The Sea as The Source

Dark Nights of the Soul
by Thomas Moore, Ph.D.

(Page 6 of 8)

Many poets and artists have created their best work out of their emotional darkness. Even if you don't see yourself as an actual artist, you are an artist of your own life. You create your own story and have your own ways of expressing yourself. I think of this mystery when I sit in the Mark Rothko chapel in Houston, which the artist filled with completely black paintings, or at the Tate Modern in London, surrounded by his haunting and ethereal, more colorful abstractions. His biographer notes that right after the artist's shock, in his mid-sixties, at having an aneurysm, his "confrontation with death would return struggle and emotional depth to his work, and produce a final artistic advance." A dark night sometimes shocks you back to life and gives you the edge you need to do good work.

One sunny spring afternoon when I was visiting London, I sat in the Rothko room and felt the power of his large, subdued, but colorful paintings. I knew that I was in the presence of a man who had really lived. He knew the bright and the dark, and that knowledge, made part of his very being, shone through in his canvases. In return, I could recover a sense of my own darkness and depth, a direct gift from him to me. Some artists and actors disappoint because, no matter how good they are technically, they don't have the personal depth required to make real art. I find that as I try to incorporate the substance of an artist like Rothko, or Samuel Beckett, who is my ideal of the honest and visionary artist, I lack their edge and their imaginative muscle, but still something of their dark force works itself subtly into my words.

In your darkness, you are in the belly of a whale with nothing to do but be carried along. In tales of the fish-womb, the hero, swallowed by a great sea monster, loses his hair in the inner heat, a sign of profound transformation, akin to the monk who shaves his head to mark the change from ordinary life to a life of holiness. Monk and infant, bald, precursors of every man and woman who returns to a state before birth in certain dark nights of the soul.

When you sense that your dark night is one of pregnancy and oceanic return, you could react accordingly and be still. Watch and wonder. Take the human embryo as your model. Assume the fetal position, emotionally and intellectually. Be silent. Float in your darkness as if it were the waters of the womb, and give up trying to fight your way out or make sense of it.

There is something Zen-like in this recommendation. Shunryu Suzuki, in his usual simplicity, taught "one-act Samadhi."9 He said you should limit your activity and be concentrated on what is happening at this moment. In this way you can express yourself. You are not wandering all over the place. He says, when you bow, bow; when you sit, sit. I would say, when you are on a night sea journey, be taken. Don't try to have it finished. Don't try to figure it out. Don't try to outsmart it. You wouldn't interfere with the natural birth process, so don't fidget your way into the journey of soul that will make you more of a person and reveal your destiny. Be in one-act darkness.

The Belly of The Whale

Remember how Jonah got into the whale in the first place. He refused the call to speak to a thoughtless people. He has been seen as an antihero, a common man who doesn't feel he has the stuff to become more than he is. Here lies another theme in this popular story: The dark night saves you from being stuck in your small life. It makes you a hero. It grows you into your fate and into being a responsive member of your community. In your mother's womb you were becoming a person. In your womb-like dark night you are becoming a soul.

The whale's belly is sunyata, fruitful emptiness. Jonah sits in the whale doing zazen, meditating like a monk. He sits, not literally but figuratively. His status as antihero is given place and becomes intense, and meanwhile he moves closer to his fate. He is like a Beckett character, having no control over his situation and yet mysteriously getting somewhere even as he doesn't move. He is also like a person in therapy. "Why do I keep coming?" people ask, since change is usually not obvious and dramatic. You sit there week after week like a Chinese jar, imperceptibly in motion.

In the dark place you may ask the basic questions: Who are you? What is this world? What kind of family do you come from? What are your origins, your early experiences? Deep down, what do you want? What do you fear? In the belly of the whale you are given the chance to start over. The sun-fish rises once again in the east. You get another morning in your life.

In the Biblical story, Jonah, sitting in the whale, sings a song in praise of the Lord. His words would be familiar to anyone suffering a dark night: "Waters choked me to death; the abyss whirled around me." There is only one psalm to sing in the dark night: the song that praises the dark. This is the song John of the Cross sings, and this is what Mark Rothko put on canvas and what Anne Sexton, the suburban homemaker turned poet, wrote on paper. The way you speak, the way you live, the ways you express yourself - these are all highly significant in dealing with your dark night. If you sing against the darkness, a tactic few real artists take, you may be in an impasse with it forever. But if you can find some way, suited to your talents and temperament, to express your situation poetically, you will be singing a psalm to the God who is your ultimate darkness.

You don't have to be a trained artist to do this. From your dark night you can speak with unusual clarity and passion, from the depth of your feeling instead of from some habitual, superficial place. Many times I have seen people find a new way of communicating their feelings and thoughts from the darkness. This expression of yourself is essential to the experience and to whatever transformation is possible.

Society, too, prefers to sings its blues rather than to state them plainly. The poignant song gets through to us and charms us even as it portrays memories of sadness and loss. Whatever impulse moves us to create or to listen to a mournful song is the same impulse that begs for poetic expression of our dark feelings.

Copyright © 2005 Thomas Moore

About the Author

Thomas Moore, Ph.D., wrote the phenomenal #1 bestsellers Care of the Soul and SoulMates as well as many other successful books. Moore was a Catholic monk for twelve years and later became a psychotherapist, earning degrees in theology, musicology, and religion. Moore now lectures extensively throughout North America.