Waking Up to the Dark: The Black Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse

Tricycle columnist Strand (The Way of the Rose) delivers an incoherent paean to darkness. “We don’t know the value of darkness until we have destroyed it,” Strand contends, stringing together musings on Christianity, Buddhism, paganism, and science to argue for the merits of nighttime. He decries light pollution and details a study that found participants shielded from sources of light while sleeping would wake in a meditative state for a couple hours during the night before falling back asleep, suggesting humans were not meant to doze straight through the night. However, his assertions more frequently forgo supporting evidence, as when he posits that people who leave outdoor lamps on overnight have worse sex (“Sex belongs to the darkness, not the light”). Readers will struggle to follow his convoluted logic, particularly in the chapter about his spiritual encounters with an apparition-like figure he calls the “Black Madonna,” in which he zooms from stories of Hindu goddesses to depictions of mother Mary to pondering the climate apocalypse, concluding that “life is close.” Riddled with prose that borders on nonsense (“Apart from the grave, footsteps are the body’s most honest answer to the question of gravity”), this is good for inducing sleep, but not much else. (Sept)