Dark night of the soul is a metaphor used by San Juan de la Cruz in a poem with the same name that defines one of the darkest stages in the spiritual awakening of a person. This awakening is shared by different religions and mystical theologies. It is one of the most devastating, sad and brutal experiences a human being can experience, and it takes you through a long process of extreme abandonment, loneliness, despair, self-repulsion and sometimes repugnance towards things you found enjoyable before, things that previously defined you, things you were comfortable with, or things that belonged to you.
It is like a depression, but much more than that: the person who is struggling with a Dark Night of the Soul is above all feeling a darkness that is coming from his/her gloomiest and deepest miseries. A darkness that grows from the deepest areas of your being.
My Dark Night of the Soul started when I got very, very sick about 2 years ago. I had a feeling of being poisoned, and I indeed though I could have become intoxicated with something: a chemical at work, or something I ate in very bad conditions. That poison was devouring not only my body, but also my soul. While the feeling advanced, I watched myself and realized the poison didn’t come from the outside world, but rather from myself. In fact, I had a medical diagnosis, and I discovered I had an autoimmune disease.
The illness that my own body had created was gobbling me up and devouring me, wearing me down to the point that I thought it was going to kill me in one way or another. I thought that the poison in my body and soul was going to end with my life or make me reach a point in which I couldn’t stand the suffering anymore and take the decision to take my life.
The Dark Night of the Soul is a long journey. For me, it took one year and a half. During that period, my body, my mind and my soul did not stop struggling and fighting one battle after the other without rest or quiet time in between. Kit was such an exhausting period, that I was left knackered in bed for weeks. I felt increasingly weak, sad, drained, and desolated. In many occasions I thought I was not going to survive that intensity, that I was going to be consumed by the darkness, that my body and my mind would not overcome it because everyone has a limit in terms of physical, mental and spiritual pain, and that I was going to just disconnect whenever that limit were to be reached.
On the other hand, I began to fantasize somehow about the quiet space that death could provide me: the suffering was so intense that I really wanted it to finish it all, in order to find rest and light.
Some people, when they have these kind of experiences, they say that inside them they knew that it was all for a good purpose, that they knew there was something useful about it, something they needed to learn or any other good purpose. Not in my case. I was not aware I was in any kind of process, I didn’t feel any resolution about it, and I don’t say this from an excess of arrogance. I am not the kind of person that cannot see anything wrong or corrupt inside her and I am always open to change. I was just very confused, I didn’t know what was happening to me and, to be honest, I didn’t think there was any happy ending on all that suffering. I only previewed further deterioration. My process, instead of taking me to any kind of catharsis, relief or awakening, was taking me, little by little, towards the end.
1 Omega, poem for the dead, the emerge of the monster.
"As the night is endless
when leaning on the sufferers.
There are ships desiring to be watched
so they can sink in peace
so they can sink in peace
so they can sink in peace
If every village had a siren
my heart would be in the shape of a shoe
Don't sob, be quiet,
To they do not feel us, to they do not feel us
I have a mercury glove
and another of silk, and another of silk.
The statues fell as
the great door was opened.
I will cut my hand off, I will cut my right hand off.
I have a glove of mercury,
of mercury and another of silk.
The statues fell as
the great door was opened
the great door was opened.
Acheans the blows,
Achaeans, for God!
That their wings are pulled off,
that their wings are pulled off,
of fatigue, the wings,
wings to my heart
As the bell tolled...
Don't sob, be quiet,
To they do not feel us, to they do not feel us
I have a mercury glove
and another of silk, and another of silk.
The statues fell as
the great door was opened.
The herb!
The herb!
You come here selling flowers,
you come here selling flowers,
yours are yellow,
mine in all colors."
00:00 A guitar distortion and the echoes of voices drag you far down towards to a desolate dark scenery where I find myself dreaming in total solitude, observing the destruction of the whole world which was once rich and prosperous. I link the first part of this song with a sonorous metaphor that could be the beginning of my physical end, the end of my body, Alfa, which takes me down the path towards the deterioration of the skin that would finally lead me to the end, to the death, to the Omega.
01:12 The lyrics are saying:
“There are ships desiring to be watched so they can sink in peace”
I felt exactly like that at that moment, like a broken drifting ship, with no more stamina o resilience, hopeless, doomed to collapse in total solitude, waiting for some company in all that pain and death process, even if It was only in the distance, and just to feel some release at the end.
03:20 “The statues fell as the great door was opened” For me, this is like realizing of something you never thought, something that was part of you, deep inside yourself, norms and established traditions or cultural attitudes, truths I usually took as immovable and a break from everything in a very dramatic way. Breaking the tradition and the rules, took my world apart and all my absolute truths broke into pieces and blew everything I thought was my base and my roots.
There was a recurring and illustrative dream I had during the first part of this process every time I listened to this song or every time I thought about it. It was like observing me from the outside in third person, in a trip through the sea in a precarious boat, where I’m sailing and arriving to the port of a city I recognize like a quite familiar place. I knew that city very well. I was entering with my canoa between the canals and I found the city on fire, in the middle of a war, and the colossal figures and buildings that represented before the grandiosity and the prosperity of a folk, were collapsing around me and falling down, broken into pieces. Those pieces, enormous like buildings, were impacting the water around me, shaking my canoa, shaking me, almost making me fall or to mush. Hopefully that never happened and I continued slowly, terrified of the danger, watching everything collapse. While everything is getting destroyed, there remained only death, destruction and shoutings, like background screams, darkness and desolation.
04:20 The song continues with a rum-based percussion rhythm that reminds me of the drums during the Andalusian holy week, when people play the funeral march that usually accompany the indicted to the execution. The track get intense and speeds up until it gets to the high breathless dizzying point. That point represents the emerge of the monster, with a rollercoaster of intensity and emotional ups and downs. Exactly like the process of my disease, it is a rollercoaster that increases, then stops, then the deterioration of the body starts to run fast again
07:11 “Don't sob, be quiet,
To they do not feel us,
to they do not feel us”
This sentence in the poem always put us in a war’s scene, like all the whole track looks:
Someone telling a story about being in the middle of a battlefield hiding from the enemy, trying to contain the sob behind the agony induced by the panic of the situation, because if the monster catches you sobbing, that could be the end of your life, and not only the end of your life but something worse: that monster can capture you, and this precludes sadistic torture. This has a powerful meaning: Repress your feeling, repress yourself so no one knows what you are going through because if they catch you that means endless suffering until your body and mind can stand it no more. The fear of the stigma about mental health makes you repress your feelings, and this makes you deteriorate faster because of the fear of rejection.
There is a sentence that represents something I was living for ages in a hidden way, something like a secret fight. At this point everything came out and I started to analyze the suffering that feeling gave me.
"Acheans the blows,
Achaeans, for God!
Because the fatigue,
their wings of my heart are pulled off."
For me (and I suspect for Lorca too) it’s a metaphor about the blows I felt from the Andalusian society, from my family and all my surroundings. Due to this blows, I had suppressed my sexual orientation, self-expression and sex-affective relations because they weren’t what the society expected from me: they were even disgusting, a lack of honor, and the reason why my family and the society in general made me suffer calamities as a form of payment for all the damage caused. It seems incredible that queer people still have the same feeling Lorca lived almost 100 years ago. In many cases Andalusía has never stopped living in La casa de Bernarda Alba, and I think we’re still living on it. This sentence is together with that drum simulating the blows we receive from society and the voice giving a shout to make stop it. Acheans for God! stop! Please stop! Because I just pulled off all that part of my life to don’t be a deshonor for my people never again.
All this, in addition to the feeling of rootlessness that I feel within the LGTBIQ+ collective in Scotland due to the xenophobia that characterizes it, negatively impacted the image that I had of myself. I really felt there was something wrong with me, that the fact of being a lesbian is something horrible wherever I go. I felt like a monster for society all over the world and this has caused me extreme suffering. The only thing that could release this suffering was to pull off all my sex-affective life and that was exactly what I did. Dead dogs don't bite.
Attention please to minute 7, second 43. Those who don't know this song must be prepared to face one of the most chilling and brutal moments of Flamenco, or Spanish music, or maybe music in general.
The musicians of the band baptized at that moment "the monster". The dancer Aurora Carbonell, the two singers, Soleá y Estrella Morente, the guitarist, Kiki Morente called it like that. In this moment when Morente broke into a howl, "The monster appeared" and he was on stage about to scream “
"You come here selling flowers,
you come here selling flowers,
yours are yellow,
mine in all colors."
Those who come selling flowers in Andalusia are the gypsies, sometimes they only sell flowers, others, rosemary, other olive branches’ baskets or crafts, sometimes they read the fortune and if some con artist catches you, they take your money without you noticing. Powerful, beautiful and wild caste. You come selling flowers, we don’t already know if you come from honesty or you are going to trick me, you come playing a game with me, we still don't know if your game is honest or you have something hidden. Your flowers are only one color, yellow, mine contain the rainbow.
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