Anam Cara

BLACK IS PROBABLY THE MOST ANCIENT COLOUR, THE PRIMAL birth-source whence everything emerged. Darkness is the great canvas against which beauty becomes visible. Darkness withholds presence; it resists the beam of eye-light and deepens the mystery. The slightest flicker of bright wings can make the darkness of a night unforgettable. It is fascinating to consider that ancient kinship of light and dark, white and black. White light always shapes the darkest shadow. Indeed the shadow is the child of the threshold where black and white converge. There could be no shadow without light. A shadow is a dark figure cast on some surface by a body which stands in the way of light and takes the form of the intruding body. It is the counterpart of that body in black form. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung seizes upon this image for his theory of the shadow as the dark aspect of the self. The conscious self usually rejects the shadow and it is forced to dwell in the unconscious. The shadow originates in all the negative experiences a person has accumulated, and part of the task of becoming free is the retrieval of the banished shadow. There are many difficult riches trapped in the shadow side. Jung said the shadow held 90 per cent gold. To learn to recognize, accept and integrate the shadow is to transfigure much of the bruised areas of the heart which dwell in fear and unease and rob us of joy and creativity. For instance, an incredibly nice, smiling person who is doomed to please people often has a shadow side where anger and disdain are nested. Often the outside clown is internally sad and despairing. An abrasive, awkward presence can sometimes conceal the kindest heart. When we meet someone, we never know who we are actually meeting.

There are two words in Irish for shadow: scáth and scáil. Scáth includes the positive meaning of shelter. There is an old proverb: ‘Is ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine’, i.e., People live in one another’s shadow. This proverb suggests the intimacy of Celtic folk culture as a cohesive web which protects individuality in its shelter. The phrase gan scáth was also used (literally, ‘without shadow’) and it signified one who is fearless. Interestingly, scáil also means spirit, which together with soul and body makes up the threefold division of the person. And there is a wonderful poetic phrase for a very thin person: mar scáil i mbuidéal, like a shadow in a bottle. There is a poetic import to the phrase ‘without a shadow of a doubt’: in all probability, there is no doubt without a shadow. Doubt is the shadow cast when something gets in the way of the light. Ironically, doubt itself often brings greater light because of the shadow it casts. In Sonnet 27 Shakespeare has this lovely quatrain:

Save that my soul’s imaginary sight

Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,

Which like a jewel (hung in ghastly night),

Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.

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LACK

IN TERMS OF PHYSICS, BLACK OCCURS WHEN AN OBJECT IS absorbing all of the coloured wavelengths. This is why nothing is reflected back. Black represents pure hunger for colour; it exercises no generosity, the eye receives nothing. When it looks at black, it is looking at the grave of colour. It is not surprising that black has been the colour of grief and mourning. In Western tradition, the priest wears black vestments when celebrating the funeral liturgy. The mourners wore black. When the husband died, for a period the woman wore widow’s weeds.

Goethe says that colours are the deeds and sufferings of light.

Yet it is not that black is without colour; it is rather that it is the absence, the outer surface, behind which colours secretly dwell. The heart of blackness is full of colour. The outer absence veils a rich interiority of presence. This casts an almost comic ambivalence on the wearing of black as a symbol of the ascetic.