Non-Weekly Cucumber Salad #17: Darkness
I'm finally back to writing for the first time after a long hiatus, and on this essay I'm going to try to make sense of a few thoughts for the sake of being able to do an exercise for a contemporary art course I've been taking.
I personally would envision bringing back the newsletter editions with a more personal take and maybe giving some updates on how my personal life is going, but I have been extremely busy staring at the small screen that represents the portal to cyberspace for hours daily, admiring videos of different types of monkeys doing a myriad of activities, and then sharing said videos with friends along with comments such as "these are just humans that don't reproduce capitalism".
So you can probably understand (and maybe even relate?) that my dopamine addiction has become extremely debilitating over the last couple months and finding the headspace to sit down and actually write a thought has just become an inconceivable activity for me to accomplish.
Helpfully, I started talking contemporary art classes, to help me have at least a few hours, fortnightly, when I'm not staring at my phone constantly and am encouraged to form a few thoughts. This week I asked the class about how do people find the headspace to actually sit down and do things considering the level of cognitive deterioration imposed by social media addiction and, unsurprisingly, I was told that everyone just suffers through their dopamine abstinence and tries their best to just do it anyway, and it's a painful process, but there's no way around it.
In this art class, we received a task of doing an exercise on the theme of Dark/Darkness, and my immediate reaction was to look for references to do some writing, so I thought bringing back the newsletter for this exploration could be useful and encouraging.
Some thoughts on Dark/Darkness and maybe this can be considered a valid exercise on the topic
As a child I was terribly frightened of the dark. I used to see the most scary shapes in the distorted visions from the furniture in the bedroom, piles of clothes would became the face of a vampire and I would always cover my neck in order to be able to fall asleep.
I also remember being mildly obsessed with the grains in my vision in the dark and would stare into them for a long time, waiting for my eyes to be able to start seeing shapes, until I would be able to see the entirety of the room in the darkness and distinguish all of the different items of furniture.
I was very interested in my dog's ability to see even the smallest details in the dark and wondered how their vision worked, if they also saw grains as I did or if their vision was a sharp vision like mine in the light.
As I grew older, naturally, I became less pathologically scared of the dark, and now, as an adult, I find some comfort in being surrounded by it, also in a metaphorical level.
Now this is the moment where I have to exercise my semantic muscles, because I'm going to try to build a bridge of equivalence between the definitions of Darkness and Chaos. My point is that, there is a lot of sense into understanding darkness as a nothingness, a vacuum. That's usually the reaction of someone who sees a modernist painting of a black square, for example.
But, I believe the strongest argument is that darkness conceals complexity through a veil of apparent simplicity, darkness is the synthesis of complexity. You can fill a painting with so much detail it eventually becomes a dark smudge, you can have a room filled with the biggest variety of objects and never make that known if the lights are off.
The understanding of Chaos as the natural state of matter and the natural state of the universe is very attached to the idea of darkness, because they're both metaphorical representations of things and situations that aren't comprehensible, at least not entirely or at least not through ways in which humans think and understand things.
And just as darkness is able to contain complexity into it's minimalistic expression, chaos represents the ultimate ungraspable complexity of life, which contains ambiguities and contradictions that only darkness could effectively represent.
Sometimes I find myself coming back to one of my major depressive episodes in 2017. I've already written about it on edition #3:
The last four years of my life were haunted by severe depression. I was extremely vulnerable and, eventually, I became nihilistic. To see the world through the lens of Nihilism is a state someone comes to when the fight against the chaotic nature of existence is lost.
I was actively understanding the world through the Nihilistic logic: Chaos was the inevitable destination of everything on the planet. Cleaning your house, taking showers, making plans, trying to make sense of life is a useless effort against entropy. I had fantasies of being reunited with the Chaos, the nothingness by laying down on the ground, in a forest, and letting my body naturally decompose.
What I find very interesting about this nihilistic perspective I adopted during one of the most severe depressive episodes I've ever had, is how it was has shifted into something that made me have a new understanding of life (I think it's kinda tacky to say "new understanding of life" but for a lack of better words I'm going to have to stick with this).
I believe that there's value in accepting that there's a true mystery to life that is beyond our grasp, not on a religious level, but on a cosmological one. The truth about how life on earth is so delicately interconnected can't be computed, can't be logically understood or explained, but it sure can be felt, for brief moments. I believe the person who has described this the best was David Lynch in his memoir Room to Dream (and in case you were wondering, no, I'm not paid to bring the topic David Lynch into every interaction I have):
So it’s the pilot and the Red Room and where they led—put those things together and you’ve got the real Twin Peaks. It’s a beautiful, delicate thing, and there’s more going on than meets the eye, and there’s mystery in the air.
Most people’s lives are filled with mystery, but things move super fast nowadays and there’s not much time to sit and daydream and notice the mystery. There are fewer and fewer places in the world now where you can see the stars in the night sky, and you’ve got to go a long way out of L.A., to the dry lake beds, to see them now. One time we were out there shooting a commercial and at two in the morning we turned off the lights and lay down on the desert floor and just looked up. Trillions of stars. Trillions. It’s so powerful. And because we’re not seeing those stars we’re forgetting how grand the whole show is.
When I read this I felt so reassured because I had actually experienced something very similar in the tall mountains between Italy and Switzerland in 2022, and I wrote about it, briefly:
I'm tired of reductions, minimalist, synthesis, tired of trying to make sense of things, tired of the idea that computers are going to understand the complexity of life and reality. Complexity is beyond our grasp, and we need to accept and embrace it's incomprehensibleness. You stare into the starry sky, your feet feel light on the ground, the more you look the more stars there are to see, it's infinite complexity pulls you in, suddenly gravity is reversed and you're scared you may drown into the sky.
The more I explored the perspective of the value of chaos and complexity the more I started to see it being expressed in different things I looked at, as it is with the natural human cognitive process of association, so no biggie, but it was very nice to be able to gather some references on the topic. I think one of the most dedicated efforts to this point is the cathedral La Sagrada Família. Not only is it's architecture supposed to overwhelm us with a simulation of an endlessly starry sky, it's infinite construction process is also a testimony to it's commitment to complexity.
On an effort so try to summarise and bring a conclusion to this thing: I've discussed my personal relationship with my experience with the literal dark and how I became friends with it. Detailed how I've learned it's metaphorical strength and explained how I believe that darkness is the ultimate expression of complexity, a fundamental concept for my current understanding of life.
At the end of the day, I think the understanding of the value of incomputable complexity is fundamental for fighting against the imperative of the surveillance technocratic hellscape we're increasingly being forced to live within. It's important to resist the pancomputationalist perspective of society, and all that starts with the understanding that computers can't be elaborated to the point that they will completely eliminate the friction of existence.
I guess the final point isn't about the Dark itself, but I think the connection between this concept and the one of complexity is valid and it's interesting. And there's value to knowing that it is ok to stare into a black square at a modern art museum and get emotional about it because you experienced something meaningful about life.
I hope this was a pleasant read. I'm not going to make any promises about bringing back the newsletter with any regular frequency, but I'm going to be putting effort into writing more.
Best,
AL