Darkness My Old Friend

“And they say that angels are only in heaven.”  Youssef speaks this love of his wife from the darkness of his blindness, where the truth is bright and clear.  Majid Majidi’s film “The Willow Tree” challenges us to reconsider what is darkness and what is light.

“Hello, darkness, my old friend;”  the words of the Simon and Garfunkel seemed to come to my tongue this morning as I awakened in my familiar darkness, after two or three consecutive mornings of awakening in the light.  I noticed that in the darkness I am called inward, called to memory, to listening, to wondering, while in the light I am called to activity, to what is ahead, to result.  The mornings of writing in the light have been challenged by distraction of action.  But this morning in the darkness, I found myself called to the ritual of brewing a pot of tea, of listening to the sounds of the warming kettle, feeling the embrace of the waiting, preparing the pot, pouring the hot water, smelling the tea leaves, the vanilla, feeling the water against the stirring of the spoon, moved from its stillness.  I found myself called not to this chair at my keyboard, but to the chair next to my desk, the Carolina rocker that we bought in the 60’s, that we bought because John Kennedy sat in one like it.  It is covered with a horse blanket from New Mexico, its hard rush seat padded by a folded old moving blanket made from shredded jeans.  It is a chair in which I do nothing. 

Feeling the warmth of my mug of tea, I sat there in this darkness, watching the scene of memory play in my mind.  There was Dr. Budzinowski, the D.P from World War II calling across the parking lot behind the engineering building  to a couple of students under the hood of an old car, testing a Claxton horn they were either installing or repairing: “ah-OOOOOOOOOOOOO-gah, ahOOOOOOOOOOO-gah.”  “Quiet, you boys,” He shook his fist at them; “This is a University!”  It was my first visit to campus.  My brother Dan was living in the dorm.  This is a University.  Wow.  I was hooked.  There was Dr. Turner, my freshman philosophy professor, who had the remarkably natural habit of placing the chalk with his one hand, his writing hand, into the crevice between the stump of his other arm and the sleeve of his gray suit.  He did it so naturally, inviting us to philosophy not merely as a subject, but an opportunity to consider life, its impact on us, and our response to it.  And here was Nadia’s so-casual flute performance yesterday, her first, pulling of her solo as if she had been doing it for years.  I wondered at the difference between this still-dark morning and the already-light ones of the past few days.  I soaked in the calm of the darkness, the stillness in myself.  The light would come in its time, and so I enjoyed this darkness, this respite from light and activity.

But Joussef lived in constant darkness, and seemed to live in stillness and contentment, in what he called “his little paradise” of loving wife, happy little daughter, and a his life as a teacher of theology.  His contentment was shaken by the discovery of a tumor behind one of his eyes.  He prayed that God would not take him from his good life.  But his good life was changed not by death, but by the discovery that the tumor was benign, and with its removal his sight could be returned.  Now his prayer was for the light, for release from the darkness.  His first prayer – for life – he had typed in Braille and placed it in his leather-bound volume of Rumi’s Masnavi, a Persian classic of mystic theology, the subject of his teaching.  He is given the sight that he prayed for, but it draws him from the darkness, the stillness, the awareness of the “little paradise” in which he had lived.  The Masnavi opens with these lines:

 Hearken to the reed-flute, how it complains,
Lamenting its banishment from its home:
"Ever since they tore me from my osier (willow tree) bed,
My plaintive notes have moved men and women to tears.
I burst my breast, striving to give vent to sighs,
And to express the pangs of my yearning for my home."

Youssef is pulled by the light of sight, torn from the osier bed, the underwater roots of the willow tree that rooted him to the love of his life.  Deprived of the stillness and dark, he becomes lost in the attraction of light, drawing him forward, or what appears as forward, until he loses his way.  The film calls us to look again at what is light and what is darkness, what is blindness and what is sight.  Here is a link to the film, (Click for a link)and a link to the Masnavi. (Click for a link) 

There is an old friend in darkness; there is a home in stillness.  There is a relentlessness in light and action that can pull us until we are lost . . . unless we feel our roots, which call to us in the dark, the darkness that is a gift to us early, if we are early people, or late, if we are late people.  

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.