to know the dark

brief notes in praise of slow art

This morning, I found a child’s science presentation abandoned on the sidewalk, “Kepler’s Law of Planetary Motion” written in purple marker on white poster board. I’d been walking and thinking about something a writer friend said to me yesterday. She was pushing to finish a draft by the new year. She was buckling down. She said again and again that she should be writing faster. 

She asked if I was trying to wrap anything up before the holidays. Last week, I sat on the roof of my apartment building at midnight wrapped in a blanket, hoping to see some of the Geminids meteor shower. I waited. I waited. I saw nothing. Inside, I lit a candle. At my kitchen table in the dark, I planted the seeds of a new essay. I’d looked for shooting stars, and in the waiting, images arrived. I jotted down notes: 

unknown sea

crow’s nest 

a woman’s dress  

cormorants at home 

the rookery 

polar flora 

end of the long night 

I can feel the questions underneath, but their shape-taking will be slow. Maybe in a month, I’ll understand what this new essay wants to be, what it’s trying to ask. Maybe six months. Maybe a year. 

I stood on the sidewalk next to the discarded science poster about planetary motion this morning. The poster was wet, covered in footprints and leaves. Above, a first quarter moon in the morning sky. The orbital speed at which planets move through space is not fixed—one of Kelper’s laws. The speed of a planet’s orbit changes constantly, the speed decreasing the further away a planet is from the sun. Even the planets slow down.

There is pressure to publish, to share, to produce. But I find myself lately interested in silence, in creative gestation. The writing I’m most proud of comes together over long periods. I take my time, placing things beside each other, looking for unexpected connections, and waiting for something to emerge. It is patient work. Slow writing is also a gift to myself. There is pleasure in going out into the darkness with only a candle. I want to feel my way slowly. 

For over a year now, I’ve been writing about befriending the crows in my neighborhood. I’ve been detailing how I leave them offerings after I take my children to school, how they follow me on my walks. But there’s something underneath I haven’t accessed yet. I’m learning to trust that there’s a question embedded in this writing that I haven’t yet learned to ask, that it’s alright if this particular creative investigation wants me to care for it slowly. 

For me, taking care often means taking time. In the poem Dear Darkening Ground, Rilke writes, “Just give me a little more time! / I want to love the things / as no one has thought to love them.” I want to love my art in unexpected ways. I want quiet and time, deeper intimacy with my own questions. 

In the collection at The Cleveland Museum of Art, there is a painting called The Heroine Who Waits Anxiously for Her Absent Lover. In it, a woman in gold stands beside a tree, looking toward the sky. The museum label says, “Her gesture indicates wonder, possibly that the clouds may be passing, and the moon may emerge to brighten the scene. She may also be astonished at her own perseverance and how she no longer feels the fear and agitation of the darkness and the solitude.”

Her gesture indicates wonder. She no longer feels the fear and agitation of the darkness and the solitude. This is what I’m after—stillness in the not knowing, astonishment at my own perseverance, slow work in the dark, eyes wide, hoping for streaks of gold against the sky, greeting whatever comes.