Tapenotes on the dark

side a

The Irish writer and mystic John Moriarty used to re-tell a Sufi parable he loved about a lost key. A person returns to their rural home on the outskirts of town every evening after work, and as they get to the single streetlight outside their gate – a welcome beacon in the gloom – they pull the housekey from their pocket and enter the house for the evening. One night, however, they go to pull the key from their pocket and it’s not there. Checking the pockets, the bag, the pockets again, they begin to turn around and around and search the glow cast by the streetlight. After a while, a neighbour passing by asks them what they are doing, and on hearing of their predicament starts to help them to look for the housekey. There’s no sign of it in the light cast by the streetlight, and eventually the neighbour asks, ‘Are you sure you lost it here?’

To which the person replies, ‘No, I lost it out there somewhere,’ signalling, with a sweep of their arm, the vast dark world beyond the house, back the way they came.

‘Well, why are you looking here then?’ the neighbour rightly asks.

‘Because this is where the light is,’ the person responds…

The parable’s point of course is that it is easier to look for answers in the realm of light that covers the familiar, the seen, the knowable, for the answers that we seek, but that the most important answers are out there in the dark, and to find them we need to take that leap, to go out into the dark, into the unknown. Writing is, for me, going out into the dark to look for the key to my house, my being. In its own way, it is contemplation of the great mystery, and, therefore, prayer. But, for me, the great mystery is not God; it is existence. It is being in this world.

What does it mean then, as a writer, to go out into the dark in search of a ‘key’? I’ve contemplated this a lot, and I think it’s giving yourself up to everything out there when you sit down to write. It’s allowing the writing hand to be a receiver of some signal that comes from far off space, from dark matter, from the things that lurk both above and beneath your understanding and your intent. There is intention of course, and some bit of planning is usually necessary in writing. I might know, for example, that I want to write a book or a story about a particular situation or theme, and I know plenty about that theme or situation in advance. I can’t help but jot down in my notebook the things that might happen on the page… But when I sit down to it, anything must be possible in the moment of writing. And this is my version of casting my hand or my mind or some combination of both out into the dark, the unintended, the unknown. I look for the key where I cannot get my bearings, to see what ideas come, be they in the form of images, words spoken, characters, sentences or just… ideas.

Coming from me, this is ironic, because I have a personal history with the dark. As a child, I was terrified of it. My parents always had to leave my bedroom door open about six inches to allow the hall light in, and the hall light had to stay on all night. It was the only way I could sleep, safe from the imagined demons that lurked in clothes hung from the bedroom door or made strange noises around the house and so on. Even more ironic is how I cured myself of this fear. Like so many other Irish Gen Xers and millennials (I was born 1983: technically the latter; spiritually the former), I was raised Catholic-ish. My mother was a half-arsed pagan-ish Irish Catholic (believing in a higher power for sure, made the sign of the cross at ambulance sightings, but not that arsed going to mass every week and never confessed to a single thing). My father was the son of extremely strict born-again Christians, London City missionaries, and I think he’d been forced to live a religious life to such an extent that he didn’t want to force us into anything one way or the other. For whatever reason, I found myself to be a pretty religious child. I believed in a higher power. I really liked the ten commandments, and even failed in an audition to be an altar boy in my local church (can’t remember the specifics of failure – it’s also possible that I lost interest, possibly during the audition itself). But imagine my excitement when the bishop came to visit the class ahead of us making our ‘confirmation’, and told us that we were, essentially, letting the Holy Spirit into our souls and our lives, and that in return for such a momentous act we could ask the Holy Spirit for one thing. Santa Claus for the soul! It couldn’t be something material, but some skill or strength or virtue we felt we were lacking. I didn’t have to think about it for a second: I would ask the Holy Spirit to eradicate my fear of the dark.

And it worked! I made my confirmation (and a heap of cash in the process), and that very night, I told my mother she could close the door and leave the hall light off. I wasn’t afraid.

Utterly emboldened by this revelation, I got out of bed, got dressed again in the gloom while my brother slept, climbed out my bedroom window, and walked out of the estate we lived on and down Church Hill towards the back road.

The back road was an old laneway that cut a jagged hypotenuse linking the town’s two main roads (one going along the river, the other rising up the hill). It was a very quiet boreen, lined by ancient trees, an old Protestant Church, a children’s home (in a decrepit, supposedly haunted ‘big house’), and, of course, unlit by streetlamps the whole way. It was pitch black and spooky as hell.

And yet I plunged down the back road and to my wonder and joy wasn’t one bit scared. The Holy Spirit had delivered! And while I came to my senses and gave up Catholicism within about a year, I can at least credit the (notion of the) Holy Spirit with the fact that I no longer feared the dark, and still don’t to this day, except perhaps when I’m at the very start of a new writing project…

side b

The door opens in the dark; a thin pillar of light widens. He comes in quietly, whispering that he needs a wee, but I’m still under the covers twisting through tunnels, on a ferry to England, looking for someone’s son throughout empty school corridors. Only moments ago it was about 1am, and I was coming to bed with mouthwash breath, sneaking in, not wanting to wake Rachel or the baby. Soar in love at the sight of them sleeping, crawl to bed with stupid, heavy eyes.

‘Dad!’ comes the urgent whisper. ‘I need a WEE.’

I wake a little more and understand him. It’s a Tuesday morning in February, 6.28am. I tell him to turn on the bathroom light himself and go, and he does.

‘I’ll follow you!’ I whisper.

‘Thanks, Dad.’

There is darkness again when he closes the door.

On the train, we passed a nuclear power plant in the midst of green-brown fields and hills. A very large puddle, like a pond, ran alongside the track.

The bathroom light leaks in a thin, faint but persistent bar through the frame of the bedroom door. I know it’s time to haul myself up, follow the boy, and remind him not to flush the toilet while the others are asleep. He’s not afraid of the dark, but he’s often afraid that he’s woken into a nightmare. If one of us is there he knows it’s real life; I think that’s why he comes in to ask if he can go to the toilet.

I was only just climbing the stairs to bed, suddenly exhausted, the eyes dragging out of me. Why the fuck did I stay up so late again? What did I even do? Watched bits of films on tele, tried to read, browsed cycling helmets on my phone, got lost in Youtube shorts. Did you know that crows have been around for seventeen million years?

I turn on the bathroom light and start to piss just as he finishes and turns to wash his hands. In the bowl, our urine is nearly brown.

‘Big drink of water as soon as we go downstairs,’ I whisper.

‘Yes, Dad.’

We go downstairs, big drinks of water. He’s allowed to watch tele from 7 – 7.30am, so he picks up a half-finished Lego project and starts tinkering with it, then asks if we can do the wordle.

We get it in four. He dreams of getting it in two. He always starts with SNAKE or LASER, and I give him options from there.

A forest of pine and fern, falling down the side of the valley.

Last night, instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour, I scrolled through football stuff, film stuff, ads, ads, Gabor Maté on trauma, golden globes, podcasts being filmed, Matt Damon on Stephen Colbert, Irish rugby players, people attacking other people in shopping centres, ‘instant karma’ top 5s, people dissecting Trump actions, dashcam and handheld footage of ICE observers, clips from Daniel Day Lewis films, football punditry, sports press conferences, UNICEF pleas for help in Gaza. Time slipped away and there was still the laundry to be loaded and the dishwasher to be put on, the bread to make.

7am comes and goes. On the tele he chooses an episode of Sonic Boom. I’m in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher, when his younger brother wakes up, calling out from the darkness of their shared room. So I go and get younger brother and open the curtains and gather up last night’s water bottles and piggy-back him downstairs and chuck him on the couch and get their two breakfast orders and then I’m back in the kitchen to make breakfast, put the fresh bread on the wire rack to cool, and finish unloading the dishwasher. The sky above the back garden is grey turning blue; clouds are thinning out, clearing away, for now. Mother and brand new baby sleep on upstairs.

We eat breakfast, tidy up breakfast, then it’s get dressed (uniforms on), lunches made and packed, brush teeth, shoes on, into the car, up the back road to Church Hill, past my old house, drop older brother to school, run a few errands, play with younger brother, give him a snack, drop younger brother to creche, collect older brother from school, homework, play, chats, more jobs, another collection, make dinner, tidy dinner, baths, brush teeth, poos, stories, bed, and darkness, and then I’m on the couch again, scrolling various apps on my phone, drinking tea, trying to read, then putting on the laundry, the dishwasher, no need for bread tonight, and hauling myself, finally, way too late, up the stairs on the verge of midnight, asking myself why I waited up so late, brushing teeth, plugging in phone in spare room, into the dark, quietly into bed, until the door opens in the dark; a thin pillar of light widens…

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