we need darkness to emerge into order (out of chaos? or into?)

A story in today's Chronicle (this post originally written in Nov 2006), reprinted from the LATimes, by Thomas H. Maugh II caught my attention.

'Dark energy, the enigmatic force that is causing the universe to expand, has been present as a constant for at least 9 billion years, a finding that eliminates many theories' about it. This finding supports but does not prove Einstein's idea of a cosmological constant that explains the balance between the expansion of the universe and the gravitational pull of stars and other matter. He theorized that there is a repulsive form of gravity (dark energy)that exists in space. Einstein abandoned his theory but it got renewed interest when dark energy was discovered in the 1990's.

. . . Dark energy is analogous to dark matter in that scientists have extreme difficulty seeing it and measuring it. They can only infer its presence primarily by measuring its effects on visible matter. Dark energy accounts for 70% of the total energy in the universe, scientists believe. (Wow.)

There are three views of dark energy, the article said. One is similar to Einstein's cosmological constant (don't you just love that phrase: cosmological constant!), that dark energy remains a constant in the cosmos. The second theory posits that dark energy is similar to electromagnetic fields and proposes that its strength changes. The third theory is that we don't understand gravity yet.

If we aspire to think clearly, it is possible to see beyond the phrase 'dark energy' and see that these scientists are talking about a beautiful phenomenon in our cosmos. Shakespeare wrote, somewhere, 'there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so'. This line has always stayed with me because I believe it deeply. I read the article I am writing about on my way to SFMOMA today. I read it before I overheard the tour guide say that Anselm Kiefer's work is full of darkness. I didn't have time before the Herzog movie to mention the article. I walked into the museum thinking about the great beauty in Kiefer's darkness only to hear that docent say that there was little beauty in Kiefer's work. She actually said scholars have written that there is little beauty in Kiefer's work. Gasp. Here I am drowning in the beauty of his vision, if not the physical beauty of his work (his work is visually breathtaking).

For me, Kiefer's most beautiful works are his darkest ones. I mentioned last week that I especially love his piece "The Hierarchy of Angels". I wrote about my inner experience but I did not describe the piece. It happens to be the one work in the Kiefer retrospective that I have spent a lot of time with so I have had a chance to develop an inner relationship with it. Kiefer's "The Hierarchy of Angels" belongs to Walker Art Center and it was on view throughout all the years I was a tour guide at the Walker.  I didn't usually use the piece in my tours, unless it was an adult tour, because at first glance, the piece seems to represent Armageddon, complete desruction of civilization. It is the title of the piece that reveals its light.  The piece itself is, especially at first glance, very dark. It is a gigantic canvas, darkly abstract. In its abstraction it gives off an aura of great destruction. If one wants to project post-WWII Germany's struggle with the legacy of Nazi-ism (sp?), the piece is very dark. There is what appears to be an old propeller from an airplane. When you look at the rocks scattered on the canvas, it is possible to see these rocks as bombs dropped by the plane. If you think the rocks are bombs and the propeller is a war plane (this is an entirely reasonable reaction to have), then the piece is about a past or, perhaps, a future armageddon.

One of the many perks of being a tour guide was that I could slip into the museum before it was open to the public, under the guise of finalizing details for a tour, and enjoy the art in silence and privacy.  There was a bench in front of 'Hierarchy of Angels' when it was on display at the Walker and I would often sit in front of it and go up and down the hierarchy of angels.  Not many Americans know the full hierarchy of angels, although some of the hierarchies are referenced in the great hymn by Christina Rosetti called 'In The Bleak Midwinter". She does not mention all the hierarchies but she mentions several, which is more than most people do.  Most anthroposophists have studied the hierarchy of angels because Steiner wrote about them. Being a serious student of Steiner, and vividly aware that I needed angels, or supersensible beings, to help me get through this life, I was magnetically drawn to Kiefer's 'Hierarchy of Angels".

We still have to deal with the title Kiefer has chosen for the piece. He portrays dark energy with the propeller, the rocks, the sense of destruction but he has called this piece "The Hierarchy of Angels". Each rock, which might still be seen as a bomb, is labeled with one of the hierarchies. What if Kiefer is suggesting that beings are spread out in the universe, spiraling through the heavens? What if he is suggesting that these little beings were 'dropped' here and there by, what, what force might that be? If Kiefer is suggesting that beings were dropped here and there, not just any beings but the entire hierarchy of angels, well, Kiefer's vision is not dark, not at all.  And we cannot ignore the title. Surely angels are light.  He titled this dark, visually grim piece with an uplifting, light-filled name:  angels! And he paid homage to the hierarchy of angels. That's a lot of light piercing a dark cosmos, the whole hierarchy of angels.

If we know anything about the hierarchy of angels, as it was originally written by Dionysius the Areopagite in the fifth century , we know that the man who first wrote about the nine hierarchies of angels believed that the angels moved through the cosmos in a kind of spiral. Then the propeller becomes, perhaps, the dark energy that moves the cosmos in its spiral, moving the hierarchies of beings that are in the universe to help its destiny unfold. The name of the piece lifts it out of dark energy and into the inherent radiance of the cosmos. Thus it is absolutely not a dark piece.

If the scientists in the newspaper article that caught my attention today and Kiefer are correct, then there is more dark energy in the cosmos we find ourselves in than there is light energy. Does this portend darkness for the known universe? Only if we associate the word dark with evil. It is my belief that any darkness, be it the dark energy embedded in the cosmos and studied by astrophysicists or the darkness in human hearts that lead to things like the Holocaust, can always be transformed. No, I take that back. I go further. I believe all darkness will always be transformed. Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Dark energy is good. It is that simple.

I don't know where I am going with this. I am lonely for companions in my journey. My individual cosmos is not peopled with very many people. I have to find my thinking partners in artists I will never meet. Nobody I know (yet: he is coming, I affirm my man will appear) has time to listen to my thoughts or hang out in art museums with me watching old movies or, even, reading all the stuff I'm writing in this blog. The blog is a tiny representation of the writing I am doing daily.

SFMOMA mounted a major retrospective of Anselm Kiefer's work just as I moved to CA. I went to the show at least once a week the whole time it was up. It was  gobsmacker. I literally spent several hours in the galleries every time I went and I have made it a lifelong practice to never spend more than an hour at an art museum. I go to museums frequent, take in a few pieces deep into my being. I can only hold so much. I am unlikely to ever see a major Kiefer retrospective again so I soaked it up as best I could while I had the chance.

Out of all the artists' whose work I have loved, I love his the most. I knew, before that Kiefer retrospective, that the human eye literally needs darkness in order to be able to see. What we actually 'see' is the contrast between light and dark. Without darkness, we see nothing. I dove into the surface of darkness in Kiefer's work because his larger message is that light is what matters. His work fits the Jack Gardner poem I have left on my blog, the one I have just shut down but for about six posts. And so does the moving story in the Heather McHugh poem I left up, the one about the man burned with an iron mask on his face so he could not speak. The poem is on the blog, you can read it. The Catholic Church burned a man to death because he did not beleive what they told him to believe. And poetry, the poem reminds us, is what that burned-to-death man was thinking but could not say while he burned.

There is so much darkness around us.  I am lost in darkness now, as anyone who actually cares about me knows. I am lost and no one can help me. I have to find light, or not find it. And that is basically the essence of Anselm Kiefer's work, certainly the essence of Gardner's 'Brief for the Defense' (still here on this blog) and McHugh's moving poem that I have left on this blog. Read those poems. Attentively.  Please.