Drop deep underground, a mine, a cave, labyrinthine, unlit. Shuttle out into deep space, a nook between the stars, a universe beyond reach of the sun; drop down deep in the ocean. Can you feel what it might be like, this state of darkness? Does it frighten or console you?

Absolute darkness. Being and not-being. All and nothing. Presence and absence. What kind of thing is it, this real dark?

Let’s begin with Isaac Newton. In the 1660s he turned his attention to the nature of colour, and to the question of what the dark might be and how – or in fact whether – we could see in it. Through a series of experiments using prisms to direct sunlight, he identified the rainbow colours that make up the visible spectrum. He also concluded that darkness is an absence of light. This might seem obvious to us today, but it was a new way of looking at the dark, which until then had largely been considered to be a pre-existing force separate to light and functioning alongside it, a thing in its own right rather than an absence.

Newton’s findings answered some important questions, but also posed another. If darkness is a non-existence – the not-being of light – then how do we experience it? Absences, by their nature, don’t transmit any energy or any other positive force. No light, no sound, no fluff or dust or feathers. So if there’s nothing for our senses to pick up on, how can we say we’re encountering it? Most of us would probably say that we know what darkness looks and feels like; we know, in turn, how it makes us feel. But the conundrum remains: how can we claim to witness something that is not there?

This is a puzzle which has exercised philosophers for centuries. The seventeenth-century English thinker and physician John Locke, for example, spent time considering the ways in which we perceive the world, and fumbled around for an explanation of how we can see anything which does not reflect light; that is, how we can see the dark. He decided that ‘one may truly be said to see Darkness’ because we’re able to recognise it as a distinct entity: ‘the idea of black is no less positive to one’s [mind],’ he claimed, ‘than that of White.’ But there are plenty of people who disagree with Locke. Some philosophers suggest that all we can do is infer the dark from our inability to see objects. They claim that we can’t actually experience it; all we can do is guess at it. So if we fail, for example, to see a chair in a dark room and fall over it, then we infer that the room is dark and therefore we’re experiencing darkness. Others point out that an inability to see doesn’t always mean it’s dark: when we emerge from a shady tunnel into dazzling sunshine, we can’t see, but this doesn’t mean it’s dark. In fact, quite the opposite.

Generally, both philosophers and physicists like to suggest that reality is positive, and that negative states can ultimately be explained in terms of positive ones. So, for example, defining the dark side of the moon as the part of the moon’s surface that doesn’t reflect sunlight, is really about where the light is, rather than where it isn’t – it’s about the positive effect of light rather than the negative state of its absence. But, of course, the moon continues to be unilluminated in parts, no matter how we describe the bits we can’t see. The twentieth-century French playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre, suggested that absence depended on a positive expectation in our minds: we can only note that Pierre is absent from the café if we expected to see him there in the first place. And again, the explanation is finally positive – just because Pierre is not at the café, doesn’t mean he’s been sucked off the face of the earth. He’s probably at home in bed.

Under these terms, darkness only exists as our minds process the expectation of light. It’s a deficiency, a disappointment. It’s something missing, that’s all. But is this your experience of the dark? Moonless at midnight, if you walk the fields or the streets, does the dark around you fall flat and lifeless? Is it just no-light? Or does it seem to have body and essence; does it seem material, tangible even?

Centuries of mind games, investigation and practical experiments have done little more than prove that darkness is an anomaly, a complicated phenomenon which is intrinsically connected to our sensory perception; a non-existent state which most of us would claim to experience as a real thing. But there is one matter on which most science and philosophy agrees: that our concept of the dark is linked to optics. We mostly experience darkness through sight. At a basic level, we know it’s dark because we see that it is. Although even this apparently simple assumption is fraught with complications and doubt. Is it even possible to see the dark? This is not a question of whether we can see in the dark but of whether we can see the dark itself, whether it’s possible to see an absence, something that isn’t there. Which is different again from not being able to see at all. A blind person can’t see the darkness of a cave, for example – rather they fail to see anything. But this does not necessarily drop the blind person into the dark: when the BBC reporter Damon Rose lost his sight, he said that what he most missed was darkness; he was plagued instead by the constant distraction of changing brightly coloured dots and splodges that he termed ‘visual tinnitus’. To see the dark – and know that it’s dark – we have to recognise it as a state that exists outside us, a thing which our eyes can witness, sending messages to the brain to confirm that, therefore, darkness exists.

Although even such an explanation may be a bit old-fashioned: contemporary theories of consciousness would propose that I’ve got things the wrong way round, so that while we’ve been habituated over centuries to thinking of signals pouring inwards to the brain from our senses, in fact, the action is reversed so that the brain scans outwards in an attempt to keep us safe in our environment. In this scenario, the brain generates a series of informed conjectures about the world around us by processing the feedback it gleans to give form and thing-ness to our environment. ‘Our perceptual world alive with colours, shapes and sounds is nothing more and nothing less than our brain’s best guess of the hidden causes of its colourless, shapeless, and soundless sensory inputs,’ claims the neuro­scientist Anil Seth, ‘Normal perception – in the here and now – is indeed a case of controlled hallucination.’ In which case, the dark, like my dad’s dark, would not come in from outside, through the eyes to the brain, but would be a construct of our brain projected outwards to help us make sense of what’s around us. Which raises some troubling questions: what does it mean if dad’s brain, a dying brain, increasingly fashions its world as a thing of darkness? Why might our conscious self place us in the dark? My inquiry into the dark will bring us back to the brain again and again; we’ll see how closely darkness and consciousness intertwine, how they dodge and scuffle. Is darkness outside us or within, physical or psychological, real or imagined? We’ll come back to all these questions. But for now we need to pin down the discussion of optics.

At this point, it might be useful to offer a biological explanation: darkness is the absence of photons in the visible spectrum as perceived by the retina. That is, where there’s no visible light for our eyes to process, there is the dark. Most of us will respond to light wavelengths of between 380 and 750 nanometres, from violet light at the shortest end of the spectrum to red at the longest. All electromagnetic radiation is light, but we can only see a small proportion — cone-shaped cells in our eyes act as receivers tuned to the particular wavelengths in this narrow band. Other areas of the spectrum have wavelengths too large or too small and energetic for the biological limitations of our perception. So, while there may be light bouncing around beyond the visible spectrum, as far as we’re concerned, if it’s not in the rainbow of perceivable colour, then our eyes tell us that we’re in the dark.

This makes sense. We know that if we turn the lights off in a mine shaft hundreds of feet underground, we’re going to be thrown into darkness. Even if we’ve never done such a thing, we can imagine what the experience might be like. It feels instinctive knowledge. And we have historical and anecdotal evidence for it. The first mining manual, De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola, originally printed in Latin in 1556, drew the reader’s attention to ‘the dead darkness’ of the mine which, Agricola suggested, was inherently disturbing, a place naturally inhabited by ghouls and phantoms, lending itself to ‘the substantiation of the supernatural’. Accounts from children working in mines throughout Britain during the nineteenth century consistently return to mention of the dark. They never got used to it. It intimidated and frightened them through the long dirty shifts underground. Those whose job it was to man the system of doors and traps were especially likely to spend many hours in a state of black-out which effectively silenced as well as blinded them: ‘I have to trap without a light,’ reported eight-year-old Sarah Gooder, who worked in the Gawber pit near Barnsley in 1842, ‘I’m scared … Sometimes I sing when I’ve light but not in the dark; I dare not sing then.’

In 1855, a group of curious ladies and gentlemen took an excursion a thousand feet underground into a deep pit in the Eastern Virginian coal field near Richmond, USA. They thought they’d known what to expect, what they were letting themselves in for. They believed they could picture the dark. But when they dropped 300 metres underneath the rock, the darkness overwhelmed them. Their senses failed. In this ‘darkest abode of man’, one of the ladies had a fainting fit and had to be helped to the surface; a male adventurer noted unnatural sweats and dizziness. Several of the party held hands to anchor themselves because they felt as though they were floating away. Time and space were upended and, perhaps most dangerously of all, the sense of self that sustained them above ground was slipping. Distinctions were meaningless in the dark; the wealthy day-trippers were losing themselves among the slaves who worked the mines. It turns out they hadn’t imagined the darkness at all.

As these reactions suggest, darkness is more than a case of not-seeing. So what is it? A feeling, an experience, a change of state? Biological explanation of the dark is not even the beginning. ‘What is the meaning of having one’s body full of darkness? It cannot mean merely being blind,’ asked the nineteenth-century polymath, John Ruskin, who spent his life preoccupied with ways of seeing. It’s an interesting phrase he chooses: one’s body full of darkness. Full. Replete or overwhelmed. Dark as a thing that can inhabit or pervade us, belong to us. What, he wonders, is the meaning of such a thing?

Art, literature, physics, medicine, religion, psychology, philosophy – they all approach and examine the dark and yet there are all kinds of things that we still don’t grasp. Like the deep oceans, the dark sits below and around us, unknowable. We remain captivated, baffled and appalled. I came to this investigation because I love the dark, the shifts and folds of it, the feel of it, like the unspooling of imagination, a non-feeling, an intimation, the brush-breath of an insect wing on skin. I love the pierce of stars, the unseen hush of breeze, the disintegration and suspension, the wholeness. But this is only my dark, and only for now. I also took on the dark because of dad’s dementia: for him darkness is a menace and a warning. He didn’t journey towards the dark; it came for him. Predatory, it stalked him, circled, hunted. If he could, he’d have run from it. He certainly tried. For him, darkness is a terrible blackening of the world, a gobbling-up, a disappearing. This was a darkness I couldn’t experience, and could not come close to. It was dad’s only, a terrible thing to own. But in looking into the dark, I could hold his hand for a while.

Darkness is shifty, a thing of many textures and many moods, a state of fascination and of horror, an absence and a presence, solace and threat, behind us and inside us, a beginning and an end. This book is the story of the many darks that fascin­ate and assail us. It faces the darkness full on in all its guises and mysteries, celebrating it as a thing of beauty, peering into the void.

Consider again, then, the question of utter darkness.

The twentieth-century American philosopher, David Lewis, took on the riddle of whether we could see in the dark, and whether this meant we could see the dark itself. His conclusions were ambivalent. On the one hand, he pointed out that it’s only our eyes that can tell us whether it’s dark or not. We can’t tell by smell or taste; we rely on sight to confirm darkness, ‘in the pitch dark, we find out by sight that it is dark.’ But he also noted how our eyes can deceive us: just because we can’t see anything it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s dark because ‘we also do not see in dazzling light or thick fog’. So where does that leave us? Lewis sat on the fence, saying, ‘In a sense, we do see in the dark when we see that it is dark. In a more common sense, we never see in the dark.’ So darkness remains an enigma, there and not there, seen and unseen.

Why is it so difficult to pin down? One reason is that our brains rage at the dark, evade it, barricade us against it. If you were shut deep in a mine, your brain would reject the darkness and fool the eyes into ‘seeing’. It would rummage around among your memories to create forms, shades, patterns. It might take a little while, but in time it would reconstruct a world without the terror of utter darkness; with a nifty VR simulation, it would allow light.

In 2009, the artist Alan Smith took a party of six non-cavers into the disused lead mines underneath Nenthead in the North Pennines. These largely intact old workings date back to the eighteenth century and stretch for around 1,500 square kilometres under the hills. Narrow tunnels and shafts lead from one mine to the next; at its peak, a network of 200 mines channelled people and materials through the rock, creating a huge dark world like a negative imprint of the one above ground. Smith’s party spent twenty-four hours exploring the underground system, bedding down overnight in the cavernous ‘Ballroom Flat’, a vast hollowed-out void named after a bizarre Masonic dinner party which was held there in 1901.

I’ve been into the mines at Nenthead; I’ve splashed, crawled and tripped through the levels to the ballroom cave. It’s a strange, exhausting experience. Worming towards the belly of the earth alerts both the mind and body; both buzz with excitement; both strain to hold the experience in check. When you reach the ballroom, turn out the lamps on the helmets and douse the torches, the darkness rampages, magical and monstrous. It hits you with force like a wave breaking over you in the sea. It’s thirty years since I disappeared into the dark of the Ballroom, but I remember it clearly: such darkness is unforgettable. I remember the feeling of my body falling from me with the sudden stubbing out of light, a feeling of weight and weightlessness. My mind shrank from the dark, cowered; leapt into it, opening out into this new dimension as though my consciousness had suddenly sprung huge, limitless. It was only a matter of moments before the torches were switched back on, but it felt as though in those moments I had been both annulled and realised.

The dark nurtures paradox. Certainties of thought and experience hold little sway as our minds renegotiate the substance of reality. During the night of Alan Smith’s expedition into the mines from Nenthead, one of the participants first noted her heightened sensory awareness, ‘the distinctive and varying textures of things in the dark’. Then came something stranger, the warping of time – ‘One hour could become one minute, one second, one nanosecond. I am floating in time without measurements’. And finally, as her brain worked to negate the darkness, she started to ‘see’ things:

I … wake to total blackness. No candles. Opening and closing my eyes makes no difference at all. Am I even awake?... I see short yellow lines emanating from a black void. It seems to turn into an opening that I might rise up and go through … slowly drifting blobs of varying size, shape and transparency; tiny bright dots moving rapidly along squiggly lines; subtle bowtie and hourglass shaped patterns. You can see the blood vessels in your own eye appear like a tree.

This experience of sight-in-darkness, often described as ‘retinal noise’ or ‘light chaos’, is not unusual, and is very similar to what Damon Rose described in his account of blindness. It’s a strange kind of etch-a-sketch sensation where the dark is scratched and blotted with shifting clouds of floating spots, or swirling ribbons of light.

These forms and patterns can seem to have substance and grain so that if you try to move around in a dark room, the retinal swirls can become confused with real objects. In a blackened space or during a night-time walk, our eyes and our brains collude to refute darkness, to disempower it, and to replace it with more familiar and identifiable ‘sights’. So the colours and shapes imprinted on the dark can take on recognisable form, tricking us into mitigating the discomfort of the void through our own invention. In 2007, the German artist Marietta Schwarz wore a blindfold for 22 days, and gave an account of everything she ‘saw’. Her brain activity was tracked by an MRI scanner, and studied by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt. During her three weeks of enforced darkness, she described seeing leopard-print patterns and the opening credits of Star Trek. The scan showed her brain was lighting up to display the exact same activity as it would have done under ‘normal’ vision conditions. That is, it was seeing these things. It was not imagining the sight of the Starship Enterprise; it was actually seeing it. When we move in the dark – waving a hand in front of our face, for example – this creates sensory signals which create real visual perceptions in the brain, even in the complete absence of optical input. Our brains simply will not accept that they can’t see anything: they challenge the fact of darkness; they blot and shift it, doing their utmost to reconfigure it. By doing so, they reclaim it for experience, reinventing reality as shifting, negotiable, independent of sight and light. Darkness forges a new sense of what is real.

In ‘We Grow Accustomed to the Dark’, the poet Emily Dickinson describes this tussle with the dark, investigating how we ‘grope’ and ‘adjust’ as an extended metaphor for change and resilience, for the process of overcoming adversity. She captures our brain’s natural elasticity in the image of reconditioning darkness:

The Bravest – grope a little –

And sometimes hit a Tree

Directly in the Forehead –

But as they learn to see –

Either the Darkness alters –

Or something in the sight

Adjusts itself to Midnight –

We adjust ourselves to midnight: this is a hopeful poem. It puts a positive spin on the shifting of the dark. Our brains negotiate the dark to overcome it; they manipulate image and memory with such mastery that we don’t even know the lights are off.

Why be afraid of something our brains can bypass and re-work? If we can adjust to midnight, why worry about it?

Theories of quantum mechanics might also allay fears of the dark. Quantum mechanics says no space is ever dark, not even the darkest cellar or deepest mine. The physics draws attention to the omnipresent fluctuations of light that exist beyond the visual spectrum, vacuum fluctuations or light noise which interact with atoms to produce photons – bundles of electromagnetic energy. Since these photons exist everywhere, they disrupt darkness everywhere. For quantum physicists, true darkness – the complete absence of photons – is impossible. There will always be the un-dark of photon activity. So even if you were stuffed in a cloth hood and placed in a black box in outer space, quantum mechanics would posit that you were not in the dark at all because photons would still be detectable.

Recent findings from the NASA New Horizons space mission suggest that you don’t even have to rely on the tiny photons of quantum physics to keep the dark away. The mission set off to study Pluto and its moons in 2015, then just kept sailing on – it’s now more than 4 billion miles from Earth, somewhere way out in a place you would think of as dark. The photos sent back from the mission were taken far beyond any sources of light contamination, such as the dust particles in the inner solar system that are lit up by the sun. But when you study these photos and remove all known sources of visible light – from the stars, from the Milky Way, from the camera itself – and then any light that could be attributed to known or suspected galaxies, then, after all that, they’re still not dark. The amount of light leaking from unidentified sources is not a glimmer or a trickle: it’s a definite glow, more or less equivalent to all the light coming in from known galaxies. It may be an indication of other, unrecognised galaxies waiting to be discovered, or of another unknown source of light – no one knows yet. But whatever the reason, it leaves us still in the not-quite dark. The New Horizons evidence supports quantum physics in suggesting that complete darkness doesn’t exist.

But the contention that darkness is impossible doesn’t tally with our experience, does it? Or it misses the point. Darkness is difficult to fully imagine but we’ve all seen it, felt it, run from it. Legend and literature assert that darkness is real; film has it creeping up behind us. It’s integral to our understanding of day, season, life, death.

And if darkness doesn’t exist, what is it we’re trying to flee?

I’m at home, walking near the house at night. I’m in the woods in Wales, in the narrow scrape of valley, the cwm. My hands and feet are tingling cold. I can hear the stream rushing, singing over the stony ridges, a rustle in the wet leaves on the ground. Damp air prickles like the dark on my skin.

The January new moon rose this morning just after five and set hours ago, in the mid-afternoon; unfastened from the dark, it was a day-moon, tracking alongside the sun. It was invisible. In a few days’ time, as the lunar phase develops, I’ll easily be able to see the thin crescent slice of a young moon in the evening, but for now there’s nothing. Each cycle of the moon begins in darkness.

I find my way in these woods by memory or instinct, by the vegetal smell, by touch, stumbling, but not by sight. I’m a long way from streetlights, a road, a house. I have no torch. If I hold out my hand, I can’t see it. If I look down to my feet, they are not visible. It’s possible I’m not here. Quantum physics tells me that I can’t really be in the complete dark, but this encounter refutes the niceties of science.

This is a small steep slice of woodland, mostly ash, sycamore and holly, a few huge old oak trees. The stream runs quick and noisy. On the far side, the bank rises precipitously into gorse; on this side there’s an area of stony level ground surrounded by some of the tallest trees. I am far out west where the slatey hills crumble and slide towards the sea. This is a place I know well. I’ve been here many times in daylight; I’ve sat by the stream, watched the squirrels and woodpeckers in the trees, the buzzards and red kites above. It’s a sheltered, safe valley that cuts directly down to the coast, private land. It’s most unlikely that there are ne’er-do-wells hiding in the shadows. Dragons, these days, are rare; the only animals I should encounter are foxes, badgers, toads, cats. There’s little danger of landslide, sinkhole, hurricane, or lightning strike. But none of the things I know about these woods hold true now. I can’t see any recognisable landmarks; I can’t make out the contours of the land; the trees could no longer be there, for all I can tell. This is not the place I know by day. Darkness has transfigured it. The familiar has, literally, disappeared leaving a half-known place, a place that has warped and buckled, distances longer (shorter?) than I’d recalled, trees out of line, dips and rises where they shouldn’t be, threat where I’d never conceived of it. As it is, I relish the blindfold challenge. Dread, fear, disorientation are momentary, indulged, invited. A buzz. I enjoy the ethereal feeling of being in the utter dark, of floating – or is it sinking? – untethered. But still I think – what if I’d been lost in the darkness? Really lost. Here, in the pitch black. What if I’d been where dad is?

Pitch. A word that’s been used for over seven centuries, since around 1300, to help us reach for the dark. The phrase ‘pitch black’ was coined in a 1598 satire, The Scourge of Villanie; the diarist Samuel Pepys describes coming home after midnight in January 1666, when everything was ‘dark as pitch’; Daniel Defoe used ‘pitch-dark’ in 1704 to describe conditions during a hurricane which had devastated parts of London the previous year. Pitch is the gummy, resinous residue from the distillation of wood tar or turpentine, commonly used as waterproofing for sailing ships. We don’t waterproof many sailing ships these days so our experience of pitch largely exists in metaphor. But it’s clung on, sticky, because we can’t find a better way of explaining what it is that threatens us. ‘Pitch dark’ is about feel as much as sight. It reminds us that dark is viscous, tangible, impenetrable. We get stuck to it like flies on gummy paper.

Dark. A word without precedent, without patina. No one really knows where it comes from. It’s unique, strange. It edges towards us with menace. The Old English deorc is probably related to the Old High German tarchanjan, meaning to conceal or hide, a mystery, a danger. But the roots of tarchanjan are unclear; unusually, it doesn’t emerge from Latin or Greek. Dark sprung at us from nowhere. And Anglo-Saxon poets sometimes chose another word: Þeostrum. An absence of light, conjuring not only a biological darkness, but also the nothingness of being separated from God. Darkness theological as well as physical. The loneliness of being in the dark. The terror of absence. Dark was no longer only a description of night but a mood, a behaviour, an alienation, a belief. It had become a loaded word, a concept, a puzzle.

The word for dark struggles to contain the multiplicity and slipperiness of the idea. The Greek σκότος (skotos) is both literal and metaphorical, indicating both the black of night and the gloom of misery. European Romance languages – French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian – use a variation of the word ‘obscurity’ to include notions of concealment or estrangement. The Chinese noun leads us into moral murk. Our language of the dark is figurative but still falls short. We struggle to conceive of absolute darkness, and we labour to express it. Taking part in a ‘dark residence’ at London’s Southbank Centre in 2018, the poet George Szirtes attempted to capture the abstraction of the dark, its changeableness, unpredictability, inexpressiveness:

The idea of total darkness is not the same as total darkness.

The idea of light is not the same as light.

The words expressing the idea of light or total darkness are not ideas.

This word may be imagined vanishing into total darkness.

This word has begun to express an idea but most of it is lost in darkness

This sentence is not total darkness.

This one is