Leap in the dark: Alastair McIntosh looks for inner life

‘Let not the occasion go to waste.’

We now know that at least seven people have died across the UK from Storm Babet; and in the Middle East, as if Ukraine and wars in Africa were not enough, another kind of storm has engulfed humanity.

Meanwhile, almost as if it is a metaphor for the way times are going, the clocks are going back, bringing a sense of evening darkness closing in.

It could all be doom and gloom: but not so fast!

In Scotland in the past, the bardic schools of poetry were held in darkest winter when the inner life comes most alive: for ‘poetry is not a luxury’ said the African American writer Audre Lorde, explaining that poetry represents the light, and that ‘the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives’, directly affects ‘the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives’.

Her words came back to me on Monday night. My wife, Vérène, is French, and she was on a call to her brother in Paris. He surprised her, saying that the state of things just now had made it dawn on him just what it is we’ve lost. We’ve lost the reverence for life, and the ability to find its beauty in nature and community. In a word, he said, we’ve lost the spirituality that makes everything join up.

I found myself thinking of a song called ‘Melancholy Man’, in a chart-topping Moody Blues LP from 1970, and the words:

When all the stars are falling down
Into the sea and on the ground
And angry voices carry on the wind…

It’s at this very point, goes the song, that:

A beam of light will fill your head
And you’ll remember what’s been said
By all the good men this world’s ever known

Good men, good women ... and so back round to Audre Lorde’s reminder, of ‘the quality of the light’. A darkness might be on the world, but let not the occasion go to waste. For as John’s gospel has it: that beam of light, is the life of humankind, ‘and the darkness did not overcome it’.

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