the Dark

You don't know you don't know something until you know it. I remember a conversation (argument?) I had about contrasts and whether photographs stole a piece of your soul by fixing you in time at a given moment and somewhere in there was the point that in order to know something you must have a contrast, a before and after, e.g. for something to be hard there must be something soft or softer at least. Point being that you understand something through the things you have already experienced, the things you already know.

I've been in rooms with the lights off, under covers, in blackouts, in basements, in closets with my eyes closed, I've covered my eyes (no peeking), worn blindfolds, been on dark streets, in dark theaters, and even in caves before and I thought I knew what dark was. I was wrong.

In Vang Vieng there caves that go kilometers into mountains, the mountains are black volcanic rock knife edges that leave scratches on the sky, inside the bottoms of the caves are covered with a soft sandy mud that is carried on raindrops through the rocks and which acts like soundproofing. Between the entrance of the cave and the outside daylight is sorted into levels of shadow; at the very edge I peered in thinking "Wow. That's dark." In actuality I was only looking at an intermediate layer. Beyond what I could see as dark was the real dark, the whole dark, and walking in I traveled through that initial dark and looked back and saw the outside light and then looked forward and saw a dark as much darker again. I did that at least three more times before I was far enough in that I couldn't see the daylight or even where the daylight came from and there was the real deal, the Dark.

Things that go bump don't belong here because there is nothing to bump, only silence, and soft sandy mud underneath to smother footsteps, so moving forward feels like falling and vertigo reaches up and grabs my hand pulling me down to feel that there is actually something below me. I started to giggle from the fear and excitement. It was like being on a roller coaster of waves of emotion; relief when I stepped forward onto something solid, terror when I missed a step, excitement at the sensations in my feet. I felt like I had been swallowed by the mountain, the floor was soft and cool, the skin of some huge underground pachyderm or cetacean with bones of stalactite and stalagmite, I was Jonah without the sea. There were musical ribs and cool pools and quietly sighing holes that appeared out of nowhere, they didn't yawn because this was no sleepy goodnight dark. This was the staring "did you hear something" dark, the dark of life sentences or teen angst, the inky pit that leads you to examine your life and soul and give yourself bad tattoos.

You know, The Dark.