Treasures of Darkness
Treasures of Darkness
Paul J. Pastor
On Image, Intuition, and the Christian Writer
And I will give thee the treasures of darkness,
and hidden riches of secret places . . .
— Isaiah 45:3, KJV
In the forest behind my house (which perches delicately on the border of the unbroken woods that stretch south from the Columbia River into the Cascade mountains of Oregon), there are many dozens of red alder snags that sit, quite silently, in the shifting light.
If you walked through these woods, “Taking the route you would be likely to take / From the place you would be likely to come from,” to quote Eliot, you would see these snags, standing dead and fairly unremarkable, scattered among Douglas firs and garryana oaks, the lower portions of their trunks obscured by sword ferns. The decaying alders would be pitted by woodpeckers, cherished by gray squirrels hoarding wild hazelnuts into their hollows. Perhaps you would see one where the bark has been shuffled down by a black bear, greedy for waxy grubs. But what you would not see, not unless you came with eyes to see and at the right time to see, would be the oysters.
Through the rain-soaked alders, the oyster mushroom, Pleurotus ostreatus (perhaps its close cousin, pulmonarius), one of nature’s great hunters, is dancing. Through the colossal nutrient bank of the decaying wood, blooming with the myriad organisms that eat and rejoice, the mycelium of Pleurotus spreads—intelligent, hungry, and vigorous.
When we think of mushrooms, most of us think of what can be seen—the squamous, glabrous flutes, bulbs, and trumpets of the fungi that riot from wood or soil to briefly announce their alien presence before deflating into liquescence. But the part we see is to the creature merely what a cherry is to its tree—the fruit. The life of the thing lies deep and out of sight.
The true creature below the fleshy fruit—neither of kingdom Plantae nor of kingdom Animalia, but of kingdom Fungi—is an intelligent colony of living threads. It is something very much like roots, and something very much like the neural network of your brain, and a little more and a little less than either of those.
In the case of the oyster, the omnivorous mycelium is both devouring the wet wood of those red alders and actively hunting the tiny roundworms that fill it. Within minutes of contact, Pleurotus paralyzes the worm by sending a chemical message that tells its body to go into a premature rigor mortis, slips a tendril noose of itself around the prey, sends a filament through the mouth of the worm, and begins to digest it.
Then twice a year, for a month or more, the mycelium will fruit. In great flushes of shelved fungus (I have found some more than 14 inches wide growing far above my reach, which I popped loose with a forked hazel wand and caught in my hat), the wild hunter of the inner intimacies of the logs will burst into the light in edible bundles of pure nutrients and protein, loved alike by all from insects to poets. The pearlescent oysters are the stallions of the mushroom world, thick and fast and confident, able to climb within the dead snags to heights of thirty or forty feet over the course of only a few years, working to make wood into soil, to make worms into food, and living a remarkable life, at once vicious hunter and abundant gift, wise, fierce, and generous.
*
I occupy the often awkward position (navigated before me by some of my favorite thinkers, including Charles Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Brian Doyle) of being both a professional editor and a working poet. In my experience, both good editing and decent poetry require a comfort with invisible work, and a sense of the importance of that invisible work. Both require a formidable, aggressive power of digestion. Both require a willingness, when ready, to “fruit,” suddenly bringing the best gifts of slow, invisible processes into the light for others to eat. In that work (it is much like feeling one’s way through a dark, nutritious log), I have found many treasures. While it is easy to bemoan the horribly commercialized state of modern publishing (particularly Christian publishing), there is much to love.
But I will also note that even among some of our tradition’s best voices today, there is a near-total absence of two great spiritual and artistic treasures: image and intuition. Our writers seem almost wholly dependent on outside sources for these particular creative riches. Great things are quoted, from generations before, or from outside the Christian fold. We are no longer mining them ourselves, and we think of the resulting poverty as normal or natural for Christians. It is neither normal, nor natural. It should never become so.
We might think of creativity as a process of mining (or hunting) for good things: jewels, or pearls, or nutritious roundworms in the depths of a red alder. The better of our Christian writers today seem very well-equipped to get those treasures that are in the “light.” These are rational treasures—clear arguments, good thought—and emotive treasures of depth of feeling and well-articulated loves. But there is so little being done to dig for what is hidden, for what is unseen (pardon the constant metaphor, I know no other way to speak of it), that it is not much of an exaggeration to say that it is not being done, or at least not being published. Image and intuition seem to have been forgotten as literary or spiritual treasures. The holy darkness is quiet beneath us, unbroken by the ring of picks or the glint even of a candle.
By image I mean something that includes symbol, archetype, and icon, but is more than each of those. I mean the raw stuff of which dreams are made. This is the native language of the deep soul, which speaks to itself exclusively in pictures. The artist who holds this jewel finds they have the ability to manipulate the web of images and forms that unites the human psyche with the natural world of creation and the relational world of humankind—both of which flow quite directly from the mind of the Creator. It is easier to describe the effects of image than to define it. The effects are of a kind of haunting—“pictures” that bleed from a story, painting, film, poem, etc., back into one’s life. The mind returns to a complex image or set of images; finds itself wanting or needing to be inside them, to touch and interact with them. These images are multifaceted, magnetic, inherently interesting, and capable of sustaining long attention, continuing to reveal gifts for a very long time. Dream-stuff. Icon-stuff.
By intuition I mean a process of “gut-knowing” that we have rejected, dismissed, and generally talked ourselves out of (as a Western culture and as Christians) largely since the Medieval period darkened into the Enlightenment. One can tell a culture’s health in this area by the level of importance it places upon dreams. Once nearly universally regarded as a source of unconscious and numinous insight, our society treats dreams like they treat the organ meat of the animals we slaughter—as garbage. This despite the fact that many traditional cultures, in exceptional wisdom, view the organs of an animal as precious and powerful, a choice delicacy!
But us? We do not like the guts. We are not used to the guts. They contain odd flaps. They are floppy and smell of copper. We are not willing even to sample them. We throw our dreams away; we cannot stomach the taste. They make us nervous. (We know, after all, that the gut is what inevitably holds those good and brutal truths the mind refuses.)
Image and intuition—the “gut” element of creativity—seem to have become spiritual and artistic treasures that Christian writers today cannot (or do not) intentionally or skillfully access. And yet, they are among our heritage, both as humans and as Christians. Both seem foreign to us. They are ours by birthright, but we have lost them. We might read the image-work of the prophet Ezekiel:
“The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones”;
or the apostle John:
“To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it”;
or St. Julian of Norwich in her Showings:
“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand”;
or more modern masters (George MacDonald chief among them), but the thing awake in them to see such things and write of them seems asleep in us. The images enlighten us, but only from the outside, like lanterns held by a foreign hand.
One could object that the three examples I have just cited are, explicitly, revealed examples; that there is a spiritual aspect to them that is not easily replicated, and that ought not to be attempted for means of creative expression. But could not the same be said of the psalmist’s emotive poetry, or of the apostle Paul’s intricate logical discourses, both of which are accessed and imitated without hesitation by worship songwriters and preachers every weekend? If the gifts of feeling and thinking can be so mined for fresh work today, why not those of even deeper wells, the intuitive? Why not the exceptional power of the distilled image? This is part of the reason the treasures have become lost: we are not bold enough to even look for them. It is easier to dismiss, to stay in the cold light, rather than to seek Isaiah’s “hidden riches.”
To be fair, very few artists today of any kind, Christian or not, do this honestly or well. The filmmaker David Lynch is one of the few who come to mind from the contemporary scene, but he is enough to indicate what I mean. To watch a Lynch creation is often described as “weird” or “dreamlike.” But there is a logic to it. There is an internal self-consistency that convinces the viewer that they are in the presence of something large and beautifully intricate, whose colors, forms, and movements are all communicating something to a level deeper than our rational mind. I cannot think of any significant Christian writers today who do this. We have many writing (or attempting to write) in the traditions of Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, or James Baldwin. We have none today working in the traditions of Robert Bly, Shirley Jackson, Paul Claudel, or Haruki Murakami. (I exclude myself as I am not successful enough to be significant at the time of this writing. Please immediately buy many copies of my books.) This could be unfairly bleak, and I admit that I have not read all the books. But I believe that it is true, or nearly so.
*
My sincere hope and my creative vision is that the rich thinking and deep emotion that characterize the best writing today—including the best writing by Christians—may be balanced by a rediscovery of the dream-thing, the image-thing in us. To recover this will be a process that involves dedication to an overlooked aspect of the creative-writing craft: that of the digestion of rich, complex images and the ability to, sometimes, do by not-doing, create by not-creating. We must commit ourselves to practices of digestion, learning to hunt like the oyster, to reclaim the inner state of more “primitive” (the word is backwards and yet true) humanity, who would starve the body at times of spiritual need to better encourage the coming of deep dreams.
The human psyche has been made by God to eat and hunt images, to intuit its way through the world as a pattern-making creature. The Christian tradition, in the long view, has remarkable resources for the writer and the artist to fuel these patterns. Our faith’s most rooted Way holds the natural world in great regard as a place of embodied spirituality and immanent meaning.
Our prophets and mystics point us to the spiritual and aesthetic beauty of our visions, night-time dreams, reveries, and interactions with the rich symbol and spiritual depth of natural and human images. Following the example of the apostle Paul, we are able to welcome the cultural riches of other traditions—including the wealth of world myth, literature, and folktale—with a generous orthodoxy able to “chew the meat and spit the bones,” rather than calcifying into small parochialisms. In all this, we can affirm the “treasures of darkness,” and ground ourselves in pursuit of the soulful, the deep and the quiet, in the hidden riches of the world and of our own lives. We can hunt our dreams within the rich, damp logs of our lives. We can learn to write and work with intuitive, emotive, and rational skill, moving creatively from the gut through the heart and out the brain.
Should we be brave and humble enough to do the work of secret digestion, to hunt out and be hunted by the dream-stuff, it is my belief that we will put ourselves in the way of great work to come. Should we be able to reclaim this, to learn from the oddnesses of the oyster’s secret hunt, I believe that we will find ourselves in the presence of a new set of quite wonderful creative problems. For rather than the hollowness and thin veneer of so much of our writing—so much of even our very good writing—we will find ourselves routinely in the company of vast and mighty presences: images that move like behemoths in the light-dappled forests of our souls; images that we may approach and tame in the name of Christ, upon which we may ride to far horizons.
Paul J. Pastor
Writer & Editor
Paul is an editor for two Christian imprints of Penguin Random House, besides being a widely published writer and author, most recently of Bower Lodge: Poems (Fernwood Press), and a candidate for Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. He lives in Oregon.
Photography by Cuno De Bruin
