The ship´s blind progress

Voyage-inthedark is an apt name for this blog. It carries just the right degree of ambiguity. Before even reading my stuff, most people would probably expect me to be embarking upon a rather somber path, associating darkness with sadness, melancholy, anger, and all those other emotions. But everything is a matter of perspective, of course.

For a long-haired teenage boy who constantly stumbles upon the incapacity of transmitting his (rather vague) feelings inside, darkness might mean: everything that is expressed in one of the sadder Metallica songs.

Well, when I think of a teenager and then Metallica, I am giving away my age: I am recalling the dozens of headbanger boys that populated my own adolescence, those that wore Pantera and Skid Row and Iron Maiden black T-shirts, and gathered gleefully in circles around a boom box at parties, dropping their heads down at a 45-degree angle. They would jerk their heads up and down, their clean or dirty, straight or curly mane bobbing along to the rhythm of the super-sped up guitar. They may have been sad, or not. Or perhaps, and more likely, they were full of anger. No matter. Darkness was definitely part of their language, their world-view. Darkness was a recurring motif in all those heavy-metal or trash-metal songs. Think of Fade to Black:

Life it seems, will fade away
Drifting further every day
Getting lost within myself
Nothing matters no one else

It´s a song about suicide, or so it seems. It's a song about losing oneself. It´s a song about feeling nothingness. It uses well-known metaphors to indicate despair, existential angst if you will. And always, darkness is the ultimate signifier.

Emptiness is filling me
To the point of agony
Growing darkness taking dawn

Of course, there were other images: that of being frozen, for instance. There was a song called Trapped under ice.

I don't know how to live trough this hell
Woken up, I'm still locked in this shell
Frozen soul, frozen down to the core
Break the ice, I can't take anymore

Here, it was all about this feeling of imprisonment, of impotence, of immobility. I don't even know if there was a story behind the song. I suspect it was a story about waking up from a coma, or perhaps there was a hint of science-fiction to it "No release from my cryonic state". Had the guy been literally frozen? Who knows...
I never listened that carefully to Metallica, it was my brother who played it all the time locked up in his room, and played it on the guitar continuously, when he wasn´t playing the definitely more joyous songs of Jimi Hendrix.

And then, there was "One":

Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see: absolute horror
I cannot live
I cannot die
Trapped in myself
Body's my holding cell

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j39ABZyzek
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/metallica/one_20092051.html--------------------------------------------

I stop to think about why I am exploring so much this image of darkness as associated with being locked up in yourself. Well, it´s an image that has stayed stuck in my head for the last couple of months. I watched the film "le Scaphandre et Le Papillon" recently, the real-life story of a magazine editor who wakes up from a stroke that has left him with Locked-in Syndrome. He is paralyzed from head to toe, as well as vocally impaired. He can only move the muscle of his left eye. This left eye is his only, tiny window out onto the world outside him, and it is also his only means of communicating with other people. He not only manages to talk to people by blinking his eye; he writes a WHOLE BOOK by blinking his eye.

I cried and cried when I saw this movie. Then I bought the book and read it and cried even more. There was so much enclosed in this iconic scene of the bed-ridden man. There were the painfully bleak details of his room, the edge of his iron bed, the floaty curtains that let in a muted light, the television high up on the wall that he could not control. There were the painful details of his daily routine; being cleaned, being made to practice swallowing by trying to raise his tongue to the roof of his mouth, millimetrically.

But there was also everything that was happening inside his head. There were his voyages into his own imagination: happy memories and fantasy worlds, film-like scenes that paraded joyfully for him. A white-marble bust of the empress Eugénie, which the locked-in man saw whenever he was taken down the hospital corridor, provoked the wildest awake-dreams. He fantasized about encountering this young beauty, about sticking his nose amongst the folds of her striped gauze dress, smelling her imperial smell of cologne. He dreamt of other things too, he imagined other things too.

And here is where the magical reversal occured: being trapped inside was not just a negative darkness; it was freeing, it was the essence of freedom. With our minds we can do anything, go anywhere, feel anything we want. We have some control, we have our fingers on the switch. Everything is relative; being trapped inside is also being free to roam inside. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: the straight-jacket and the bird flight, the walls and the spirit that traverses the walls as if they were made of cottony fog...

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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I thought, was also an amazing image for the dilemma of I and the world, and by extension, I and you. Am I what is not-the-world, in a dichotomy of I vs objects outside of me? But aren´t we that which we perceive? Isn´t what I see, and what I apprehend also what I am? How much is the I the world? How much am I made up of the world outside me? Am I not that trajectory line, that leaping bridge, that butterfly´s flight, that dialectical journey between inside and outside? Shall we fall deeper into that phenomenological well, and think of how much of You is Me, and vice-versa?

Our relationships are made up of our attempts to reach out, to transmit our inner visions. The path is inevitably ridden with misunderstandings, misencounters. But it is precisely this blind path that connects us; where we reach out and try to say "I am this" and the other says "I am this" or "I am not this". And the other says "is this what you mean?", and you say, like TS Elliot*, "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all." (* http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html)


It´s a veritable miracle that we manage to communicate, to connect with other people. I am thinking of the courageous man existing in his body-tomb, his mind leaping and dancing inside his vaulted cave-body. How this man, Jean-Dominique Bauby, trapped in his diving-bell, unable to speak, unable to move, still managed to reach out to the world, and to speak to me, to try to tell me who he is (now he is no longer).

I salute you Jean-Do, your voyage-inthedark bears fruits everyday, you make my imagination leap, you make me appreciate the beauty and freedom of being trapped-inside.

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I am digressing, of course. I had meant to talk precisely about how my voyage-inthedark is not signifying darkness as despair, as sadness, as evil. I meant to talk about how I didn´t mean the darkness of the teenage head-banger. Or of the one trapped inside himself (and look where that brought me). I meant to explain how the name of my blog was about darkness as an unsad, perhaps even joyful not-knowing, as a euphoric not-seeing, as a "tatonner dans l'obscurité" --a blind man´s progress; feeling your way around the walls, with your hands out in order not to stumble and fall upon that which is there but you do not see. Or, now that another image starts to take shape in my head, it is also about a ship, at night, knowing its course, and yet not seeing what is around it. Il vogue, il vogue, le bateau. Or about a person whose eyes are closed, and what happens when she starts to open her eyes.

What is my voyage-inthedark? It is all these things and more. Darkness is not despair, it is joy in the not-seeing, not-knowing, thereby allowing the discovering, the starting-to-see. My darkness is this and something else. My darkness is more the something-else.