The Reason for the Darkness of the Night by John Tresch

Author:John Tresch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

This preference for the strange, unexpected, novel, or seemingly inharmonious would be one of Poe’s decisive contributions to modernist aesthetics.

Poe’s questions about the design underwriting nature intersected with his musings on the tremendous power of words. He described “experiments” he undertook at the limits of waking consciousness, alluding to a “class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language.” These mental phenomena arise only when the soul is in a state “of most intense tranquility,” in those “points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams”—when he is “upon the very brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so.” He described his attempts to bring back lucid reports from this borderland: “Now, so entire is my faith in the power of words, that, at times, I have believed it possible to embody even the evanescence of fancies such as I have attempted to describe.”

His faith in the power of words went further. Charles Babbage, in his provocative Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, developed the implications of the claim in modern physics that every act and motion makes a “permanent Impression” through its impact on the ether: the air becomes a recording device, “one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or even whispered.” Babbage, an abolitionist, illustrated this notion with a gruesome anecdote taken from court reports of a slave trader who forced his human cargo overboard; Babbage imagined a record of the victims’ cries inscribed on the ether, a permanent witness to his sin.

Poe ran with Babbage’s sublime suggestion in a spirit colloquy, “The Power of Words.” In it, two spirits discuss the ether, that “great medium of creation”; they observe, like Babbage, that the vibrations from every act, from every sound, leave a physical trace. As proof, one of the angels points out a “wild star”—a planet newly formed by the angel’s tears: its “brilliant flowers are the dearest of all unfulfilled dreams,” and its “raging volcanoes are the passions of the most turbulent and unhallowed of hearts.” Through words and tears, thought and feeling literally impress themselves upon matter. They alter the course of nature’s development, forging and remaking worlds.

Just as in the metaphysics sketched in “Mesmeric Revelation,” and the experiment in “Valdemar,” Poe was extending factual, material processes to the point at which they blurred into the speculative, ethereal, and spiritual, teasing life and thought beyond their known limits. Challenging simplistic understandings of design, he was chasing the edge of creation, where “unthought-like thoughts” and unstable, formless entities might be converted into felt and spoken things.

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