and the Darkness covered the Earth......

[Guest guest]

In Praise of Darkness

 

By Traci Hukill, AlterNet. Posted March 31, 2006.

 

 

On the eve of Daylight Saving Time, we wonder: When did everybody get

so scared of the dark?

 

 

Nothing affects my mood like sunshine. My years are divided into

lightish and darkish, happyish and glummish. The long s-wave

undulating across the calendar doesn't follow the schedule of

Persephone's well-run express, slipping into the dusky realm on Sept.

23 and reemerging six months later on the vernal equinox. It follows

U.S. Daylight Saving Time.

 

I am part of a disparate tribe, scattered throughout the general

populace, who anticipate this rite of spring like anxious kids

waiting for Christmas. Everyone is generally pleased about it, but

our delight is intense and exultant, thrumming with the thrill of

deliverance. Soon we'll walk in the sun again.

 

" Saving daylight " for the evening hours of summer started in 1918 as

a wartime effort to lower domestic electricity use. People hated it

(they went to bed earlier back then), and the next year Congress

repealed the act. After that Daylight Saving Time was deployed in

fits and starts until it was standardized in 1966. Henceforth the

nation, except Indiana and a few other maverick states, would spring

forward on the last Sunday in April and fall back on the last Sunday

in October.

 

Since then Daylight Saving Time has been tweaked at will by Congress

any time that august body wishes to deprive OPEC of the sale of a few

hundred thousand barrels of oil. In 1974, in response to the energy

crisis, DST started on Jan. 6. In 1987 its advent was permanently

moved back to the first Sunday in April.

 

Next year the happy time will be extended once again. The 2005 energy

bill decreed that starting in 2007, Daylight Saving Time will begin

the second Sunday in March and end the first Sunday in November.

That's 34 weeks of fun in the sun, up from 30 this year. If it had

been up to the House it would have been 38 weeks.

 

" It just makes everyone feel sunnier, " said savings-pusher Ed Markey,

Democrat of Massachussetts, pressing his case.

 

You would think this would make me, a victim of Seasonal Affective

Disorder if ever there was one, overjoyed. It doesn't. It leaves me

ambivalent. Because I've come to believe the problem is not that

there's too much darkness in life. It's that we don't revere the

darkness we have. And like anything scorned, that makes it mean.

 

Leaving the lights up

 

We welcome the season of darkness apprehensively, armed with

Christmas lights. Americans bought $823 million worth of them from

China last year. Little twinkly lights to banish the darkness, to

ease us into winter's darkest depths. On my street, people are

leaving the lights up well into January. And I'm right there with

them. My new habit of observing Epiphany (Jan. 6, the 12th day of

Christmas, the day the wise men arrived in Bethlehem) is mostly an

excuse to leave Christmas lights on a little longer.

 

I get by fine in January, even most of February. The new year has

begun, and I'm abuzz with plans for self-improvement. But toward the

end of February and into March -- duplicitous, now-you-see-it-now-you-

don't March -- I get cranky. By now it's been months since I

exercised regularly, and I'm tired of the rain. And this from someone

who lives in California. My boyfriend assures me that this time of

year in Montana, where he lived for many years, relationships are

bursting into flame, lives are ending in suicide and average

upstanding citizens are in a muddy slide toward alcoholism.

 

Maybe that's not the healthiest way to cope with the dark, but I kind

of admire it anyway. These people are not struggling to appear

chipper, fit and well-groomed, as most of us will feel compelled to

once the late sunsets permit evening powerwalks. They are gloomy,

slovenly and down in the dumps, squaring off against private demons

at pitiful odds. Their good spirits are hibernating with eye masks

and ear plugs. The seeds of their joy are fast asleep underground,

waiting to go nuts when spring has finally sprung.

 

Dark nights of the soul

 

When did everybody get so scared of the dark? When did people decide

they needed sunny and 70 and happy and safe all the time? One of the

congressmen pushing the Daylight Saving expansion noted that kids

everywhere will rejoice come Halloween 2007 because they'll be able

to stay out trick-or-treating in their neighborhoods, thanks to

Daylight Saving Time. Because now, of course, kids trick or treat in

the afternoon at the mall. Where's the thrill in that? How are you

going to have a chance encounter with a goblin in front of Hot Dog On

A Stick? How do you get to practice facing danger, even the simulated

variety provided by dragging your pillowcase of candy across the

neighborhoods' darkened lawns, if your whole world is a clean, well-

lighted place?

 

Apparently ordinary, garden-variety darkness is now unbearably

creepy. And forget about dark nights of the soul. Those are not to be

borne in any form.

 

Last year I inteviewed Rob Brezsny, the Freewill astrologer. As we

trudged along a chalk-dust trail winding up a hot hillside near his

house in Marin County, he talked about darkness.

 

There are two kinds, he said. " One is darkness that is most in play

right now -- outright pathology, sickness, misery, cruelty, evil. And

the other kind of darkness is mystery, the unknown, difficult

challenge. That aspect of our own nature which is unripe and is on

the way to growing into something more interesting but at this point

is still ineffective and clumsy. "

 

The trick, Brezsny mused, is to form an alliance with the Glenda-the-

Good-Witch darkness, engage it so it crowds out the evil twin. " My

opinion is to the extent that we ignore our own shadows and unripe

qualities we conjure that other kind of darkness, " he said.

 

I think I get what he's talking about. Not long ago my therapist

suggested I read through some old journals to identify some patterns.

I cringed, knowing it would be exquisitely embarrassing. It was. But

it was worthwhile, if for only one reason: I found that each time I

had approached the scary truths about the confining relationship of

my 20s and my life's suspended trajectory, I had invariably veered

away. It was terrifying to peer into those impenetrable depths and

see what was probably obvious to my friends and family. Worse, in

subsequent entries I would disavow the glimpses of truth. I labelled

them mistakes, failures of bonhomie, or my favorite, PMS-induced

temporary insanity. Not surprisingly, the whole thing finally blew up

in my face, and I got the " opportunity " to face some of those

difficult truths.

 

Moral of the story: Ignore your personal darkness, and it will sneak

up later and bite you in the ass. Venture into it, and you might save

yourself some misery.

 

Unnatural cheerfulness

 

Last fall New York University professor Christina Kotchemidova

published an article titled " From Good Cheer to 'Drive-by Smiling': A

Social History of Cheerfulness. " In it she argued that cheerfulness

is no more endemic to human character than bowling -- that in fact

our cultural dictum to be perky is a uniquely American phenomenon

rooted in the 18th century rise of the middle class, an outgrowth of

the young capitalist republic's emphasis on pluck and self-

sufficiency.

 

There are plenty of good things to come of the sunny national

disposition, Kotchemidova writes. In the workplace cheerfulness

benefits the individual and the group by keeping everyone upbeat and

productive, while in the marketplace it stimulates consumerism. It's

also nice to be nice and meet other nice people. So cheerfulness is

uniquely useful socially and economically. But what are the costs?

 

One may be a skewed view of normalcy that has a lot of Americans

believing they're depressed or otherwise defective. I remember how

stung I was when I applied for a job at a Phoenix chiropractor's

office only to be told I had in effect flunked the personality test

by coming up too melancholic-phlegmatic. The New Age medievalist-

huckster-bonecracker himself told me the receptionist really needed

to be a sanguine sort. I hope he spends eternity soaking in a pool of

black bile and phlegm. Just kidding.

 

Another cost could actually be higher rates of depression; people may

be worn out by " emotion labor, " the work of trying to stifle

noncompliant, unacceptable emotions like anger or melancoholy or just

general pissiness. Kotchemidova notes that Delta Airlines, which

institutionalized cheerfulness training for flight attendants in the

1970s, spent $9 million on antidepressants for employees and

dependents in 2003.

 

Eternal hyperactivity

 

For all you deductive thinkers out there rolling your eyeballs, I'm

not suggesting a causal relationship between Daylight Saving Time and

pervasive shallowness leading to depression. But there is a

metaphysical correlation. The culture rejects repose. People are

supposed to be upbeat all the time. They're supposed to be ever

active, happy, hungry for more activity and experience. All that is

an exhilarating part of human life, and summertime feeds it

naturally, but it's like that's not good enough anymore. Even 30

weeks isn't enough anymore. We've got to be living in some kind of

hyperactive state for 65 percent of the year.

 

A cantankerous writer featured on webexhibits.org weighed in on the

subject in 1947: " As an admirer of moonlight, I resent the bossy

insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At

the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-

fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier

and get them up earlier to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in

spite of themselves. "

 

The truth is there are a lot of good reasons for Daylight Saving

Time. It does save some oil, about 1 percent a day. It cuts down on

car accidents. There's also a public health argument to be made,

since overweight America could use more after-dinner walks with the

kids.

 

But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. We should get

to know the darkness, the better to understand the light.

 

Traci Hukill is a freelance journalist based in Monterey, Calif.

 

just a good story......bob