Why I needed a new camera

(I found these notes in a suitcase and this is one way to preserve them)

I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;
I stumbled when I saw; full oft 'tis seen
Our means secure us, and our mere defects
Prove our commodities. O dear son Edgar,
The food of thy abused father's wrath!
Might I but live to see thee in my touch,
I'ld say I had eyes again!

There is no single metaphor of light and darkness, but several, and they can appear to contradict each other even when they don't. We have to start from the human experiences which we seek to make sense of and give coherent form to by reaching out to evocative comparisons. Of course there is an association that we make between light and darkness, good and evil, it is one of the oldest associaations: the image of the dark engulfing the light, the Manichaean story of the interpenetrating pendulums, light and darkness, good and evil, separate and distinct and then their mixing, always though with the sense that it is the light that shall be swallowed up, that will falter in the presence of darkness. Two eternal, metaphysical principles. But although this pattern fits in with theism in different ways, God's light but also his darkness, we do not need to attach the imagery to strictly theistic reflections: it can shed 'light' on our progress through life in other ways.

Primal emotions, fear, dread, hope, relief, associated with the coming on of night, the dawn, the coming of evil times, the possibility of rescue, or of being 'saved'. The sense of the presence of evil, a vivid reality, always also cold, the sense of dark and relentless forces. But in another context, not unrelated, we think of the light of understanding and the darkness of ignorance, partly because we think of these already in moral terms, understanding is a good, ignorance an evil.

However, we can become over-attached to the light and over-fearful of darkness. Unconscious forces, the shadow, fear of looking into the dark places of the psyche, because we put things now in the wrong order and associate darkeness too readily with evil (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Enduring the darkness, and learning to distinguish between what is merely an object of fear and what is genuinely evil. Lawrence and Nietzsche on the desire to be rational, conscious, daylight at any cost, etc. But we can also be 'fearful of light and enlightenment' (maybe it is the same thing expressed in an opposite way) and there is the instinct of concealment of action ('light thickens and the crow ...') but we are also night's black agents: we do not wish to be discovered, exposed to the daylight.

But in another context it makes sense to embrace the darkness in a positive way: the ordinary light of day can conceal a greater light but it can also conceal the presence of the heavenly bodies. An ascesis of becoming familiar with the darkness, enduring, living without the stimulation of the senses, in the hope that with their cessation and that of quotidian desire, new insights might dawn ...