The Fruit of Darkness in Anne Carson’s Decreation
If conditionals are of two kinds now it is night and all the cats are black.
(100)
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A redheaded woman wearing espadrilles walks into a hotel room. She tips the porter, sits at the end of the bed. She slips out of her shoes. Four bottles of pills are removed one at a time from the depths of her purse. Then a heavy library copy of Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway. She relaxes back on the bed, opens to her bookmarked page, pill bottles next to her like a lover, and begins to read.
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Deep calls to deep.
Psalms 42:8
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Tehom (Hebrew: תְּהוֹם), literally the deep or abyss (Greek Septuagint: ábyssos), refers to the Great Deep of the primordial waters of creation in the Bible. Tehom is a cognate of the Akkadian word tamtu and the Ugaritic t-h-m, which have similar meanings.
Wikipedia entry: “Tehom”
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As she reads, her hand unclasps her skirt, unbuttons the bottom of her blouse, moves over the globe of her belly where new life resides, resting in its own primordial swamp.
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Everything might spill.
(66)
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She sets the book aside, and knowing the bottles and their small pills within will wait for her, she stretches to sleep. Suddenly, water streams in from the four corners of the room along the floor, river water filled with algae, seaweed, and muck rushes in with the power of a dark current and the room is quickly filled with water washing over the bed, over the woman. She is covered. She is subsumed, captured in its watery grip.
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It is possible to die.
Mrs. Dollaway
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Blessings of the deep that lies beneath,
Blessings of the breasts and of the womb.
Genesis 49:25
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Audre Lorde appears in pictures, a single-breasted warrior. I want to drink from her power.
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The woman on the bed is Julia Moore, though here, she is Laura Brown in the 2002 movie, The Hours.
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If conditionals are of two kinds now it is night and all the cats are black.
(100)
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The poet, Audre Lorde believed the tehom to be a fecund place, a dark place where women’s true power – the power of the erotic – exists.
Lorde
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The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
Genesis 1:2
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What is fecund in darkness? Night creatures called nocturnals, the navigated night-sounds of bats. Nightshades ripening at midnight. Mushrooms and lichen and night-blooming jasmine.
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Eva Gabor: “Don’t bother with perfume, dolling, just plant night-blooming jasmine outside your bedroom window”
San Francisco Chronicle, 1967
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Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole.
John Keats
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If there were only darkness, all would be clear.
Samuel Beckett
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Sunlight like lamé lays upon the surface of the water rendering the river opaque, not warming the rushing water beneath. Virginia dresses with purpose, carefully, hurriedly. She smooths her tweed coat, belts it tightly, shoes, stockings, hat. She remembers to close the front door with its pane of stained glass and even the garden gate, completely.
The deep that lies beneath. The tehom. A hunger, like a lover. It calls.
The sunlight is pushed back as she enters the river, her pockets stuffed with heavy rocks, shoes and coat. She walks in, up to her neck and lets herself glide away, body moving along the darkness, the seaweed and the muck, pulled by the current.
The poet is dead.
The Hours (2002)
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Michael Cunningham didn’t write the screenplay for the movie The Hours, but it is based on his Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name. In his six books, Cunningham wrote about the struggles of contemporary queer life.
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I defy you to find those deep approaches
where ordinary air is.
The tough wound plucks itself.
Dark swallow.
(81)
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Whose uprushings send rocks and riverbanks from down below and pour out rivers of that weird, spontaneous, earthborn fire.
Longinus
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If conditionals are of two kinds now it is night and all the cats are black.
(100)
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The passionate moment echoes from soul to soul.
(46)
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You might think a total solar eclipse would have no colour. The word “eclipse” comes from ancient Greek ekleipsis, “a forsaking, quitting, abandonment.” The sun quits us, we are forsaken by light. Yet people who experience total eclipse are moved to such strong descriptions of its vacancy and void that this itself begins to take on colour. What after all is a colour? Something not no colour. Can you make a double negative of light? Would that be like waking from a dream in the wrong direction and finding yourself on the back side of your own mind?
(149)
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River fogs (7 am) go flayed and silvery
when it dawns dark
on the day I leave.
(12)
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We were very, very old. We were men and women of the primeval world come to greet the dawn.
“The Sun and the Fish”
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In the essay, “The Sun and the Fish,” Virginia Woolf tells of travels to Bardon Fell above Richmond on 29 June, 1930 to watch a full solar eclipse. She was in the company of both her husband, Leonard, and her lover Vita Sackville-West, and Sackville-West’s husband, Harold Nicolson. According to her diary, she was watching Vita all day.
(152)
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Sunset at Night – is natural –
But Sunset on the Dawn
Reverses Nature – Master –
So Midnight’s – due – at Noon –
Eclipses be – predicted –
And Science bows them in –
But do One face us
suddenly –
Jehovah’s Watch – is wrong –
Emily Dickinson (415)
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Sights fade and perish and disappear because they failed to find the right mate.
“The Sun and the Fish”
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For example, old Germanic legend tells how the (male) moon was married to the (female) sun but could not satisfy her fiery passion, he just wanted to go to sleep. They made a bet: whoever woke first in the morning would rule the day. The sun, still turbulent at 4 am, won the bet but vowed she would not sleep with the moon again. Both of them soon regretted their parting and began to edge toward one another (= eclipse). No sooner do they meet than they fall to quarreling and go separate ways, the sun bloodred with anger.
(150–151)
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If conditionals are of two kinds now it is night and all the cats are black.
(100)
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What does it mean to be loved by God?
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In the movie, The Hours, each kiss is woman to woman, each inspired by desire, a desire not for love, but for life. Each kiss is an inhale of lifeblood, not a sharing of love.
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Reading Anne Carson’s Decreation on my bed. River water, filled with green, rushes over me.
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Touched by the true sublime your soul is naturally lifted up, she rises to a proud height, filled with joy and vaunting, as she had herself created this thing that she has heard.
Longinus
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Richard, AIDS-ridden and crazed, uncovers every opening, lets light flood his apartment before he drops himself out of a window.
The Hours (2002)
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It is useless to ask the night these questions.
(36)
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Everyman, seeing himself from the point of view of God the creator, should regard his own existence as a sacrifice made by God. I am God’s abdication.The more I exist, the more God abdicates. So if I take God’s side rather than my own I ought to regard my existence as a diminution, a decrease.
Weil
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Dispossession: things that “leak”
Sleep
Loss of a mother
Spillage
Acceptance of God
Sublimity
An unquiet soul
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The self is only a shadow projected by sin and error which blocks God’s light and which I take for a Being.
(167)
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What can it mean to “refuse one’s existence”? How does my “consent not to be” enable others to be? What Is The Nature or ontology of a self that has the ability — evidently even the obligation — to consent to its own nonexistence as a present fact?
Reed (27)
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If conditionals are of two kinds now it is night and all the cats are black.
(100)
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And at night / and there is non-silence for me.
Psalms 22:2–3
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Laura Brown is queer. Too honest, too tortured to live a hetro-normative life, she abandons her children. Her son, Richard soaks in every part of her story.
The Hours (2002)
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The place of emptiness — the tohu or the tehom — appalls us, leaves us aghast; but it may also constitute us as human. Its inchoate murmur moves us to language and silence. Alien to human meanings, discomfiting, distracting, unfathomable, the murmur of the tehom mocks pretension and threatens sanity.
Zornberg
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Her unquiet drifts in her, spills, drifts on.
(70)
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decreation, n.
Etymology: < de- prefix 1f + creation, n. (In sense of “diminution;” décréation is found in 14th cent. French.)
The undoing of creation; depriving of existence; annihilation.
1647 N. Ward Simple: “As he is a creature, hee feares decreation.”
1678 R. Cudworth: “More Reasonable than the Continual Decreation and Annihilation of the Souls of Brutes.”
1918 P. T. Forsyth: “It is creation not out of a chaos but a wreck. It is the recreation of a decreation.”
1930 D. H. Lawrence:“The excrementory flow is towards dissolution, de-creation, if we may use such a word.”
Oxford English Dictionary
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the three-cornered figure of jealousy
(168)
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Yithak Luria asks, if God is complete and perfect and he fills the whole universe, how can the world exist? Lurianic philosophy answers, God pulled his belly in and made a place for the world. This whole green, imperfect planet created from a belt.
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A young girl, Simone Weil scribbles fragments into a dozen notebooks. Writes the word “decreation.” Coughs blood into a handkerchief. Hands her notebooks to Gustave Thibon, tells him she would be happy for her thoughts to appear under his pen.
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Two directions pulling apart from each other-creating the triangle as the first spot remains intact. “Two-fold security”
(36)
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The Talmud calls God “the third who is between them.”
Torat Kohanim to Leviticus 5:21
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Possibility of fusion
Lorde
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If conditionals are of two kinds now it is night and all the cats are black.
(100)
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I must withdraw so that God may make contact with the beings whom chance places in my path and whom he loves. It is tactless of me to be there. It is as though I were placed between two lovers or two friends. I am not the maiden who awaits her betrothed but the unwelcome third who is with two betrothed lovers and ought to go away so that they can really be together.
Weil
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The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, it is deep.
Lorde
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Sound of oars drawing away from shore. / That tang of dogshit in darkness.
(15)
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Dark pupil / the entire night itself.
(15)
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The dark and the light. The depths of the river, the sparkle of the sun, and only a shoed and coated woman with rocks in her pockets to complete the triangle.
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We were come to see the dawn. The night greater prominence and substance “disembodied intercourse with the sky”
“The Sun and the Fish”
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In the drifting and nameless light and warmth of infancy, in the nocturnal depths of the erotic, and in the domain of dying where rational discourse has no longer anything to say.
Lingis
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that strength
That strength, mother: dug out.Hammered, chained,
blacked, cracked, weeping, sweeping, tossed on its
groans, hammered, hammering snouts
off death. Bolted and damming,
dolloped and biting. Knife. Unbloodable
on grindbones
that strength, mother,
Stopped.
(10)
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Allow the abyss to open within you. Make way. Make way for the other.
ξ
Bibliography
Carson, Anne. Decreation: poetry, essays, opera. New York: Knopf: Random House, 2005.
The Hours. Director: Stephen Daldry. Performances by Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore Writers: Michael Cunningham (novel), David Hare (screenplay). Paramount Pictures, 2002.
Hulle, Dirk Van. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 2009, Vol. 21, “Where Never Before: Beckett's Poetics of Elsewhere”/“La poétique de l'ailleurs.” In Honor of Marius Buning (2009), pp. 179–192. (Beckett quote on p. 179).
Keats, John. “Sonnet to Sleep.” The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900. Clarendon Press, 1900.
Lingis, Alphonso. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing In Common. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Lorde, Audre. Sister, Outsider. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.
Reed, Robert. “Decreation as Substitution: Reading Simone Weil through Levinas” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 93, No. 1 (January 2013), pp. 25–40.
San Francisco Chronicle, 1967.
Weil, Simone. The Notebooks of Simone Weil. “New York Notebook.” Wills, A: London: Taylor & Francis Group; 2004.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dolloway. Boston, Mass. Mariner Books, 1990.
Woolf, Virginia. The Captain’s Deathbed and Other Essays. Boston, Mass., Houghton Mifflin, 1950. “The Sun and the Fish.” p. 213–218.
Zornberg, Avivah. The Murmuring Deep. New York, New York: Schocken Books, 2011.
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Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds won the 2018 Patricia Bibby First Book Award and was published by Tebot Bach in 2020. She is also the author of the chapbook, What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014, winner of The Clockwork Prize). Rachel’s work has appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Grist, and Georgia Review as well as other publications and anthologies. Her awards include the Crab Orchard Review Richard Peterson Prize, the Passenger Poetry Prize, and nominations for The Pushcart Prize. Rachel, a current PhD candidate at The University of Southern California, is also editor of Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation for the AuntFlo2020 Project. More at rachelnevemidbar.com