Photo by Stacie FerranteShadows in Darkness

In the beginning, there was blackness, the chthonic, oily mystery of the interior of things.  It is undemanding to call it a formless void because without light there is nothing to offer contrast to the shapes that undulate and coil in the dark.  It is the soil beneath the surface of the earth, the sizzling emptiness in the cosmos that makes up the space between stars, the inside of seemingly dormant ova, the shadow side of souls.

In our puritanical imaginings, we fear that which we cannot see and thus fathom, demonizing the dark while glorifying the light.  Black must symbolize vice because white symbolizes virtue, as our dualistic human brains seemingly split everything into left brain analytical and right brain mystical.  Even the electrical impulses of our thoughts, the neurotransmitter-mediated currents of our emotions rise up in darkness from the sheltered black interior of our skulls.  No light that reaches our eyes finds its way within-- save that which is transformed into a chemical signal interpreted by our occipital lobe.

We are shadow as much as we are light.  So many things about us are illuminated by the contrast of darkness, just as the darkened contour of the moon in an eclipse clarifies the flares on the surface of the sun.  In the darkness of our souls we are revealed in our incandescent strength.  It is in our loss and our grief, where we touch the raw edges of the void with blind fingers, that we find our depth and carve out the vessels inside us that may later contain joy.  Without the deep black secret places in us we would lack mystery.  Surely the earthy, lustful desires that drive us in the creation of art and life come from that place.  It is the ink in the well.

Stacie Ferrante