In Praise of Darkness

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

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 People hated it (they went to bed earlier back then), and the next year Congress repealed the act.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."

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

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