Dark Matters
We ask ourselves at times why it is that evil comes to rule us. We concern ourselves with the shape of brutal acts, but the space claimed by them isn’t shapeless.
I’ve been thinking of this equation, as we all must have been.
Between our little town and the far off sea last night, the mist came like an army, taking mountain after mountain ahead and hanging its tears underneath each streetlamp; voiceless. Autumn arrives unaccounted. Ours is a town of relative accord, despite what flickers between the curtains, and the quilt of fields and common lands surrounding it, applied to the daily business of living. The structures of its supply – the well-laid tarmac roads, the linear skeleton of telegraph poles – severed as they were from view throughout the evening by this fog still brought the lifeblood in.
We sit, each of our communities, shaped by the wider world and formed around it, more than in any generation that came before.
I want to tell you a story about three brothers. It’s the right moment to consider hierarchies – during this change of guard, which seeks so forcefully to reshape our own. One brother died in summertime, one I said goodbye to very recently and one I saw leave at just this time last year. They were the sons of our queen goat, Thorne, and her mate of three years, Burtie. My daughter named them Opal, Olly and Octavian.
They slept together in a tangle of comfort and challenged each other at running and jumping onto and off my back while I tried to write. Their competitiveness wrapped them around one another as much as their sleep. Because I was there with her throughout the nightlong birthing heaves and because she trusts me, Thorne left me one to feed. Opal never needed to jostle for the breast – but nor was he quite included; always halfstepping in a different direction, searching for a thing the others didn’t know. Olly and Octavian saw him bottlefed but it meant nothing to them. In the race for supremacy that awarded the strongest chance at life, there were really only two.
And they chose very different pathways. Octavian was strongest, fastest, proudest. He mounted the others – just to make a point. His coat was silver and his new horns formed quickly. Olly did not have power on his side.
So his route became a circuitous one. He grew wily and found a way to meet his needs. The first time he pushed his head through the fence, I blamed myself. The grass was greener there, the pen too small - and I searched for solutions. It was painful to get him uncaught; wrapping my fingers around his head and trying to manoeuvre him backwards, fitting my knuckles with his trapped horns at the only angle that would take them, wrestling him free as though against his will.
Only to hear him caught again within minutes. His distress cry was impossible to mistake; a regulated siren of demand. Off I’d climb towards the fence again. Any fence, any field. One morning 13 times in 2 hours. And each time I walked away after passing this endurance test, I shook my head at his mother. ‘Idiot! He’s an idiot,’ I said. ‘You’ve given birth to an idiot, Thorne.’ But she gazed back with equanimity - knowing far better than me. Because as soon as he was freed (and just before he found the next place in the fenceline through which to slip his horns) Olly ran for reassurance. It took me weeks to realise, Thorne standing there without the slightest investment, waiting for me to comprehend as she received him - and granted him her milk, like any mother would her distressed child.
This week – in parks, on common lands, built communally for us to assemble in shared spaces – effigies will be consumed by flame. We’re concerned with light and dark, this time of year; with playing games of radiance and captured shadow. At home in bed, the light switch’s just within our grasp. For a little while, wonder paints the sky in brief collusion with the dark and before we know it we’ll disband and walk back to the hoodwinked houses with disposable keepsakes and no collective memory of what we’ve burnt.
I took my daughter to a fireworks display at the military base in Brecon once, when she was still small enough to carry in my arms. She cried in the dark and confusion, despite the fact that I held onto her, and soldiers lined the tarmac strips to keep us safe beneath the phosphorescent rain.
The memory of Olly’s death looks like a yin-yang sign. He’s curled up pale, halfshaped inside a darker circle.
I remember it was a grey day. I heard him bleating from a distance, mid-morning, after milking the nannies inside. I’d already been to see to him and the other boys but the timbre was different now; changed by desperation but also broken into strata by the liquid he’d inhaled. The well where I found him – its lid split and fallen in – wasn’t deep really and he was crying out when his face showed intermittently above the water. I pulled him out, kneeling in the bog, and he was heavy by then, forty kilos I suppose. His brothers stood silently beside me on the hill while I attempted some kind of CPR. A long time, half an hour probably with him wet in my arms while I shouted for someone else to come up from the house to help me – not because there was anything that could be done to save him, but because we call for help when we have none.
Unable to revive Olly, we took his life and in the woods we skinned and processed him. We brought him back to the house, silent, hideless and headless, his carcass curled up foetal in our black bin.
These are the images we do not wish to live with. These are the realities we erect whole buildings to sequester, gated, served by their own roads, the barns, the abattoirs and milking factories with which our lives can’t intersect. These are the matters that we will have nothing to do with – all memory of them cleansed by cellophane.
Octavian, strongest – left only Opal to fight with or sleep beside – was given to stud at a sanctuary near the Wirral. Opal was sold just two months ago, also to be a sire to his own young. ‘You do what you can for them,’ another farmer voiced to me once.
Although we cannot know, of course, what must be done for others if their needs are hidden in the dark from us.
There is a beautiful quote, by a beautiful man, David F. Noble, on the subject of the science that pushes back the boundaries of our known universe:
‘Empiricism was introduced into scientific study as a means of understanding metaphysical truths, a guide to reflection. In the late nineteenth century, however, this process underwent a subtle inversion whereby practical experience, the handmaiden of science in search for truth, made science its own handmaiden.’
Here we sit in the twenty first century, spectators to the magnificent.
Well-lit, the parameters of our world shine stark inside the cave.
We must push back at untroubled darkness. We must not make ourselves into any shape that fits it.
There is a theory by Denis Rancourt I’ve tried to show you before:
The model shows how the dominance hierarchy creates two kinds of individuals that predominantly reside either… [in] dominated or dominant modes… [T]he animal’s intrinsic bio-chemical response to environmental signals provides stable dominance hierarchy, irrespective of the individual health consequences… [W]hile complex institutions, technology and resource extraction efficiency theoretically permit individual emancipation, nonetheless the human animal cannot escape its intrinsic socio-bio-metabolic nature.
Dominance hierarchy rules.
He is interviewed in the film about David F. Noble linked above though, because both men, by becoming ungovernable, in fact refused to fulfil the formula that completes our present hierarchical mould.
We must break the balance that sustains us.
What is it that we wish for? Do we believe that the fulfilment of those wishes will be brought to us by swift delivery during a night that we don’t need to penetrate?
Fed, heated, sleeping, is this our darkness then?
Images by Francesca Swift.
Beautiful, thank you. It's a bleak time but writing like yours helps me focus on being human and staying connected 🌹
What a magnificent piece of writing , so moving, thank you.