Thoughts on The Dark Lighthouse

The Dark Lighthouse

Today I was re-reading this recent experimental short story (it has a fixed paragraph size) and a particular sentence struck me.  I’ve written a handful of these type stories and I find its spatial limitations help me focus a bit more, kind of like how writing a poem does.  My experience has been that it forces me to get each idea or image into a circumscribed size and extraneous stuff is forced to fall off, kind of like using a cookie cutter to get a visually pleasing shape.

The sentence is “And he ascends one step at a time in a slow upward spiral that spins into days and then weeks and maybe even months but there is no progress as far as he can tell.”  Reading it a second time I had the strange feeling I’d seen something like that before.  Today it struck me.  It is from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.  When Max has entered a dream state and is traveling to where the wild things are it says “and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost a year to where the wild things are.”

This is an example of the time distortion that can occur in dream states where our waking understanding of time and space doesn’t necessarily apply.  In psychoanalytic circles it might be referred to as “primary process” thinking or “dream logic” in film studies.  It is theorized that there is a deep place under our conscious awareness where our waking life is processed in various and sundry ways in order to solve a problem or meet a need.  What comes from this process makes its way into our conscious awareness through a kind of filter that is replete with metaphors, symbols, and fantastical imagery.  Talking about our dreams and free association are ways the analyst can get at the underlying meaning and help us understand what is troubling us and maybe how to resolve it.  It is well known that Maurice worked with an analyst regularly for years and its influence can be seen in works like Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There.

Looking at The Dark Lighthouse again I think it is about a man who is dying and in the process of dying becomes reborn or maybe “re-birthed” would be more accurate.  There is the groan of labor, the sound of the mother’s heartbeat, going headfirst down the birthing canal, and emerging into light. In the “real” world some of the imagery implies the possibility of a plane crash at sea and being swept ashore unconscious and only half-alive.  So, a journey back to life.  

Whatever the case may be the process of writing stories can be a kind of free association where connections are being made and understanding approached but only in part with some of it coming into conscious awareness when reading it at a later date and not necessarily during the writing process itself.  It’s like a gift that keeps on giving.

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