A short while back, I got into distinctions and rambled along, working through some terms that I wanted to separate. I didn't talk about the basic one that everyone who woke up this morning knows in their bones - light and dark. It is the fundamental distinction. It was there at our birth and will be there at the close of our lives. And it plays an enormous role in between.
Here's Simon & Garfunkel from 1964 with Paul Simon's take on the darkness as metaphor for obscuring communication and relationship, even as he calls it "my old friend". You can find interpretations of the lyrics, and do have a look at some of them, but try your own first. There seems for me to be a contradiction overall in that the darkness of silence is both an "old friend" and a "cancer".
The Sounds of Silence
Hello, darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams, I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
"Fools," said I, "You do not know
Silence, like a cancer, grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops, fell
And echoed in the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said,
"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence"
The two basic distinctions of our lives - silence and sound, light and darkness - might well be examined for what they withold from our lives as much as for what they contribute. Light blinds us to subtle differences in the shape of things. We all know the momentary dislocation of visual acuity when we go from sunlight into the relative darkness of indoors, especially if we are driving a car into an underground parkade, but have we ever lost emotional acuity (that is, empathy) for a silent friend in the noisy conviviality of a social event?
Darkness has real importance as a counterbalance to brightness; indeed, more than 270 locations such as big metropolis Flagstaff, Arizona (first in the world) and Naseby (population 150) in New Zealand that have declared themselves "DarkSky" places to permit celestial observatories to function more efficiently. Tourists and residents of DarkSky places can look up at a night sky lit with innumerable points of starlight that are not visible in cities where the light pollution eliminates the necessary contrast of darkness. Down here, bugs need darkness too.
This article by Quentin Shaw speaks to efforts to save the humble glow worm in the UK, but most of us can relate to the experience of chasing "lightning bugs" or "fireflies" on a warm summer night. The females turn on their bioluminesence to attract a mate, subsequently produce a hundred or so eggs and then it's all over. Sound like anyone you know?
There is an eradication of the very nighttime that glow worms need for procreation, especially in our urban centres, so that night is losing its distinctiveness. Our metaphors speak of the dark as something negative, even evil, as a force that obscures the light of knowledge and divine benevolence. On a more mundane level, it also obscures the leggo bits on the carpet that your bare feet discover on a 3:00 am stumble to the toilet. If Milton hadn't had those loving daughters to care for him in his encroaching (see the metaphor?) blindness, his Paradise Lost would have had another canto.
Beyond the stark light-dark contrast, there is the experience of the gradual shift into night that reveals subtle distinctions that evolve as dusk settles over us. Many of you have posted photographs of sunsets over wilderness vistas (although there are fewer sunrises, I notice) and that gradualness gives time for reflection - physically as deepening colours on clouds and contemplatively as our philosophical inclinations lead us. Other margins of experience may offer their own elements of awareness.
I once compiled a list of those borderlines and evolutionary transitions, and with the help of my computer's word processor, I have dragged it out into the glare of inspection. Without belabouring the exercise, I offer it here, and in only rudimentary order. All of them could be unpacked into subcategories over time. Take a moment or two. I did.
Historical/Social
fire
forge
wheel
container
argriculture
commerce
navigation
sail
steam power
education
electrification
aircraft
telephone
television
computer
artificial intelligence
Natural
seasons
day to night
tidal action
weather patterns
celestial movements
body maturation/aging
tribes
evolution
tectonics
desertification
Moral/Imaginative
truth & lies
fantasy and fact
history & myth
The thing about these elements that started this whole examination is that there is a gradualness to them. They designate slowly-evolving experiences, even more slowly than dusk to twilight and sunset or dawn; for example, education progressed from family training or tribal practices by apprenticeship to modern research facilities at universities.
Some boundaries may have been relatively sharp as with the period we designate "the enlightenment" when the myths of divine right of kings and astrology evolved (not without civil dispute) into democracy and astronomy and did so within a short space of time by a standard of human life-spans. In some cases,the evolution is still proceeding but, thank your lucky stars, the scientific method is gaining converts. If I can get Chris in Ottawa to add enough explanatory detail to his social-scientific development graph so that even I can get it without his verbal guidance, I'll give it the separate posting it deserves.
The interval of the shift is also becoming shorter. We elders remember the introduction of television in our neighbourhoods. Some of us may even recall the change from horse-drawn to truck deliveries of bread and milk, and even the advent of telephones or appliances. This is not the place for gilding our recollections of some happy bygone years, for you can find enough of those imposed upon you with even a casual search or bit of FB scrolling. The question now is how fast those changes will occur. Drones have largely replaced other forms of mechanized warfare and the cavalry charge of the light brigade happened only 170 years ago - a blink of time's eye.
Will AI bring about the end of human existence? Some informed writers have given a timeline for the next two years, and their statement calling for increased surveillance of AI development was released in May 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statement_on_AI_Extinction_Risk . Even the less alarmist experts caution about the adverse effect of AI in our social endeavours of education and writing.
The consideration of items on the list above, many of them denoting a gradualness of transition but even the headlong pace of AI development, all exist in the physical world or social realm. Others have spoken of a spiritual domain which exists out of time with access through locations denoted as "thin places" in Celtic. The stone rings of the British Isles evoke that feeling. Your favourite place, perhaps by a lake at sunset, may also be a thin place for you.
And more recently, both in my London Review of Books and elsewhere, I have found the term "hinge places" alluding not to some action whether slowly or rapidly evolving, but to a point on which transition occurs. It could have been the first gourd container by some (most likely) female in a hunter-gatherer tribe to store food for transport, or it might be the experience in a life relationship when past actions are suddenly understood and future ones determined.
At any rate, those places, geographically or experientially, are only available by slowing down long enough to allow them to gradually present themselves. Here's another set of lyrics to take you out of the text and into your own world.
Take It Easy
Song by Eagles ‧ 1972 co-written by Jackson Browne & Glenn Frey
Well I'm a-running down the road trying to loosen my load
I've got seven women on my mind
Four that want to own me, two that want to stone me
One says she's a friend of mine
Take it easy, take it easy
Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy
Lighten up while you still can
Don't even try to understand
Just find a place to make your stand and take it easy
Well I'm a-standin' on the corner in Winslow, Arizona
With such a fine sight to see
It's a girl, my lord, in a flatbed ford
Slowin' down to take a look at me
Come on baby,
Don't say maybe
I've got to know if your sweet love is gonna save me
We may lose and we may win
But we will never be here again
Open up I'm climbin' in to take it easy
Well I'm a-running down the road trying to loosen my load
Got a world of trouble on my mind
Lookin' for a lover who won't blow my cover
She's just a little hard to find
Take it easy, take it easy
Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy
Come on baby,
Don't say maybe
I've got to know if your sweet love is gonna save me
You know we got it easy
We oughta take it easy
Come on, take, take it easy
This has been a long ramble for me and if you have persevered, I appreciate your company. Along with some of you, my elder comrades, I am experiencing a transition time, or at least I am experiencing an increased awareness of the transitions of life. It certainly gives weight to the advice to take it easy and to stop and smell the flowers and to enjoy the sunsets. The hinge points or thin places of our lives are not hidden when we slow down enough to see them, and even the darkness can become a friend.