by Melissa Pallotti
1. I have heard it said that when someone you love dies, time seems to slow down.
2. While the details remain under earnest debate, we have as a civilization reached something of a consensus on what existed before existence, posited in more or less the same manner by philosophers and scientists and priests: In the beginning, all was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. The problem with this theory is that it relies upon the fact of existence—of time to define the beginning, of darkness to define the state—in order to explain the phenomenon of non-existence. This, therefore, is a poor definition, but for now it is the only one we have.
3. Someone’s fingers find the switch embedded in the peeling floral wallpaper, and the room floods with light. We blink back tears as it chases the darkness back into the corners. It creeps into the lonely white cereal bowl still soaking in the dented sink, sprawls across the seat cushions with all the lazy arrogance of familiarity, settles in the cracks in the floor, seeps into the fibers of the rug. Until recently, this house was as much a part of the family as any of us. Now, in the harsh light, this familiar place feels foreign. We squint at one another, hardly able to see. I cannot help but think I have experienced this blindness before—a few years back, when the five of us moved across the country, arriving at our new home under cover of darkness, enveloped in the eerie serenity of the foothills, aware that we had stumbled into something entirely new.
4. We turn the lights off when we leave, and something about seeing the house filled only with shadow feels unnatural. The next time I am here is the last time. My father has come to gather what few personal belongings remain in this place—a circular saw, a bottle of Four Roses older than either of us, a cardboard box full of notebooks and floppy disks. Even with the same destination, this drive westward will be much longer than the last.
5. Shadow is what lingers when something is gone, but also what precedes its being in the first place; only the dusky shapes are less unsettling when we don’t yet know that they should mean something, when we can’t yet feel their loss.
6. The day before we leave for home, my father and I spend the morning in the Italian part of town. We still know all of the shops on this street. My father stops to buy a hot sausage sandwich from three different grocerias. He says they don’t make food like this out west, which is true. But there’s more to the story than that.
7. “In the West,” writes Charles Moore, “our most powerful ally is the light.” In the West, we are not so much attracted to the day as we are fearful of night, of the inevitability of it—of anything we cannot penetrate, of anything that presses in on us on which we cannot push back. Is this some version of claustrophobia, or existential dread, or something else entirely? But this is not an alliance. If it were, what would it say about us in the West that our closest partnership is held together by something so ordinary as a fear of the dark?
8. Giacometti’s walking men, melancholy wanderers who could as easily depict a new spirit solidifying as one that’s been corroded away, are fascinating for many reasons. My favorite: they are tangible shadows. Capturing something of ephemerality in the unyielding form of metal. Giacometti addresses critics who insist his work reflects the scarred consciousness of a post-war humanity, saying “Emptiness filters through everywhere, each creature secretes his own void.” So isn’t it interesting that in order to manufacture these shadows, raw darkness must first be heated to a glow?
9. Suppose we could walk backwards into a sixth grade like Giacometti’s statues turned on their heels. A classroom like any other sixth grade classroom, where the desks are branded with “S” chains and the floor is a mosaic of the chipped linoleum tiles that math teachers claim are perfectly square. Suppose the teacher in this classroom is short and round with spectacles wrapped round his face, and as he orbits the room he tells you that the natural state of the universe is shadow. Does this fact stick in your mind the way the alien terrain of dried gum and old bandaids clings to the underside of the desks? Were it to fade from your consciousness as quickly as it was introduced, would it fade into shadow itself?
10. In the small corner of my mind that remains well-lit, the part I can still go into alone, this fact does not fade but remains a fixture. I have collected other thoughts here also, but this one is perhaps the brightest.
11. Sylvia Plath was possessed by a similar fixation. She writes that the most beautiful thing in the world is shadow, “the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow,” and she calls out each shadow by name. Shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth. As if it were possible for each of them to be distinct, rather than simply holes pricked in the in the veil of light we have drawn around our corner of the infinite, allowing the dark to seep in.
12. Plath writes “cul-de-sacs of shadow,” as if shadow were someplace one could live. As an astronaut, Dave Wolf has been steeped in this infinite. He says of the experience: “You can get lost.”
13. The universe feels closer under the northern lights. In the arctic circle, it stains the horizon like ink bleeding across an empty page for months at a time. This is called Polar Night. The town of Tromsø, for example, along with the rest of Norway plunges into total darkness in November and does not emerge until late January. Three months submerged in shadow. A writer for The Atlantic visits Tromsø to ask how can the people here be happy in the dark? No one questions why this writer had to travel so far to find someone to ask.
14. I have heard it said that when someone you love dies, time seems to slow down. This is a poor explanation. It fails to capture the way that death pulls the edges of time apart to create space, an entire dimension that was not there before. If you could just navigate through this space you could retrieve all that has been taken away; but in this space it is too dark to see the dust gathering on your desk or the laundry you should have done last week, let alone a road that might bridge the gap between what is now and what once was.
15. It has been my experience that lungs do not take kindly to dark things. Like my father’s cigar smoke and his father’s coal dust—does shadow become something more sinister when taken in the body?
16. The first time I light a Marlboro Red, I am sitting at the base of a lamp post in a parking lot hidden by trees. The stars and the boy who brought me here have both sunken into this muggy midsummer night, but I am sixteen and cannot be bothered to think about this. Unable to see beyond the crisp edge of the lamplight, I am not thinking about the shadow I’m swallowing, but rather the shadow that is swallowing me.
17. There must be some line between darkness and shadow, and the Oxford Dictionary draws it, fittingly, with a sunbeam. Shadow is but comparative darkness, a shadow where there once was light. Here the memory of brilliance may shimmer just out of reach, no longer present, but still not forgotten. Darkness, however, is blindness from the start, the total absence of light or life. I don’t know which of these definitions makes me sadder.
18. As we sip crappy coffee, the steam wrapping our cheeks in fleeting tendrils of an aroma much smoother than the taste, an old friend bemoans the approaching night. “5:30, and already it’s getting dark,” he says. I tell him that in Tromsø it has been dark for weeks. I don’t think this impresses him the way it has me.
19. Philadelphia-based painter Quentin Morris refers to his artwork as immersive blackness. This is just another way of saying he, too, is preoccupied with shadow.
20. When someone you love dies, the shadow of their life lingers in unexpected corners of your daily life.
21. According to Victor Hugo, the mind’s eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling nor more dark than in man. This speaks only to the shadowy nature of the ego, as true darkness cannot but be absolute.
22. It is 1997. Two men orbit Earth tethered to the Mir Space Station. One of these men is Dave Wolf. Hurtling through the heavens at five miles per second, he remarks that nowhere on Earth is the contrast between light and dark so extreme as it is in space. Either the unparalleled brilliance of being enveloped in sun or absolute dark when some other body interrupts this embrace. “The darkness of that shadow is blacker than any black you thought it could be, out there in space. That shadow has no light in it.”
23. I still can’t decide if the beauty Plath finds in shadow comes from the notion of obscurity or the shadow itself. This is to say that she and I have the same fear of the dark.
24. The shadow of life, much like the shadow of light, takes on a lurking quality once observed. Waiting always, ominously, in the corners of your vision, it’s prone to swallowing things it had previously been too timid to touch.
25. This city has been given many names: before we had Champions, we had Steel; or perhaps more accurately, we had shadow. Hanging low over the streets, staining the sides of the buildings, filling every lung in the city with the same fine, ebon debris.
26. In Japan, the practice of Naikan is sometimes interpreted as an immersion in death. Separated from the world by a series of screens too close together to sit comfortably, practitioners are asked to reflect. What have I received from the people in my life? What have I given them in return? What trouble have I created in their lives? It is not uncommon for practitioners to report out-of-body experiences, recalling details they should long ago have forgotten, and inevitably, an acute awareness of the imminence of death. In the East, this acknowledgement of mortality is considered therapeutic, a beacon guiding the practitioner to happiness. In the West, these are the sort of acknowledgements we try to push back.
27. Quentin Morris’s contribution to the 20/20 exhibit in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art is a large black circle hung on the wall. It’s not quite dark enough to be impressive itself, but as I exit the gallery I look back at it behind me only to notice its reflection shimmering in the polished white linoleum floor. Surprised, I step backwards.
28. It is the dawn of the new millennium when the Shadow Lounge opens its doors in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood. In an interview with the City Paper: longtime resident, barber, and DJ Nate Mitchell says that prior to this event, starting sometime in the 60s, everything in the neighborhood had started to die, leaving in its place only a shadow, a memory of what once had been. The neon signs in business windows flickered out. The cool blue pools of television light that poured out of living room windows and gathered on the sidewalk began to dry up. The darkness creeping out from under parked cars and between buildings grew hungrier. The owner is a 21-year-old kid named Justin Strong who grew up in neighboring Squirrel Hill. Justin says: “It’s kind of like you’re a product of your environment.” Evidently, this one manufactures shadow.
29. Neither of us wants to stop driving, but at some point it becomes necessary. We park at a rest stop somewhere in the midwest and sleep the best we can considering the backseat is so packed that the front seats won’t recline. The bottle of Four Roses is tucked away by my feet, the circular saw balanced precariously atop a pile of other fragments of a former home. I wake up every hour or so, peering out the window as best I can. I know the road home is somewhere beyond the glass, but enveloped in night alongside this empty highway, I can’t quite make it out.
30. Before Justin Strong opened the Shadow Lounge in 2000, he was a student renting a house in a neighborhood where whole generations of families used to spend their entire lives. People gathered in Justin Strong’s rented house the way they would later gather in his club, the way people in Justin Strong’s life had gathered since he was a kid, the way shadow gathers in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases.
31. At a depth of 200 meters, or roughly the height of Seattle’s Space Needle, so little light penetrates the ocean that photosynthesis can no longer occur. At a depth of 1,000 meters, or about as far down as water rushing over Three Sisters Falls drops in Peru, light does not exist at all. Many of the creatures that live here have developed bioluminescent appendages to prevent darkness from swallowing them entirely. Scientists cite these creatures as shimmering examples of the diversity of life, but don’t all of us keep some small light with us to ease our desperation?
32. There’s something comforting about the idea, however fraught, that long after we and the world we know has lapsed back into whatever obscurity preceded existence, there is a way to imagine reality such that shadow may remain as ubiquitous then as it does now.
33. We watch the sunlight fade from the valleys, turning them first into fire and then into ash. On two hours of sleep, strung out on grief and gas station coffee, the world hurtling towards the windshield looks like the hyper-speed blur of science fiction movie. The difference is just that we’re in a Toyota Tundra, and instead of smudged planets and stars there are road signs and patches of ugly yellow paint flying past. A Tool song from the year I was born plays on the iPod plugged into the radio. My back aches from sitting, but we decided back in Iowa that we would make it home tonight. Looking up at the Devil’s Slide in Utah, we told ourselves that this is a matter of pride. Neither of us wants to admit that we’re just thieves, more comfortable now in the shadow than the light, or that the thing we’re trying to steal is something that, no matter what we do, we will never get back.
34. There are strict rules about light pollution in the foothills. It is 12:01AM and pitch black when we arrive. We have driven almost three thousand miles over rivers and through ghost towns in little over a day and half, but somehow, it doesn’t yet feel as though the journey has begun.
Melissa Pallotti is a senior at the University of Pittsburgh. She enjoys reading 19th-century literature and is majoring in Nonfiction Writing. She has a pet snake, a minor in Computer Science, and an Underwood Typewriter.