Gloomy (Doomy?)
On shadows, nihilism, the implicit realm, and Blake.
Gloomy is one of my favorite words. I like the way it feels in my mouth when I say it. (Try it!) I like what it conjures: dark overcast skies, drizzle, wind and whitecaps, lush dripping ferns. I love a gloomy day. I love what we must do to ward off the gloom from seeping into ourselves: candles, coffee, movement, creation.
I’ve been accused of slipping into melancholy. It’s true. But don’t we all sometimes? Maybe not. Some of the people I admire the most have an air of melancholy, the artists and poets, those willing to recognize and live with their own shadows and imperfections, their moods.
I’m headed to the west of Ireland for a writing workshop this November. I’m very excited. When I googled “weather in County Clare in mid November,” the results were exactly what you’d expect, rain, clouds, lows in the 40’s and highs in the 50’s. Perfectly Gloomy.
But autumn gloom is not the same as spring gloom. After months and months of dreariness, it gets old. In color theory, warm colors can appear cool beside even warmer colors. It’s all about our references. The same is true for weather. After what felt like a long hot summer, I’m ready for the gloom.
I’m currently sitting in one of the cafes I frequent. It rained heavily this morning, but the sky is now bright and blue to the west. The asphalt glistens. Two men behind me are hyping each other up on the benefits of AI, justifying its use. “The emails my assistant drafted were never in my voice. I don’t have that problem with AI.”
There’s a maple tree outside our shop that loses its leaves in September every year. For a few days, it’s brilliant. When the sun sets, golden light streams in from the west and the tree is aglow. I’ve seen people take photos of it and come in and proclaim autumn. I don’t know if they’re conscious of the fact that it was planted in a thin strip of soil within a massive parking lot twenty five years ago, that there’s hardly any permeable ground within hundreds of feet, and that the parking lot, with full day southern exposure, is a heat island. It’s stressed. It’s unhealthy. Obviously. But who cares?
Let’s think in deep time for a moment. Let’s go quantum. Imagine ourselves floating serenely in the implicit realm where all of space and time and light and consciousness exist in perfect unfathomable complexity and scale. We sense something, it feels like a warm radiant glow on our skin, a sunrise, our universe forms, our sun, our solar system, Earth. These massive galactic explosions feel like a tickle. The glow brightens and we focus our attention to get a closer look. What is that? Listen. Life. Brighter, brighter, brighter still. Humanity, knowledge, a river of consciousness flows, floods, tools, society, poetry. It radiates brighter, brighter. We squint, but it’s so bright we must close our eyes. Blip, the light fades, and a peaceful darkness washes over us.
Is this nihilism? I suppose if we get stuck here, maybe. But what does it mean to be an observer? A ponderer. Especially when my mind often drifts out to this scale of thinking about existence. Especially with times as they are.
I think about Ernest Hemingway often. Unlike what
Saunders has described about his early writing career, it’s not his writing that haunts me but the myth of the man himself. You know, the tormented one who couldn’t sit still, who chased war, “liberated his favorite hotel in Paris,” and was in two small airplane accidents in a single day because he was living so hard.He sneaks into my mind and asks, “do you really think you’re doing enough?”
The honest answer is no—I do not believe I have ever felt like I was doing enough.
Years ago, when we’d just moved from Portland, OR, the way I described the vibes of the two coasts was, “people on the west coast manifest things and people on the east coast get shit done.” I had hopes of helping to bring back some of this laid back lifestyle to Massachusetts, merging the two mentalities. This was 2014 and quite a bit has happened since then, personally, professionally, geo-politically.
I’ve written before about struggling with cynicism, but what I’ve begun to wonder is what I might have misplaced along the way. Does cynicism fill a vacuum where courage or imagination or hope once thrived. Is nihilism a black hole? I believe if this is true for societies, it must be true for individuals. I don’t feel this way all the time. For most of the day, I’m functioning, I’m moving things forward, I’m enjoying myself, I’m present. It’s when my head hits the pillow and I think back on my day, think back on what I did or did not accomplish, check in with my goals, my hopes and dreams, that my shadow catches up with me and lays down beside me, dulling my light, clouding my vision, and haunting my dreams.
In 2021, a few days before I set out to circumnavigate Prudence Island on foot (another story for another time), I had a dream about a shadow and a boy. The shadow, dark, dense, and full of despair, is a reoccurring figure in my dreams. The towhead boy was new. As I walked through an old empty house, I sensed a presence around each corner. The walls were a deep green, and the floorboards so dark they were almost invisible. Through some windows, I could see the deep blue night sky, through others the silhouettes of thick foliage pressing up against the house. Around each corner, a body-aching dread, part of me and separate. As my heartbeat quickened and my anxiety rose higher and higher, I found myself in a lucid state yearning to wake, but unlike most other dreams on most other nights, I stayed sleeping. Step after floating step, I moved through the house until I rounded a corner and saw the boy, small, alone, familiar. I woke to my wife’s hand on my back. I’d been yelling in my sleep.
The dream of the shadow and the boy lingered, but it wasn’t until later that week when I read an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin at the suggestion of my therapist, (hi Jerry!) The Child and the Shadow, that I realized how important it was. Le Guin’s essay is her recalling of a Hans Christian Andersen story about a young man who becomes untethered from his shadow when he lets it run off ahead of himself so it can seek pleasure and poetry and pursue the darker sides of his being. The man remains decent and integrated into society only then for his shadow to return sometime in the middle of his life. When this unfamiliar and suppressed part of himself returns, it takes mastery over him because he has lost his ability to assert and integrate the darker, freer aspects of himself. He is consumed. He has disintegrated.
I wonder how many of us feel disintegrated or misplaced. I wonder what effect this has on us individually, as a society? I think I know. But, I’d love to hear from you, dear reader, if you’ve felt this way.
Robert Bly writes of the shadow as the heavy sack we drag behind us through life. What an image.
I don’t know what came first, but closely associated with these feelings is, perhaps the root of so much pain in the world, fear. Fear for the state of the world and all who are impacted. Fear for my loved ones. Fear that time is running out. Fear that my brain and my processing style will never allow me to fully get out of my own way. I yearn to be rid of this fear. Intellectually, I know it does no good.
Did the man in the story fear following his own shadow? Was the boy in my dream my own fear? In the implicit realm, are we whole?
I’ll leave you with this poem by William Blake I often return to each winter when the gloom sets in.
Mad Song
The wild winds weep,
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs infold:
But lo! the morning peeps
Over the eastern steeps,
And the rustling birds of dawn
The earth do scorn.
Lo! to the vault
Of paved heaven,
With sorrow fraught
My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of night,
Make weep the eyes of day;
They make mad the roaring winds,
And with tempests play.
Like a fiend in a cloud
With howling woe,
After night I do croud,
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east,
From whence comforts have increas’d;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.
Thank you for reading and sharing!
-Caleb
PS. I’ll be trying some new things with this newsletter / on Substack soon so please look out for those.