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Rethinking Darkness

This book examines the concept of darkness through a range of

cultures, histories, practices and experiences. It engages with
darkness beyond its binary positioning against light to advance a
critical understanding of the ways in which darkness can be
experienced, practised and conceptualised.
Humans have fundamental relationships with light and dark that
shape their regular social patterns and rhythms, enabling them to
make sense of the world. This book ‘throws light’ on the neglect of
these social patterns to emphasise how the diverse values, meanings
and influences of darkness have been rarely considered. It also
examines the history of our relationship with the dark and highlights
how normative attitudes towards it have emerged, while also
emphasising its cultural complexity by considering a contemporary
range of alternative experiences and practices. Challenging notions
of darkness as negative, as the antithesis of illumination and
enlightenment, this book explores the rich potential of darkness to
stimulate our senses and deepen our understandings of different
spaces, cultural experiences and creative engagements.
Offering a rich exploration of an emergent field of study across
the social sciences and humanities, this book will be useful for
academics and students of cultural and media studies, design,
geography, history, sociology and theatre who seek to investigate
the creative, cultural and social dimensions of darkness.

Nick Dunn is Professor of Urban Design and Executive Director of

Imagination, the design research lab at Lancaster University, UK. He
is senior fellow at the Institute for Social Futures. Nick has authored
numerous books, journal articles and reports on cities, futures and
darkness.

Tim Edensor is Professor of Human Geography at Manchester

Metropolitan University. He is the author of Tourists at the Taj
(1998), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002),
Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005), From
Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom (2017), and Stone:
Stories of Urban Materiality (2020).
Ambiances, Atmospheres and Sensory
Experiences of Spaces
Series Editors:
Rainer Kazig, CNRS Research Laboratory Ambiances –
Architectures – Urbanités, Grenoble, France
Damien Masson, Université de Cergy-Pontoise, France
Paul Simpson, Plymouth University, UK

Research on ambiances and atmospheres has grown significantly in

recent years in a range of disciplines, including Francophone
architecture and urban studies, German research related to
philosophy and aesthetics and a growing range of Anglophone
research on affective atmospheres within human geography and
sociology.
This series offers a forum for research that engages with
questions around ambiances and atmospheres in exploring their
significances in understanding social life. Each book in the series
advances some combination of theoretical understandings, practical
knowledges and methodological approaches. More specifically, a
range of key questions which contributions to the series seek to
address includes:
In what ways do ambiances and atmospheres play a part in the
unfolding of social life in a variety of settings?
What kinds of ethical, aesthetic and political possibilities might
be opened up and cultivated through a focus on
atmospheres/ambiances?
 How do actors such as planners, architects, managers,
commercial interests and public authorities actively engage with
ambiances and atmospheres or seek to shape them? How might
these ambiances and atmospheres be reshaped towards critical
ends?
What original forms of representations can be found today to
(re)present the sensory, the atmospheric, the experiential?
What sort of writing, modes of expression or vocabulary is
required? What research methodologies and practices might we
employ in engaging with ambiances and atmospheres?

Rethinking Darkness
Cultures, Histories, Practices
Edited by Nick Dunn and Tim Edensor

For more information about this series, please visit:

www.routledge.com/Ambiances-Atmospheres-and-Sensory-
Experiences-of-Spaces/book-series/AMB
Rethinking Darkness
Cultures, Histories,
Practices

Edited by
Nick Dunn and Tim Edensor
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Nick Dunn and Tim Edensor; individual
chapters, the contributors
The rights of Nick Dunn and Tim Edensor to be identified as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, have been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-20115-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-25965-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents

List of figures
List of contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: venturing into the dark: gloomy

multiplicities
TIM EDENSOR AND NICK DUNN

PART I
Histories of the dark

2 Affordances of the night: work after dark in the ancient

world
APRIL NOWELL AND NANCY GONLIN

3 Shakespeare’s darkness: a stage and state of mind

ELISABETH BRONFEN
 4 In the night garden: Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, London
1800–1859
ALICE BARNABY

5 A brief history of artificial darkness and race

NOAM M. ELCOTT

PART II
Cultural practices in the dark

6 Purda:the curtain of darkness

ANKIT KUMAR

7 Inuit’s perception of darkness: a singular feature

GUY BORDIN

8 Darkness in video game landscapes: corporeal and

representational entanglements
ROB SHAW

9 Dancing in the darkness to The Darkness

NINA J. MORRIS

PART III
Sensing darkness

10 Creatures of the night: bodies, rhythms and Aurora

Borealis
KATRÍN ANNA LUND

11 Contact zones: the Galloway Forest Dark Sky Park as

creative milieu
NATALIE MARR
12 How does the dark sound?
DAMIEN MASSON

13 Ghosts and Empties

SIMON ROBINSON

PART IV
Designing with darkness

14 Going dark: the theatrical legacy of Battersea Art

Centre’s Playing in the Dark season
MARTIN WELTON

15 On darkness, duration and possibility

SHANTI SUMARTOJO

16 Darkness as canvas
LENI SCHWENDINGER

17 Designing with light and darkness

CHRIS LOWE AND PHILIP RAFAEL

18 Afterword: revisiting the dark: diverse encounters and

experiences
NICK DUNN AND TIM EDENSOR

References
Index
Figures

2.1 A Classic Maya pyramid temple called the ‘Temple of the

Inscriptions’ at Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. Deep inside King
Pakal was buried. Photo: Marlon Shota Gonlin
2.2 Classic Maya bloodletting ritual painted on pottery vessel.
Photo: Justin Kerr
2.3 A Classic Maya stone sleeping bench from Copan, Honduras
(Group 8N-11, Structure 66C, Room 2, North Wall). Photo:
David Webster
2.4 An anthropomorphized Bantu smelting furnace in the shape of
a woman with breasts and genitalia. Photo: Shadreck Chirikure
5.1 Paul Bilhaud, Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel (aka Negroes
Fighting in a Cellar at Night), 1882, as reproduced in Alphonse
Allais, Album primo-avrilesque (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1897)
5.2 ‘The Stage Setting for Black Art’ (top) and ‘Black Art Revealed’
(bottom), from Albert A. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions and
Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography, 1897
5.3 Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915
5.4 (a–c) Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic
Educational.MOV File (2013). Frame grabs from high definition
 video. Courtesy Hito Steyerl
5.5 Kerry James Marshall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of
His Former Self, 1980. Egg tempera on paper, 8 × 6.5 inches.
LACMA Collection. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the
artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
5.6 Carrie Mae Weems, Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me (2012).
Installation view. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist
and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
5.7 Pepper’s Ghost, with Silvester’s mirror in the lower stage. From
Natural Philosophy for General Readers and Young Persons,
1876
6.1 A woman sitting with older and younger men from the same
household in Rangpur. Top: The original photograph taken in
complete darkness. Bottom: Photograph with increased
brightness to show those inhabiting the space. Ankit Kumar
6.2 Mr Mandal’s shop. Light in front and darkness at the back for
marihuana smokers. Ankit Kumar
11.1 Pinhole camera image. Natalie Marr
11.2 Solargraph. Natalie Marr
13.1 The view from Gun Hill overlooking Tilbury, Purfleet, and the
Dartford Crossing. Ghost and Empties, Simon Robinson, 2016
13.2 One of several burnt-out cars on the edge of the marshes.
Ghosts and Empties Simon Robinson, 2016
13.3 Whitby Abbey and Church, Whitby, John Atkinson Grimshaw,
1876
13.4 The full moon rising. Ghosts and Empties, Simon Robinson,
2016
13.5 Nocturne, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1870–1877
13.6 The view from Holehaven Creek looking over The Thames
towards the former Coryton refinery. Ghost and Empties,
Simon Robinson, 2016
13.7 Foreground and background details, Canvey Wick, showing the
physical connection between object and scene. Ghost and
 Empties, Simon Robinson, 2016
13.8 The camera lingers on Grain Marshes as dusk descends, the
now defunct oil refinery quiet in the background. Ghosts and
Empties, Simon Robinson, 2016
13.9 A lone farmhouse on Fobbing Marshes conjures up thoughts of
rural horror films. The lights in the distance only accentuating
the sense of isolation. Ghosts and Empties, Simon Robinson,
2016
13.10 A quiet backstreet just off of the old A2, the location of
Chatham’s red-light district. Ghosts and Empties, Simon
Robinson, 2016
13.11 One of the Gateway’s network of lay-bys. Ghosts and
Empties, Simon Robinson, 2016
13.12 Condoms litter the area, the ends heavy and bulbous with
fresh deposits. Ghosts and Empties, Simon Robinson, 2016
13.13 Security lighting illuminates The Thames tidal defences,
Thurrock. Ghosts and Empties, Simon Robinson, 2016
15.1 The unassuming exterior of Minamidera. Photo: Shanti
Sumartojo
16.1 NightSeeing™ Lyon, 2010. Photo: Xavier Boymond
16.2 Smart Everyday Nighttime Design in Cartagena, 2016. Photo:
Don Slater, Configuring Light
16.3 Shades of Night diagram. Graphic designer: Fatima Terin
Contributors

Alice Barnaby is Associate Professor of English Literature and

Creative Writing at Swansea University. Her research and teaching
expertise lie in the literature and material culture of the long
nineteenth century. Her work investigates the relationship
between perceptual experience and nineteenth-century
modernity. She conducts historicised readings of literary and
visual sources in light of current debates concerning theories of
affect, ontology and material agency. This work rethinks
established methodologies of cultural materialism. Her
publications include the recent monograph, Light Touches:
Cultural Practices of Illimuniation, London 1800–1900 (2017).
Guy Bordin is an ethnologist (PhD from the University of Paris-
Nanterre), Lecturer in Inuit culture at INALCO (Paris), co-founder
of the Inuit cultural space in Paris, associate member of the
Centre for Studies and Research on Literature and World Orality
(Cerlom) at INALCO. He has written extensively in journal articles
and collective works on the perception of time, representations of
the night and related topics, and relations between humans and
non-humans among Eastern Canadian Inuit. He is the author of
several books, among others On dansait seulement la nuit. Fêtes
 chez les Inuit du nord de la Terre de Baffin (Société d’ethnologie,
2011) and Beyond darkness and sleep: the Inuit night in North
Baffin Island (Peeters, 2015). He is also a filmmaker, and co-
directed eight films (short and feature films).
Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at
the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished
Professor at New York University. In 2017, she was awarded the
Martin Warnke Medal by the Aby Warburg Foundation, and in
2018, she was appointed as an Ambassador of the Friedrich-
Alexander-University. A specialist in the 19th- and 20th-century
literature, she has also written articles in the area of gender
studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture.
Her recent monographs include, amongst others, Spectres of
War: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict (2012) and
Crossmappings: On Visual Culture (2018).
Nick Dunn is Professor of Urban Design and Executive Director of
Imagination, the design research lab at Lancaster University, UK.
He is senior fellow at the Institute for Social Futures, examining
the insights that the arts, humanities and social sciences can
bring to the ways we think, envision and analyse the futures of
people, places and planet. Nick has authored numerous books,
journal articles and commissioned reports. His expertise on cities,
darkness, futures and health has led to curated exhibitions and
keynotes around the world. A keen nightwalker, Nick’s book, Dark
Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City (Zero Books, 2016),
explored the importance of nocturnal urban environments in the
face of late capitalism.
Tim Edensor is Professor of Human Geography, Manchester
Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK, and a principal research
fellow, School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Melbourne,
Australia. Tim has written extensively on national identity,
tourism, ruins, mobilities and landscapes of illumination and
darkness. He is the author of Tourists at the Taj (1998), National
Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002), Industrial
 Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005), From Light to
Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom (2017) and Stone: Stories
of Urban Materiality (2020). He is also the editor of Geographies
of Rhythm (2010) and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of
Place (2020).
Noam M. Elcott is Associate Professor for the history of modern art
and media in the Columbia University Department of Art History
and Archaeology, the Sobel-Dunn Chair for Art Humanities, an
editor of the journal Grey Room, and co-director of The August
Sander Project (MoMA/Columbia). He is the author of the award-
winning book Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern
Art and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2016; paperback
2018), as well as essays on art, film, and media, published in
leading journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogues.
Nancy Gonlin is Registered Professional Archaeologist 16354
whose investigates Classic Maya commoners, household
archaeology, and archaeology of the night. She is co-editor of the
journal Ancient Mesoamerica. Her co-edited volumes and
contributions are on Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient
Mesoamerica, Ancient Households of the Americas, Human
Adaptation in Ancient Mesoamerica, and Archaeology of the Night
(with April Nowell). She has co-authored a case study on Copán:
The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Maya Kingdom and a textbook on
The Archaeology of Native North America.
Ankit Kumar is a Lecturer in Development and Environment at the
Department of Geography, The University of Sheffield. He
received his PhD in Geography from Durham University working
on social and cultural aspects of access to modern energy in
through solar lighting in rural India. Ankit’s my research interests
are situated around energy and climate justice in the global
South. He enquires justice questions by working at the nexus of
culture, knowledge and politics in communities on the margins of
developing economies. Conceptually he draws from critical
development studies, postcolonial studies and environmental
 geographies. He has published in several journals including
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Social and
Cultural Geography and Environment and Planning C: Politics and
Space.
Chris Lowe is Associate Lighting Designer and design team leader
at Building Design Partnership (BDP), Manchester, UK. He was
drawn to lighting design due to its creative balance of science and
art. He regularly speaks at professional events exploring the
topics of both light and darkness, and works collaboratively with a
number of design collectives. His project portfolio ranges from
small-scale temporary experiential installations to city-wide
master planning. He is co-founder of The Dark Art, a global
design movement that nurtures lighting theoretical discussion on
the importance of contrast, shadow and the visual experience in
lighting design.
Katrín Anna Lund is Professor of Geography and Tourism, Institute
of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Iceland.
She is a social anthropologist with a PhD in 1998 from the
University of Manchester. She has done research in Spain,
Scotland and Iceland, as well as in Northern Norway and Finnish
Lapland. Her research has focused on tourism, travel and the
perception of landscape, but landscape studies have been central
to her work on travel and tourism, with a special emphasis on
walking and narratives. She has been studying destination making
in tourism for the past ten years.
Natalie Marr is an artist and researcher currently based at the
School of Geographical & Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow,
UK. Her PhD explores the values of International Dark Sky Places
with a focus on the Galloway Forest Dark Sky Park in South West
Scotland. Her project maps the lifeworlds of the Dark Sky Park, its
unique approach to dark skies practice, and the various people,
places and practices (human and non-human) that shape and
sustain it. She makes work through photography, sound, writing
 and performative actions with an interest in forms that centre
experience and facilitate dialogue.
Damien Masson is an Associate Professor in Urban Studies at CY
Cergy Paris University, researcher at the MRTE laboratory, France,
and co-director of the International Ambiances Network. His
previous research has focused on sonic ambiances of public
transports, and on the relationship between ambiances and
mobility. His current research concerns the ambient dimensions of
security and safety policies in urban areas, and the atmospheres
of “post-terror” in cities that have experienced terrorist attacks.
This involves developing new research methods that aim at
crossing micro-spatial approaches, social encounters and sensory
phenomena. The contributions of his recent research consist of
articulating the social, cultural and political dimensions of urban
spaces to the sensory and the ambient.
Nina J. Morris is senior lecturer in human geography at the
University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research interests fall into three
interrelated areas: cultural geographies of landscape; sensory
perception; and, human-nature relationships. Previously, she
explored the ways in which art can mediate our understanding of
familiar and unfamiliar landscapes. This has included collaborative
research on the work of artists exhibiting on, and the experiences
of visitors to, a sculpture trail in West Yorkshire, and solo work on
a large-scale light and sound installation on the Isle of Skye.
Whilst undertaking the Skye project, she developed a particular
interest in darkness and the uncritical way in which visibility
features in many contemporary landscape accounts. She teaches
sensory geography in the undergraduate curriculum and is
interested in embodied pedagogy.
April Nowell is a Paleolithic archaeologist and Professor of
Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada. She directs an
international team of researchers in the study of Lower and
Middle Paleolithic sites in Jordan and is known for her publications
on cognitive archaeology, the archaeology of children, Paleolithic
 art and the relationship between science, pop culture and the
media. She is a co-editor of Stone Tools and the Evolution of
Human Cognition (with Iain Davidson), Archaeology of the Night:
Life After Dark in the Ancient World (with Nancy Gonlin) and
author of Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological
Evidence of the Lived lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children.
Philip Rafael is associate lighting designer at The Flaming Beacon,
with experience in interior, exterior and façade lighting design,
daylight design and lighting master planning in a wide range of
projects across Europe and Asia. He is co-founder of The Dark
Art, a global design movement that nurtures lighting theoretical
discussion on the importance of shadow in lighting design. This
initiative led to him being shortlisted for the PLDR awards in the
category of newcomer at PLDC Madrid in 2011. Philip is based in
Berlin and active in both Europe and Asia.
Simon Robinson is a film-maker, early-career researcher, and
Teacher of Art and Design at Suffolk One Sixth Form College,
Ipswich, UK. His practice-led PhD research explored edgelands
and spaces left over after planning and led to a series of films,
Zones of Change. His films form a cross-disciplinary reading of
place and are informed by an experiential methodology of both
ethnographic and autoethnographic methods. Through examining
both landscape theory and his own experience of an embodied
approach to landscape, his work examines the potential of film to
act as a portal to read and experience the landscape.
Leni Schwendinger is Nighttime and Urban Lighting Designer, with
affiliations that span her involvement in research and practice.
Leni Schwendinger Light Projects facilitates creative collaborations
with urban infrastructure teams. For community engagement, her
NightSeeing™, Navigate Your Luminous City program is activated
for awareness raising and envisioning. Finally, on the research
front, Leni is leader of International Nighttime Design Initiative.
She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at The London School
of Economics and Political Science, Sociology Department,
 Configuring Light. She has created illuminated environments,
products, and programs for public spaces both temporal and
permanent. She has lectured and taught widely throughout the
United States, Latin America, Europe and Australasia. The
International Nighttime Design Initiative focuses on urban
nighttimes, and the attendant issues around safety, public health,
local economies She lives in New York City and London.
Rob Shaw is lecturer in geography at the University of Newcastle,
UK. His first book, The Nocturnal City, was published by
Routledge in 2018. He has carried out research exploring the
night-time economy in the UK, changing artificial lighting
technologies and the Nuit Debout protest movement in France. In
addition, he has published on ecosophical theories in geography,
and has a wider conceptual interest in concepts of earth, self and
temporality. His work has been funded by the ESRC, and
published in several journals including Environment and Planning
A, Geoforum and Theory, Culture and Society.
Shanti Sumartojo is Associate Professor of Design Research a
member of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash
University. Her research investigates how people experience their
spatial surroundings, including both material and immaterial
aspects, with a particular focus on the built environment, design
and technology. She has published in several areas: public
memorials and commemoration; the conceptual frame of
‘atmosphere’; how data contributes to spatial experience; and art
in public space. Her most recent books include Atmospheres in
the Experiential World: Theory and Methods (2018) and
Experiencing 11 November (2020).
Martin Welton is a Reader in Theatre and Performance at Queen
Mary University of London, UK. His research covers a series of
intersections between contemporary theatre and choreography as
they engage with concerns for affect, atmosphere and the
senses. This was the subject of his first book, Feeling Theatre,
that considered a continuum between emotion and the senses in
making and watching performance. Over the last two decades, he
has conducted a sustained inquiry into the history and
phenomenology of darkness and shadow in theatre practice, and
in 2017, he co-edited Theatre in the Dark with Adam Alston, the
first book-length publication on the subject.
Preface

The origins of this book arose through our shared love of landscapes
at night, and the diversity of experiences and encounters they bring.
Having individually written monographs on the subject, we decided
to convene two sessions, Dark Landscapes: new forms of experience
and place, at the American Association of Geographers Annual
Meeting 2018 in New Orleans. This enabled us to bring together a
series of scholars and practitioners to share their engagements with
darkness from a variety of backgrounds and theoretical orientations.
The sessions were a success and inspired us to bring this edited
collection together, including contributions from some of those who
presented. We discussed the scope of this book at length, and given
the vast array of disciplines that darkness connects with plus the
manifold ways in which it is interpreted, experienced, contested and
examined, we decided to focus on the insights and methods that the
arts, humanities and social sciences can bring. In this regard, our
book addresses a significant gap in current knowledge in relation to
perspectives from these fields on the subject of darkness. In building
a multi- and interdisciplinary field of inquiry into darkness, this
edited collection aims to bring together engagements with darkness
from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, empirical studies and
theoretical orientations.
Acknowledgements

We would like to express our considerable thanks to all the authors

who contributed chapters to this edited collection. We are delighted
with the breadth and depth of inquires and creative engagements
with darkness that they represent. They have proved to be an
attentive and supportive group and have been a pleasure to work
with. Thank you everyone. We would also like to thank Faye Leerink
and the team at Routledge who championed this book from its
conception and helped us bring it into being. Nick would like to
thank his family and friends for the unconditional love and support
they gave through the encounters with darkness that made this
book possible. He would also like to thank Tim for his energy and
enthusiasm in undertaking this project – he has been a fantastic
collaborator. Tim would like to thank his friends and family members
who accompanied him on his journeys into darkness.
Guy Bordin would like to highlight that his sincere thanks are due
many people from Mittimatalik, in particular Juanasi Aariak † , Gisa
Inuaraq, Rosie Kalluk, Timuti Kalluk†, Isimaili Katsak†, Maata Kunuk†,
Alan Maktaaq†, Tirisi Kupaa Maktaaq†, Aani Pairngut Piitaluusi†, Jaiku
Piitaluusi † Liitia Qajaq † , Anguilianuk Qijuapik † , Gamaili Qiluqisaaq,
Ruut Qaunnaq Sanguja, John Tuurngaq † , Ilisapi Uuttuvak, Florence
Wood. His contribution was carried out in the framework of a
research project acknowledged by the Nunavut Research Institute in
Iqaluit (Scientific Research Licences No. 0500203N-M, 0203105N-A
and 0203606R-M). Natalie Marr would like to thank Camilla Brown
for an insightful and spirited review of an earlier draft. Her
contribution was possible, thanks to the funding support of the Arts
and Humanities Research Council and Forest Research Scotland. Leni
Schwendinger expresses her gratitude to Lee E. Williams, poet, for
her reviews and writing guidance. Martin Welton would like to thank
June Bretherton, Ian Davie, Richard Dufty, Matthew Lenton, Tom
Morris, Meg Peterson, and Shaun Prendergast for their help and
advice.
1 Introduction
Venturing into the
dark: gloomy
multiplicities
Tim Edensor and Nick Dunn

Darkness is multiple, situational, contested. In this introductory

chapter, we seek to underpin these contentions by foregrounding the
sheer diversity of values, ideals, sensory experiences, cultural
practices and creative engagements that have been entangled with
darkness across space and time. Our account thus endeavours to
provide a compendious review of the rich writings on darkness that
have been disseminated across the humanities and social sciences
and have surged in recent years. We align ourselves with the
contemporary academic, creative, ecologically inspired and aesthetic
reappraisals of darkness that are challenging the long-standing
negative associations that have prevailed until recently. We have
sought to honour this ongoing rehabilitation by editing this book,
selecting a series of exciting chapters that further extend the
analysis offered in this introduction and expand understandings
about darkness and its meanings, uses and qualities. In
contextualising the chapters, we look respectively at the hugely
historically and spatially diverse ways in which people have
conceived and utilised darkness, at the capacities of darkness to
reconfigure sensory experience in manifold ways, at the numerous
ways in which creative practitioners and artists of all kinds have
deployed darkness and, finally, at how darkness has been variously
utilised in design practices.

The multiple meanings and uses of darkness

across time and space
In Western culture, forms of received wisdom and common sense
have typically considered darkness to be laden with negative
attributes. From medieval times, as Galinier et al. (2010: 820)
contend, darkness has symbolised ‘pagan obscurantism - deviancy,
monstrosity, diabolism’. It is hardly surprising that in a culture
saturated with widespread beliefs that a host of powerful
supernatural forces lurked in dark corners, the night held
multifarious terrors for most people. The devil carried out his work at
night, and sinister hobgoblins, ghouls, ghosts, witches, demons and
dark elves could be discerned in shadows and murky shapes. These
superstitious beliefs about the dark were fuelled by Christian
orthodoxies which drew on biblical passages to underline absolute
distinctions between a malign darkness and a godly realm of light.
Most obviously, Genesis 1:2–5 describes how all was subsumed in
darkness until God created light, a notion poetically rendered in John
Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar
Stood ruled, stood vast infinitude confined; Till at his second bidding
darkness fled, Light shone, and order from disorder sprung’ (2008:
83). The light is further conceived as that condition inhabited by
believers, as Ephesians 5:8 articulates: ‘you were once darkness, but
now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light, for light
produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth’. Craig
Koslofsky (2011) identifies these continuing associations of darkness
with witchcraft and devilry, heresy, sin and death throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the devout struggling
through the temptations and terrors of ‘the long night of the soul’.
These religious conceptions were supplemented and shifted by
the ideas expressed in the Enlightenment, which, as the word
signifies, foregrounds light. As Bille and Sørensen (2007: 272) note,
the Enlightenment marked a process through which scientists and
thinkers might ‘shed light on all things’ in the pursuit of ‘truth, purity,
revelation and knowledge’, embodying the ideals of ‘illumination,
objectivity and wisdom’ (ibid.: 273). Such ideals bolstered
Eurocentric ideas that Africa was the ‘Dark Continent’, replete with
animist and idolatrous faiths, ignorance and barbarism, ‘primitive’
qualities that could be overcome by the enlightening civilising
mission. The metaphor of enlightenment was also assigned to
Western spaces. The Victorian notion of ‘Darkest London’ was
assigned to slums alleged to house indolent, criminal and depraved
inhabitants, while the upright citizens of eighteenth-century urban
America imagined that ‘rakes, scavengers, and thieves made their
way through the inky blackness of the streets’ (Baldwin, 2004: 751).
Such narratives, as Oliver Dunnett (2015: 622) explains, are not only
associated with a practical and symbolic modernisation but have
‘taken on a moralising tone, seen as an all-encompassing force for
good, banishing the ignorance of darkness in modern society’. Such
associations extend and persist, as Kumar and Shaw (2019)
demonstrate in disclosing how illumination remains a signifier of
modernity in rural India. And the negative binary associations
wherein darkness is counterposed to the revelatory, sacred, moral
goodness of light possess an enduring legacy. They linger in
common references made to the ‘Dark Ages’, ‘dark forces’ and ‘dark
tourism’; darkness remains synonymous with the malevolent, sinister
and backward.
This is comprehensible in grasping the potency of darkness in
medieval times. As Roger Ekirch details, alongside the imagined
malign entities that were believed to populate the nights were
numerous very real hazards for those who ventured out after
nightfall, including piles of rubbish, ditches full of waste, excrement-
laden streets and overhanging timbers. Those trying to make their
passage beyond city walls suffered accidents, stumbling into ‘fallen
trees, thick underbrush, steep hillsides and open trenches’ (2005:
123). Gloom permeated the spaces inside most houses, with
rudimentary candles providing ‘small patches of light amid the
blackness’ (ibid.: 100). Little wonder also that medieval towns
typically organised a watch for guarding against fire, interlopers and
unidentified nocturnal wanderers, protecting inhabitants against
those who used darkness to conceal their nefarious activities.
Yet even in contemporary times in which darkness has largely
been banished from the city through what Koslofsky (2011) calls
‘nocturnalisation’ and Murray Melbin (1978) terms ‘colonization’ – the
expansion of social and economic activity into the night and the
subsequent spread of illumination – it remains widely perceived as
intrinsic to danger, though this is influenced by different
subjectivities of gender, ethnicity and age, for instance. Light, by
contrast, affords visibility and orientation, deterring potential
wrongdoers. Though this is ambiguous, with a growing awareness
that light renders potential targets visible and disarms visibility
outside areas of bright illumination, darkness remains associated
with the fearful and dangerous (Brands et al., 2015). As illumination
was increasingly utilised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
Chris Otter (2008: 66) states, darkness was conceived as a problem:
‘it allowed microbes to flourish and dust to accumulate. It made
cleaning difficult, and it was inimical to health’. Moreover, urban
darkness intensified anxieties about moral decay, debauchery and
crime, fuelled by sensationalist media reporting. Lighting up public
space allowed for the exposure and inspection of civil conduct while
maintaining the reserve and distance necessary for fostering liberal
subjects to make rational judgements about their own and others’
conduct.
Accordingly, an orthodoxy has prevailed wherein light has reigned
in many nocturnal settings, yet, having emphasised earlier that
darkness is multivalent across time and space, it is invariably
mediated by cultural practices and values; we emphasise Robert
Williams’s (2008: 514) contention that gloomy spaces are
‘constituted by social struggles about what should and should not
happen in certain places during the dark of the night’. For despite
construals of darkness as overwhelmingly negative, such notions are
neither historically nor geographically universal; nor have they ever
been accepted by all. There has always been a plethora of dissonant
voices, those for whom gloom is a cherished quality. Michel de
Certeau (1984: 96) writes of the terror of an implacable light
producing an urban text without obscurities, but insists that such a
transformation is never complete, as this means that urban
practitioners can ceaselessly create ‘opacities and ambiguities’ and
‘spaces of darkness and trickery’.
We may gain a sense of these alternative conceptions of darkness
by considering certain pre-modern nocturnal values. In ancient
Greek belief, the multiple qualities of darkness were portrayed, with
necromancy, Dionysian and sacrificial rituals taking place in the dark.
Moreover, a deep darkness was believed to characterise the lightless
conditions of the underworld in contradistinction to the variable
darkness of earthly night-time (Boutsikas, 2017), while the night
goddess Nyx was an ambiguous divinity, associated with death and
strife, but also with dreams and love (Bronfen, 2013). Gonlin and
Nowell’s (2018a) edited archaeological collection also features essays
that focus on the diverse and complex nocturnal historical practices
and understandings of Polynesian, Native American, Indian, South
American, African and Arabian cultures, collectively refuting any
overdetermined universalism with regard to darkness. In their
chapter in this book, Gonlin and Nowell underscore these
contentions, investigating how archaeological research can reveal
how sacred and productive nocturnal practices were carried out
every day in ancient cultures. Zoroastrianism (Zajonc, 1993) conveys
a particular Manicheanism in foregrounding an antagonism between
warring spiritual powers that plays across the world, a battle, it is
mooted, that will be resolved at the arrival of a final, third age in
which light will triumph over dark. In his chapter for this book, Guy
Bordin shows how Inuit culture emphasised that darkness was not
ontologically associated with negative values but was conversely a
condition conducive to sociability, storytelling, play, rituals and
festivity, qualities and understandings undermined by the advent of
Christianity.
Yet though we have asserted that Christian practice and belief has
tended to express dualistic understandings wherein light is divine
and dark is malign, older Christian conceptions challenge this
orthodoxy. For instance, Veronica Della Dora identifies the appeal of
the gloomy caves sought by early ascetic Eastern Christians that
served as sites of prayer and retreat. Since it was beyond the
capacity of humans to understand the divine, experience it visually
or express it meaningfully, for these adherents, ‘(V)isual presence
conceals spiritual absence; visual absence invites divine presence’
(2011: 762). Similarly, Koslofsky (2011) draws attention to a
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European mystical theology that
also promoted meditation within caves in which darkness inspired
piety and metaphorically encapsulated the religious struggle towards
the light and the path from earthly gloom to illuminated afterlife. In
these caves, darkness was valued as conducive to mystery,
profundity and beauty, signifying the ineffability and inexpressibility
of God. More recently, Catherine Bird (2017) endeavours to refute
these conventional Christian dualisms, asserting that since God is
present in all things, He is as much revealed in darkness as in light.
Drawing on many scriptural and spiritual references, she especially
foregrounds an extract from Psalm 139:

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,

and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.

She also identifies the Christian Tenebrae service in which candles

are successively extinguished, the final snuffing out of the light
symbolising the crucifixion, divine ascendance and resurrection. Yet
other belief systems also find spiritual sustenance in the dark. In
Taoist meditation, remaining in a completely lightless room for a
prolonged period is conducive to lucid dreaming and enhanced
spirituality.
In addition to these positive cosmological and spiritual meanings,
darkness has been imbued with positive qualities for a range of
subaltern and oppositional groups.
In the dark, persecuted minorities, marginal groups and the lower
classes may escape domineering masters, carve out time and space
outside working time and achieve ‘freedom from both labour and
social scrutiny’ (Ekirch, 2005: 227). Galinier et al. refer to the
Mesoamericans and Andeans who escaped the violence of Spanish
imperial power by confining ‘indigenous knowledge and practices to
the hidden recesses of the night’ (2010: 828), and Palmer (2000)
mentions the African-American slaves who forged a collectivity in the
darkness. In addition, the time after the sun sets has been regarded
as a period in which revolutionary, subversive and libidinal activities
may thrive. Bryan Palmer conceives darkness not only to promote
states of disconsolation and alienation but also transgression, as the
‘time for daylight’s dispossessed - the deviant, the dissident, the
different’ (2000: 16–17) to emerge. Recently, this is exemplified by
the occupation and disruption posed to urban space by the Nuit
Debout protests at the Place de la Republique in Paris, where
darkness has provided an opportunity to escape day-time
surveillance and create an ‘intensive timespace in which political
debate, discourse and protest might be more possible’ (Shaw,
2017a: 124).
As illumination has expanded, it has been resisted by ‘the
traditional inhabitants of the night: servants, apprentices and
students… tavern visitors, prostitutes’ and other workers and
pleasure-seekers (Koslofsky, 2011: 278), as well as by witches,
bohemians, beatniks, drug dealers, revolutionaries, conspirators and
heretics. Late-night settings accommodate burlesque shows and
blues and jazz musicians, nurturing ideas that darkness is associated
with transgressive sexualities and mystical practices. These libidinal
desires are especially exemplified by the gay darkrooms that offer a
space in which men may seek out anonymous sexual intimacy, yet
are often subject to regulation, as Aramayona and García-Sánchez
(2019) show in their discussion of tourism-led closure of gay dark
rooms, low-cost clubs and ‘dark rebellious’ nocturnal scenes in
Madrid, replaced by more respectable, sanitised gay-friendly cafés,
‘heritage’, art galleries and restaurants. Yet while constantly subject
to surveillance and control, darkness continues to spawn
opportunities ‘for trying to be someone the daytime may not let you
be, a time for meeting people you should not, for doing things your
parents told you not to do’ (van Liempt et al., 2015: 408). These
possibilities for transgression, adventure, subversion and libidinal
encounter are aligned with the cultural presentation of the dark
night as imbued with a nocturnal sublime. This ‘realm of fascination
and fear which inhabits the edges of our existence, crowded by
shadows, plagued by uncertainty, and shrouded in intrigue’ (Sharpe,
2008: 9), as discussed later, is amply portrayed in film noir, romantic
art and poetry and, more curiously, in colonialist constructions of
exotic otherness, as explored in Julian Baker’s (2015) account of
nineteenth-century British colonial travellers in India travelling
through the night to avoid the heat of the day. Baker discusses how
their phantasmagorical colonial imagination intensified orientalist
associations as they encountered the nocturnal landscape, with the
silhouettes of elephants and bullocks, singing Indian servants,
fantastic shadows and flickering flames, all enclosed by the gloom
beyond, soliciting an exotic picturesque.
While romantic visions counter overwhelmingly negative
portrayals of darkness, it is critical to recognise the highly
ambiguous, contradictory sentiments that darkness can provoke.
This is epitomised in two accounts of teenage encounters with
gloom. Samantha Wilkinson (2017) shows that darkness, rather than
being apprehended as a condition of fear and danger, is positively
embraced by young British drinkers of alcohol. Finding spaces
outside the home at night, they appreciate darkness’s allure as
offering a temporary reprieve from spatial, social and sensory norms,
as well as a convivial and intimate opportunity to drink and socialise
with friends in a shared affective space. Conversely, Thomas et al.
(2018) contend that for other young people in a different post-
industrial location, darkness stoked fear and a sense of exclusion,
and signified a political neglect that undergirded negative
representations of their place. They undertook a campaign to install
street lighting to banish the darkness that, for them, reduced
convivial nocturnal movement and restricted the forging of social
connections. In his chapter in this book, Ankit Kumar underscores
the multivalency of darkness, showing how it generates moments of
peril, a negligent local state, freedom and conviviality in rural Bihar.
The shifting values that surround darkness according to changing
contexts are also exemplified by the divergent responses to three
blackouts. During the 1965 New York city-wide blackout, large
numbers of residents and workers poured onto the street, and
convivial conversation devolved as social barriers dissolved and
inhibitions weakened. This celebratory mood wholly contrasted with
the blackout of 1977, when the city was mired in inflation,
unemployment and social conflicts, for the blackout became
emblematic of this economic discord, social breakdown and a
potentially dystopian future. In 2003, a further blackout once more
devolved into conviviality and carnival, a ‘collective effervescence’
(Yuill, 2004), but only once fears about terrorist causes had been
assuaged.
Despite the ongoing expansion of illumination into hitherto unlit
realms, rolled out into rural areas, for instance, as global
technologies of lighting extend across the globe, the distribution of
darkness and light often remains geographically and culturally
specific (Kumar and Shaw, 2019). James Atlee (2012: 3) contends
that only in ‘the great deserts and oceans’ can the moon be fully
appreciated under dark conditions, while Paul Bogard (2013)
witnesses star-filled skies in the vast blackness of Death Valley,
California, although he finds that other formerly crepuscular
American national parks have been invaded by light pollution. Across
the earth, we can still point to Chile’s vast Atacama Desert and deep-
sea trenches and caves that remain bereft of light.
The defence of darkness across space has been most assiduously
championed by the International Dark-Sky Association (International
Dark Sky Association). An expanding number of designated
International Dark-Sky Communities, Parks and Reserves are
managing to secure starry skies and nocturnal habitats through
minimising light pollution. Terrel Gallaway (2015: 280) summarises
the diverse values of the dark night sky as a ‘source of aesthetic,
scientific and spiritual inspiration … a natural resource, a scenic
asset and part of humanity’s cultural heritage’, as well as signifying
more ecologically sustainable environments (Sutton and Elvidge,
2015). The cultural and mythological resonances of dark skies have
also solicited enquiry (Griffiths, 2017).
Such realms are not only rural. For example, Moffat in south
Scotland has been assigned as Europe’s first Dark-Sky Town, having
adopted special street lighting to minimise light pollution. Ada Blair
(2016) explores the small island of Sark in the English Channel which
has acquired status as a Dark-Sky Community, an environment that,
she asserts, offers a range of positive experiences, including well-
being, communality, a return to child-like sensations and spiritual
enhancement. Darkness is thus being re-conceptualised in such
places as a valuable educational, cultural, scenic and natural
resource; as an attraction for celestial tourists (Weaver, 2011) and as
a site for creative practice, as Natalie Marr demonstrates in her own
practice in her chapter for this book. Indeed, the nocturnalisation of
tourism is also seen in growing popularity of visits to museums in
the dark, graveyard tours, ghost walks and bat walks (Eldridge and
Smith, 2019).
These latter activities indicate how areas within cities also offer
experiences of gloom, notably parks and green spaces devoid of
illumination, back alleys and edgelands (Dunn, 2016). In addition,
spaces that counter the dominant march of illumination in providing
opportunities to pleasurably encounter darkness have long been part
of modernity. As Alice Barnaby (2016) details, as illumination
increased, darkness was deployed in many ways to enchant and
intrigue patrons in forms of visual entertainment. In this book, her
chapter investigates how, during the first half of the nineteenth
century, the Hermit’s Grotto, Submarine Caves and Dark Walk in the
Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, London, produced a recreational space in
which visitors could experience depths of light and darkness. These
were later superseded by a variety of fairground attractions which
also conjured with the diverse qualities of darkness. Tunnels of love,
in which small boats transported passengers along passages in
fabricated environments, featured two major themes: a relaxing
romantic ride encouraging unseen intimate contact, or a spooky
horror ride that inspired couples to cling to each other, also
legitimising close physical contact. Similarly, the ghost train conveys
visitors via a railway through a dark interior in which they are
assailed by whistles and hooters, air blowers, cobwebs, skeletons
emerging from coffins, springing ghouls and optical illusions. This
feast of carnivalesque gothic is described by Botting (1996: 3) as an
‘overabundance of imaginative frenzy, untamed by reason’,
unbounded and unconstrained. Updated versions of these dark,
thrilling realms are provided by walks through darkened corridors
where actors in the guise of malign creatures are employed to taunt
and terrify visitors (Edensor, 2018a). Such crepuscular conditions
were as integral to the popular spiritualist séances held in the
parlours of Victorian England, as they are to contemporary ghost
tours (Holloway, 2010).
Equally affectively, modern forms of dark space emerged with the
advent of the darkroom, an intimate space for focused
concentration, in which photographers pore over chemical solutions
to scrutinise the appearance of images appearing in trays.
In addition, the conversion of movie theatres and auditoria into
darkened settings in which attention was focused upon an
illuminated stage or screen also created new spaces of intimacy and
fantasy. Indeed, as Elcott (2012: 74) asserts, darkness was ‘written
into cinema operating manuals, and it is that darkness that still
pervades major motion-picture theaters’, intensifying absorption in
the production. As he also demonstrates in his chapter for this book,
darkness was cleverly, if dubiously, deployed in other forms of early,
modern, popular visual culture.
As Chris Otter importantly points out, artificial light and its
converse, darkness, rapidly became ‘a symbol and a determinant of
urban differentiation’ (2008: 335) wherein, as Joachim Schlör notes,
the brighter the light in the centre, ‘the more starkly do the outlines
of the darker regions stand out’ (1998: 65). Jane Brox (2010: 104)
concurs in attending to how the brightly illuminated shop windows,
signs, theatre entrances, homes and pubs in the commercial centre
contrasted with those realms regarded as ‘another country’ – the
dark neighbourhoods of the poor, in which ‘old light retreated into
the far streets and lesser known neighbourhoods, disregarded and
disparaged in relation to the new’. In early twentieth-century
Istanbul too, the persistence of darkness in certain areas of the city
revealed inequalities as well as a governmental inability to fully
embrace modernity (Ileri, 2017).
The use of lighting as a means of distinction has long been ‘a
technology whose conspicuous consumption was a status symbol for
both individuals and towns’ (Harrison, 2015: 952). By drawing on the
city of Rocky Mount in North Carolina, Harrison shows how the
selective installation of electric lighting was central to the
development of racialised urban space. Illumination was promoted in
commercial areas and white districts to prevent crime but was
deemed unnecessary for black areas, thereby naturalising spaces of
‘black dispossession and white privilege’ and modernity (ibid.: 14;
also see Gooden, 2016). In this book, Noam Elcott shows how
darkness was deployed in popular theatrical shows to reaffirm racial
stereotypes but also how more recent creative displays have
inventively used darkness to challenge these malign evocations.
Illumination also marked the rigorous spatial distinctions that
colonial authorities sought to impose by designing ‘dual cities’
organised into native quarters and European cantonments, with the
former consigned to darkness and the latter bathed in light (Winther,
2008; Frasch, 2012). The legacy of these colonial inequities is
revealed by Jonathan Silver (2015) in his analysis of unequal access
to electricity and lighting in contemporary Accra, Ghana. Here,
neoliberal programmes of structural adjustment have produced a
splintered urbanism in which surges in demand for electricity from
middle-class households to supply their air-conditioned homes often
leads to disruption to supply. Yet because such households can
afford to purchase individual generators that provide an alternative
source and bypass the effects of the blackouts, their houses remain
illuminated, whereas the districts inhabited by the poor are plunged
into darkness. This manifestation of power in the nocturnal
landscape is also evident in rural Bihar where power holders ensure
that light is distributed to village areas inhabited by high-caste
residents (Kumar and Shaw, 2019). In this way, as well as providing
a signifying index of deprivation, Jaffe et al. (2019) contend that
pervasive darkness is also imbricated with sensory perception, and
thereby becomes part of what poverty feels like.
As Rob Shaw (2015b: 586) discusses, power is also manifest in
controlling darkness in domestic environments, wherein what may
be regarded as a place of refuge can become a site of entrapment
where it is the ‘the intimacy of darkened spaces which perpetrators
of domestic violence are able to exploit in order to generate
atmospheres of fear’ in which the proximity of the two bodies in the
darkened space allows the perpetrator of violence to exercise power
over the other.
Finally, a consideration about the unequal distribution of light and
dark is usefully contextualised by Jacques Rancière’s (2009) claim
that regimes of the sensible are shaped by particular values
espoused by the powerful, who are able to render the configuration
of the built environment a commonsensical realm that is difficult to
imagine otherwise. Such values feed into the production of nocturnal
space and the creation of forms of illumination and darkness that
appear to be part of the way things are and should be, revealing the
difficulties of campaigning for better illumination and greater
expanses of darkness. According to Matthew Gandy (2017a: 354),
this distribution of the nocturnal sensible is ‘integral to the changing
sensory characteristics of late modernity’, its quotidian ‘affective
dynamics’ and rhythms and ‘pervasive atmospheres of distraction’. It
is to the sensing of darkness that we now turn.

Sensing and experiencing darkness

Night does not anaesthetize the skin but makes it more subtly
aware. The body trains itself to seek the road in the middle of
darkness, loves small insignificant perceptions: faint calls,
imperceptible nuances, rare effluvia, and prefers them to
everything loud. Things wandering in the silence and shadow
help it to rediscover practices long since lost through
forgetfulness and habit.
(Serres, 2008: 68)

As Michel Serres notes, immersion in dark spaces provokes the

mobilisation of sensory capacities not deployed in the light. Sounds
and smells become more prominent, tactile skills are required to
negotiate gloom and taste is enhanced.
In addition, visual capacities are also recalibrated; the world is
seen differently after nightfall. This is partly due to the operation of
the eye’s rod cells, replacing the use of the cone cells that are
mobilised during the day, in adapting to lower levels of light. After
around 20 minutes, human vision adjusts to gloomier environments,
enabling greater visual sensitivity to light, shape and movement, but
impairing the ability to discern colour. In the dark, the horizon marks
the boundary between the earth and the sky, and seems to enclose
a dark, largely undifferentiated, realm within which the boundaries
of the body become indistinct, merging with the surroundings to
produce an expansive impression of the space beyond us.
Alphonso Lingis (1998) identifies how changing levels of light,
characterised by the depth of field and brightness, continuously play
across the spaces within which we see things and with which we
continuously adjust, and this also applies to depths and densities of
darkness. This distribution of light and dark across space is shaped
by seasonal and weather patterns, diurnal temporalities, longitudinal
and latitudinal positions and the presence of cloud and atmospheric
particles. Our perceptual experience of night is also conditioned by
the affordances of place, the way moonlight shines on distinctive
surfaces or reflects on water, the form of silhouettes against the
starry sky and the masses that block light.
Whereas in daylight, the depth of the landscape is registered by a
succession of scenes that fade into the distance and the eye
continuously shifts between them, in dark landscapes, vision attends
to looming masses, silhouettes, small patches of reflected light or
subtly different shades of grey (Edensor, 2013; Dunn, 2017). This is
captured by John Daniel’s contention that daylight vision ‘catches on
the surface of things, gets snagged and tugged about by their
multiplicity’, whereas when looking at trees in a forest at night, the
sensation is of their ‘commonality’ and ‘not the names I knew them
by but their essential namelessness’ (2008: 23). John Tallmadge
(2008: 140) contends that vision becomes less critical and that
sensory information is gathered by hearing, touching and smelling;
also, in becoming attuned to the landscape through these other
senses, the body ‘relaxes, opens, breathes, extends its attention
outward into the world the way a plant feels its way into the soil
with roots or into the air with leaves’.
Peter Davidson’s (2015) highly nuanced account of the subtle,
ever-changing and manifold sensory and metaphorical potency of
twilight particularly captures the shifting experience of gloom.
Exceptionally attuned to the multiple qualities of the fading light, he
depicts the shifting hues and the emerging shadowy forms with
thick, poetic descriptions of very different landscapes. He draws on a
wealth of historical, literary and artistic representations to explore
the intoxicating impact of the period between sunset and darkness,
the melancholic, optimistic and satisfied responses to a sinking sun
and evolving darkness, a riot of nuanced affects and sensations.
Japanese novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s renowned account, In
Praise of Shadows, celebrates the visual pleasures of darkness with
unusual acuity. He maintains that ‘[i]f light is scarce then light is
scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover
its own particular beauty’ (2001: 48) and provides an exquisite
depiction of the appearance of Japanese lacquerware in a darkened
room. He describes how its ‘florid patterns recede into the darkness,
conjuring an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones
but partly suggested’ and depicts how ‘the thin impalpable, faltering
light, picked up as though little rivers were running through the
room, collecting little pools here and there, lacquers a pattern on the
surface of the night itself’ (2001: 24). Such aesthetic effects, he
insists, depends on ‘a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against
light shadows’ (ibid.: 29) in contradistinction to the over-
ornamentation and garish lighting of Western interior décor. Such
visual treats may also be experienced outdoors, as Jane Brox
exemplifies in observing that during a New York blackout, the city
was re-enchanted, as ‘skyscrapers take on a geological sheen and
the stars resemble those of ancient times’ (2010: 243).
In addition to the visual experience of the vital dark world,
critiques of accounts that privilege the visual also point to the non-
visual ways in which space is apprehended through the senses of
hearing, smell, touch and proprioception, together with a heightened
awareness of temperature, the stillness or freshness of the air and
the shifting textures underfoot, all of which stimulate an imaginative
approach to space. Indeed, Robert MacFarlane (2005: 75) claims
that in the dark, ‘one becomes more aware of landscape as a medley
of effects. A mingling of geology, memory, nature, movement’, in
which landforms ‘exist as presences: inferred, less substantial but
more powerful for it’.
In former times, a multisensory attunement to pervasive darkness
solicited the development of practical competencies, with knowledge
of the regular patterns in the star-filled sky used to guide the way
along with the moon. The path ahead could be discerned according
to the multiple ways in which moonlight transforms landscape, the
‘changing colours and contours in its shape-shifting light’, a luminous
variety, according to James Attlee (2011: 5), that would be ‘too
subtle for our modern eye to appreciate’. This heightening of other
senses was also practically useful, as Roger Ekirch (2005) details in
explaining how parents devised games to habituate their children to
darkness, taking them out on night walks and testing their ability to
locate place by touch, sound and smell, instilling a non-visual
familiarity with local landmarks and hazards.
This notion that the more-than-visual becomes more prominent in
the dark resonates with recent nature writing which has begun to
draw upon darkness as an essential time within which different
sensations and experiences are particularly pronounced (Yates,
2012; Francis, 2019). In the city too, Robert Nye describes how
blackout creates ‘a state of suspended animation, which sharpens…
perceptions of (the) immediate environment… the city is quieter and
sounds unfamiliar’ (2010: 83). Some of this sonic awareness is
produced by transformed environmental conditions; for example, air
at night is often at a lower temperature than during the day,
affecting the way that sound travels. The prioritisation of sound
featured in Eclipse, a 2011 series of concerts staged by blind Malian
couple Amadou and Mariam that were performed in complete
darkness. Audience members could attend to the nuances of the
lush music that washed over the pitch-black venue, overwhelming
other sensory experiences. Yet the absence of the audience rituals
and shared participation that typically characterises the experience
of live music performance were disconcerting. There were no visible
performers or dancing fans, no light show, none of the familiar visual
cues and audiences largely remained quiet. Yet as the concert drew
to a close, the lights gradually rose to reveal a resplendent Amadou
and Mariam and their band on stage in a rousing finale. The
audience was catalysed by the abrupt transformation in sensory
experience and affective communication, enthralled by their sudden
re-attunement to the sights and movement of a rock concert.
The unfamiliar sensations of darkness are also promoted by dark
spas and massage treatments, as well as a series of tourist
attractions. Dialogue in the Dark, located in dozens of locations
across the world, offers a non-visual apprehension of a series of
chambers that simulate both iconic sites and generic environments.
Visitors are greeted by a blind guide and provided with a walking
cane that facilitates a tactile apprehension of the ground surface,
and different non-visual sensations are solicited in each room. For
instance, at the now closed New York City attraction, a room that
simulated an impression of ‘Central Park’ was replete with sounds of
water, birdsong and peoples’ conversations and movements. Visitors
were requested to place their hands in the ‘fountain’ and feel the
foliage and flowers (Edensor, 2013).
Dans le Noir?, a London restaurant, prepares diners for a visit: ‘by
suppressing the dominant sense of sight, you will enter a world in
which one is uncertain of surroundings and experiences’ (Dans le
Noir). Research (Edensor and Falconer, 2014) revealed that many
diners referred to the intensity of the food, its flavours,
consistencies, chewiness, smoothness or graininess, despite most
failing to recognise what they were eating. Also accentuated were
tactile and verbal communication, and the sense of an enhanced
affective connection between diners and towards the waiting staff,
with many commenting on the liberating absence of a self-
consciousness generated by visual judgements about their
appearance.
Both these attractions solicit non-visual apprehension, experiences
promoted in other gloomy realms. We may become more acutely
attuned to the shifting quality of the air, as where a breeze assails
exposed limbs and face or where stillness or dampness prevails, and
air, of course, also carries a medley of scents to which we may
attend more intensely than usual, undistracted by multiple sights.
Feet may identify the different textures underfoot, detecting uneven,
slippery or springy terrain. As our bodies move through different
liminal states across dark landscapes, the character of places
changes too. This is particularly evident in edgelands where a
crosshatch of rural and urban landscapes produces places that seem
more open-ended, as does the shifting experience of space (Farley
and Symmons Roberts, 2011; Dunn, 2020).
These mobile sensations are further conditioned by the modes
through which we move in dark space, whether by train, walking,
running or cycling, for instance.
Hayden Lorimer (in Edensor and Lorimer, 2015: 9) details how
running at night offers sensory experiences that wildly differ from
those when moving through a daylit landscape. In cities, ‘the
runner’s world glows sodium orange’, a light that is sufficient and
consistent enough to ‘reveal surfaces underfoot: well-laid,
dependable paving slabs; smooth tarmac or the irregularities of
cobblestones; back lanes pitted with potholes and puddles’. However,
when jogging across a dark, hilly landscape with a head torch and
light suit while participating in a grand collective performance staged
by arts group NVA, rhythms, manoeuvres and modes of attention
are transformed: ‘feelings of vulnerability are palpable, borne of not
knowing with any real confidence what lies beneath or just ahead.
Long strides shorten and stiffen to smaller steps… freer movements
are pitched off balance by the ever-present worry of putting a foot
wrong’ and ‘feelings of fluency deteriorate into a clutter of physical
uncertainty’. Here, ‘the felt-world is continually emerging into being’.
As Büscher and Urry assert, the bicycle can ‘sensuously extend
human capacities into and across the world’, and ‘provide various
ways of framing impression’ (2009: 102). The cyclist uses
illumination to guide passage through dark landscape via the narrow
beam of the bicycle lamp that cuts an illuminated tunnel through the
darkness and suddenly highlights the forms of trees, gates, hedges
and animals scurrying across the road ahead (Cook and Edensor,
2014). Surroundings may be tinctured with brightness when the
cloud is low and the lights cast by towns are reflected to form an
orange ceiling. When the moon shines brightly after rainfall, lanes
glow silver and the seasonal thickness of vegetation creates a sense
of enclosure within dark forms. Temperatures, the grain of the
asphalt, scents that emerge from hedgerows and the sounds of
distant traffic and nearby wildlife are noticed, while in the absence of
many sights, attention focuses on the body and its capacities, the
rhythm of pedalling and the feelings of tiredness or energy.
The experience of mechanical mobilities at night also generates
divergent sensations. On nocturnal train travel, David Bissell (2009:
52) notes that ‘outside the sodiumscape of urban areas, the
attenuation of visual phenomena framed by the window focuses the
visual gaze towards the interior of the carriage’, yet he also draws
attention to ‘the otherworldly flashes, glows, sparks and orbs that
punctuate the dark of night’ and ‘the magical green lights of
trackside signals’ (ibid.: 52–53) outside the train. In considering car
travel in the dark, Sandy Isenstadt claims that to ‘position oneself at
the vertex of a cone of light and propel it across a darkened
landscape must count as one of the most startling visual experiences
of the twentieth century’ (2011: 229). Isenstadt further discusses
how car headlights ‘rendered forms in a novel fashion’, exaggerating
their shape and throwing long shadows that extended to join the
surrounding darkness. Such objects, he continues, ‘bloomed
gradually into nocturnal form, then sharpened for an instant and,
just as swiftly were gone’ (ibid.: 218). Finally, Maria Borovnik (2017)
explores how for those who work on container ships, the ever-
shifting environment of the nocturnal sea opens up multisensual and
corporeal ways of experiencing the ship’s mobilities – the active
scanning of the horizon for landmarks and other nautical lights, a
sonic attunement to oceanic and mechanical sounds and a tactile
sense of the motion engendered by the roiling ocean, as well as
managing the often intense, variable emotions and affects solicited
by such vast, dark realms. In this book, distinctive forms of mobile
engagement with darkness are discussed. Katrin Lund examines how
a coach tour to unsuccessfully experience Iceland’s aurora borealis is
replete with the visual apprehension of a host of forms across
nocturnal landscapes, tactile sensations provoked by mechanised
movement through darkness and a multisensual encounter with a
derelict site that provoke a medley of affective and imaginative
responses. Nina Morris explores how her participation in an event
organised to stage dancing in the dark, though offering opportunities
to experience sensory and embodied pleasures in the absence of
light and an escape from self-consciousness, was for her marred by
a lack of kinaesthetic empathy.
 Sensing darkness potentially affords an enhanced imaginative and
affective experience of space; it can ‘dim the sharpness of vision,
make depth and distance ambiguous, and invite unconscious
peripheral vision and tactile fantasy’ (Pallasmaa, 2005: 46). In his
The Theory of Colours (1810/1970), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
questioned the then prevalent scientific theories of darkness, placing
specific emphasis on the value of subjective and embodied
experiences. Such notions were also articulated by American
psychologist G. Stanley Hall who worried about the demise of such
experiences as illumination advanced. He submitted that with their
‘rich colours and long shadows, the hours of dusk nurtured
something poetic and spiritual in the human psyche, a contemplative
mode of existence that looked beyond the material world exposed by
the strong light of day’ (Freeberg, 2013: 294).
These concerns are extended by a consideration of the
possibilities offered by these encounters with the sensory alterity of
darkness. For darkness has a long history of providing rich
atmospheres that stimulate imagination, and its role has also proven
key to the development of sacred and supernatural beliefs (Moyes,
2012; Moyes et al., 2017). The originality and value of dark places
for thought and creativity to flourish has been the subject of more
recent attention (Dunn, 2016; Stone, 2018). Michaël Foessel (2017:
151) has referred to the potential for a different ‘regime of sensory
experience’ when out in the dark to support such processes. Indeed,
psychologists Anna Steidle and Lioba Werth (2013) have shown that,
‘darkness triggers a chain of interrelated processes, including a
cognitive processing style, which is beneficial to creativity’. Moreover,
as Rob Shaw asserts, darkness intensifies the experience of touch
and offers conditions for meditative retreat and the possibilities of
intimately engaging with an otherness that escapes the delineations
of the visible (Shaw, 2015).
Of course, it is not only humans that sense and experience
darkness. It is also critical to acknowledge how the loss of darkness
is affecting the non-human actions and routines that co-constitute
the senses and experiences of environments under darkness. For
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Bits from
Blinkbonny; or, Bell o' the Manse
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Title: Bits from Blinkbonny; or, Bell o' the Manse

a tale of Scottish village life between 1841 and 1851

Author: John Strathesk

Release date: November 27, 2023 [eBook #72243]

Language: English

Original publication: Toronto: William Briggs, 1885

Credits: Susan Skinner, Quentin Campbell, and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BITS FROM

BLINKBONNY; OR, BELL O' THE MANSE ***
 Transcriber’s Note

The cover image was restored by Thiers Halliwell and is placed in the
public domain.

Click any image to see a larger version.

See end of this transcript for details of corrections and other changes.
BITS FROM BLINKBONNY.
The Artists Bit.
BITS FROM BLINKBONNY
OR

BELL O’ THE MANSE

A TALE OF SCOTTISH VILLAGE LIFE BETWEEN

1841 AND 1851

BY

JOHN STRATHESK

With Six Original Illustrations

TORONTO
WILLIAM BRIGGS, 78 & 80 KING ST. EAST

C. W. COATES, Montreal, Que. S. F. HUESTIS, Halifax, N.S.

——
1885
Entered, according to the Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one thousand eight hundred and
eighty-five, by William Briggs, agent for John Tod, St. Leonard’s, Scotland, in the Office of the Minister
of Agriculture, at Ottawa.
 PREFACE.
——◆——

T HESE “Bits from Blinkbonny” were grouped together by the

Author to beguile the tedium of a protracted period of domestic
quarantine. They are not only his first attempt at sustained
literary work, but they were commenced without any concerted plan.
Blinkbonny was selected as a pretty name for a Scottish village, but
the Author himself cannot fix the precise locality; and all the names
he has used are supposititious, excepting those of such public
characters as Dr. Duff, Dr. Guthrie, etc.
Owing to his having adopted the autobiographical form, the Author
has experienced more difficulty in writing the preface than any other
part of the book, as, although most of the incidents are founded on
fact, a good deal of imported matter has been required to form a
connected narrative. He also knows that in bringing together the
varieties of character and incident that an ordinary Scotch village
affords, he has passed “from grave to gay, from lively to severe,” in
some instances with injudicious abruptness, and that there are other
defects for which he needs to apologize; but as even his readers will
probably differ as to where these occur, it is not desirable for him to
dwell on them.
The Author is not in any way connected with the Free Church of
Scotland, and at the outset he had no intention of treating so largely
as he has done of the “Disruption” of 1843; if, however, he induces
the rising generation to study the past and the present of that great
movement, neither they nor he will regret the prominence given to it
in this volume.
The illustrations with which the book is embellished are
“composition” sketches; but the Author confidently leaves these to
introduce themselves.
The idiom of the Scottish language—the dear old Doric—has been to
the Author a difficult matter to render, so as to be at once intelligible
to ordinary readers and fairly representative of the everyday mother
tongue of the common people of Scotland. He hopes that he has
succeeded in doing this, as well as in preserving a few of the floating
traditions of the passing generation which are so rapidly being swept
away by the absorbing whirlpool of these bustling times, and that his
readers will follow with kindly interest these homely records of the
various subjects he has tried to portray in these “Bits from
Blinkbonny.”
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
The author is delighted to find you so hurriedly called for, that he has
only time to express the hope that you will receive as kindly a
welcome as your precursor has done.
February 1882.
 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
The author gladly avails himself of the opportunity you afford him, to
express his gratification at the warm reception which Bell and her
friends at Blinkbonny have met with on both sides of the Atlantic, as
well as to make a few verbal corrections.

“The cleanest corn that e’er was dicht

May ha’e some pyles o’ caff in.”

July 1882.
 CONTENTS.
——◆——

CHAPTER I.
THE MANSE.
PAGE

The Artist and his Bits—Blinkbonny—The Author and his

Relations—The Good Folks at Greenknowe—The
Manse—Once thinking of getting married—The
Interrupted Call—Mr. and Mrs. Barrie—Bell of the
Manse—Wee Nellie—Her Illness, Death, and Grave
—“A Butterfly on a Grave” (Mrs. Sigourney), 1

CHAPTER II.
A QUIET EVENING AT THE MANSE.
Bell’s Sliding Scale—Her Pattens—The Hospitality of the
Manse—Be judeecious—James and his Skates—
Mrs. Barrie’s Experiences—Mr. Barrie’s Illness—The
Good Samaritan—A Startling Proposal, 22

CHAPTER III.
THE MARRIAGE AND THE HOME-COMING.
“The Books”—P.P.C.—Marriage Presents—“The
Confession of Faith”—Toasts—“The Frostit
Corn”—“The Country Rockin’”—Auntie Mattie—“The
Farmer’s Ingle”—Peggy Ritchie on the Churchyard—
A Lamb Leg and a Berry Tart—Mathieson’s Heid, 41

CHAPTER IV.
THE TWO SIDES OF THE CHURCH QUESTION.
Coming Events—Bell and the Seed Potatoes—Her Idea 58
of the Government—Knowe Park—Spunks—The
 Town-Clerk of Ephesus—Bell’s summing up—Daisy
—The Eve of Battle—Sir John McLelland’s Opinions
on the “Evangelicals”—Patronage—Preaching
Competitions—Little Gab—Non-Intrusion and Voting,

CHAPTER V.
BLINKBONNY AND THE DISRUPTION.
Bell’s Opinion of Knowe Park—Mr. Barrie’s Return—The
Deputation’s Visit to the Manse—Mr. Barrie’s
Statement—Mr. Taylor’s Views—George Brown on
the Crisis—His Covenanting Relics, 85

CHAPTER VI.
THE DISRUPTION AND BLINKBONNY.
The Meeting in Beltane Hall—The End of the Ten Years’
Conflict—George Brown’s Exercises—The Bellman’s
Difficulty—Sabbath Services at the Annie Green
—“Thae Cath’lics”—The Secession Church—Mr.
Barrie’s Successor—Bell and Smoking—“Hillend” on
Doctors and Ministers—A Man amang Sheep, 99

CHAPTER VII.
OUT OF THE OLD HOME AND INTO THE NEW.
Leaving the Manse—Dr. Guthrie and the Children—
Nellie’s Tibby—Well settled—Bell’s Experiment with
the Hens—Dan Corbett—Braid Nebs—Babbie’s Mill, 126

CHAPTER VIII.
BLINKBONNY FREE CHURCH.
The Disruption of 1843—Hardships—Scotch Villages and
Church Matters—The New Church—The Session
and Deacons—The Beadle, Walter Dalgleish—The
Precentorship—Psalms and Hymns—Mr. Barrie’s
New Life—Foreign Missions—The Assembly’s
Decision—The Living Child—Saxpence—“Gude Siller
gaun oot o’ the Country”—Reminiscences of Dr. Duff, 154
 CHAPTER IX.
BELL AT HOME IN KNOWE PARK.
The Three Ministers of Blinkbonny—Mr. Walker—The Ten
Virgins—The finest o’ the Wheat—Bell’s Fee—Alloa
Yarn—Bell’s Cooking—Sheep’s-head—Mr. Kirkwood
and the Potato-Soup—Dan in the Kitchen—Mr.
Gordon o’ the Granaries and the Smugglers—Dan at
Nellie’s Grave—Mr. Barrie’s Visit to Dan, 177

CHAPTER X.
INCIDENTS IN BLINKBONNY.
Miss Park on Dan—The Sweep’s dead—Mrs. Gray’s
Elegy on her Husband—The Coffin for naething—The
New School-master—The Roast Beef in the Lobby—
The Examination Committee—“Hoo’ to get there”—
George Brown’s Death—Scripture References—Mrs.
Barrie and Mr. Corbett—Dan and the Pictures—Dan’s
Bath—His Dream—Dan at Church—His Visit to
Babbie’s Mill—Colonel Gordon’s First Visit—Sir John
McLelland at the Soiree—“The Angel’s Whisper”
(Samuel Lover), 205

CHAPTER XI.
CHANGES AT KNOWE PARK.
The Dorcas Society—The Morisonian Controversy—
Colonel Gordon’s Second Visit—A Real Scotch
Dinner—Champagne—Dan an’ the Duke o’ Gordon—
The Smuggler’s Log-book—Colonel Gordon’s Will—
Dan’s Bank—The Call to Edinburgh—No-Popery
Agitation—David Tait o’ Blackbrae—The Sow and the
Corinthians—Bell woo’d—Mrs. Barrie breaks the Ice
—Bell won—Found out and congratulated, 230

CHAPTER XII.
ANOTHER MARRIAGE AND HOME-COMING.
The Forms of Procedure—Reception of the News of Bell’s 259
Marriage by Mr. Taylor, and by Sir John McLelland
—“Her Weight in Gold”—Bell’s Presents—“Hook ma
 Back”—Mr. Walker’s Violin—Bell’s Marriage and
Home-coming—The Infar Cake—Creeling—Dan,
“Burke,” and the Noisy Convoy—The Vexing Pig—
The “Kirkin’,”

CHAPTER XIII.
CONCLUSION.
The Packing at Knowe Park—The Bachelor Umbrella—
Nellie’s Box—Dan and Rosie—Dan on Evangelical
Effort—On “The Angel’s Whisper”—Bell in Edinburgh
—Home to Blackbrae—Andrew Taylor’s Criticisms, 284
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
——◆——

The Artist’s Bit, Frontispiece.

Blinkbonny, Page 6
Bell and “Daisy,” ” 70
Babbie’s Mill, ” 152
Dumbarton Castle, ” 197
Bell’s “Hoose o’ her Ain”—Blackbrae, ” 250
BITS FROM BLINKBONNY.
BITS FROM BLINKBONNY.
——◆——