Goodnight, Good Gloom

   Goodnight, Moon is the story remembered and still read by parents, children and grandchildren.  It's treasured as a way to step into the dark, a movement that involves some hesitation, even trepidation.    
   Children who are afraid of the dark are on to something.  We comfort them, banish monsters in the closet and under the bed, and assure them that we will protect them from attack.  We may leave a light on in the corner of the room but we usually wean them away from that beacon, for sooner or later the dark must be accepted and its pall borne.  Part of growing up.  But even after we leave childhood there is fear of the dark.  The things of the night are not the same as the things of the day, as Hemingway observed. Sleep mimics death and we sleep in the dark. Insomniacs know this, at least subconsciously, and so they are restless and easily roused; they find somnolent repose elusive and even recalcitrant.  They may find themselves prompted to prayer-like supplication, as in this plea from childhood.

                                                 From goulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties
                                                 And things that go bump in the night
                                                 Good Lord, deliver us!

    However, the dark that unsettles is not only the external dark.  There is a darkness that rises up from one's brain even as the literal darkness of night descends.  A kind of  Kirkegaardian dread. The inner darkness may be more existential than metaphysical.  Recall some of Robert Frost's poems from his "dark side" that that evoke ominous insight, such as the walker in "Acquainted with the Night," whose perambulations have pushed him to "have walked out in rain--and back in rain. /  I have outwalked the furthest city light."  And the sounds and sights he records include "an interrupted cry" "from another street," and a prophetic tolling of "one luminary clock against the sky" that "proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. / I have been one acquainted with the night."  The walker's alter ego, the speaker in "Desert Places" passes the field filling with snow as the night is falling fast.  He is made desolate by "a blanker whiteness of benighted snow/ With no expression, nothing to express."  But for all the bleakness he knows the way that winter withers the desert is not what alarms his heart, but his own epiphany that "I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places."  

   In one of his Five Nocturnes, poems less familiar than the ones referenced above, Frost comes inside and pictures the bedroom protected by The Night Light.   

                                                  She always had to burn a light
                                                  Beside her attic bed at night.
                                                  It gave bad dreams and broken sleep,
                                                  But helped the Lord her soul to keep.
                                                  Good gloom on her was thrown away.
                                                  It is on me by night or day,
                                                  Who have, as I suppose, ahead
                                                  The darkest of it still to dread.

   I love that phrase, "good gloom."  Is it oxymoronic or a kind of prevenient grace?  It seems that the one requires the other.  We know from Aristotle and Greek tragedy that catharsis is a purging of anxieties that must first be roiled in us before they can be cast away.  And we know from Aquinas and Augustine that the intersection between grace and free will is theologically complex. It is not easy to transform the dark.  It has been done, however.  You remember the conclusion to A Child's Christmas in Wales when Dylan Thomas intones: "I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept."  He didn't create this image of the dark as transcendental out of whole cloth.  As far back as the Book of Exodus we read: "Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was."  Those are angles of vision few of us reach.  If we dwell in the dark, we stay up late and revere lights that burn brightly.
       
   For some, the cloak of night is alleviated by a companion who sleeps beside us.  For others, another person's presence is less help than one would think. There are many nostrums and soporifics we can proffer those who fear the dark. But what may be more comforting is a thing, an inanimate object that has meaning or association for those who toss and turn.  Something one can grasp and hold, speak to or through, a totem.  Stuffed animals have a provenance in childhood but many perdure into adult life.  Rosaries or pray beads find their way from the nightstand to the bed itself. Whatever the object is, you must be able to clutch it.  And when you do, you can, by incantation, by ritualized utterance or by defiant determination evoke that "good gloom" that "The Night Light" names. 
   Sweet dreams.    
  




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