Truth & Darkness

Truth and darkness
On Wednesday night I had dinner in the dark, at dans la noir, courtesy of the mind gym. It was an interesting evening.
There was a lot of preliminary claptrap to the effect that we would gain some insight into how it is to be a blind person: I suspect that sitting in the dark for two hours whilst waited on by blind waiters does not really compare in any way to life as a blind person. There is the obvious point that we were all sighted people, experiencing sightlessness as bourgeois experimentation, but more importantly I knew all the people around me were in the same position. My companions included editors from the daily mail, the times, assorted journalists and significant learning people (if that isn't a contradiction in terms).
It was utterly, completely pitch dark in there. We were guided through a series of curtains with hands on each others' shoulders, finding ourselves suddenly and disconcertingly seated in an undefined space, populated by voices to which we could not assign a face. I felt sick and thought I might have to leave.
Superficially the challenge was to figure out what we were eating - there was a quiz to this effect following the meal and lots of trepidatious patting of sticky foodstuffs. But for me the real discovery was existential: relating to people in the dark changed my perception of myself and of our relationships quite profoundly.
Firstly there was the question of identity: our space was no longer three dimensional - not even two dimensional. There was only the interplay of voices, and in this exchange it was possible to doubt which of the voices one 'was' - or even what this meant. Really, to doubt which voice I was. You and I incorporate more than one voice in our own everyday thinking, but in the darkness what was clear to me was how arbitrary the sense of identification with one voice rather than another was. Which was my voice? There were simply voices - I'm not sure I really 'owned' any of them - the only remaining clue to identity was the physical sensation of utterance.
And then there was the question of closeness - that sense of oneself as both discrete and related in physical space. In the darkness some of us felt pitifully close, achieving something that our miserably elucidated lives prohibited. There was no space between us, no personal space to be defended or intruded upon. It was a dream-like intimacy, almost a feeling of immortality - each of us rendered as warm voices, all too human, in a shared opening - not the discrete clearings, the Dasein of Heidegger - but a directness of contact mediated by absence; absence of the space that separates us.
And the darkness was truly revealing: the absolute absence of light seemed to give our voices a poetic quality - a beauty brought about by the lack of distractions - in just the same way that simple words spaced carefully on a page, like a Larkin poem, may take on a fresh charm our voices traced rich forms in the warm air. Voices variously crisp like a dry white wine, or smooth and rich like Chianti.
It was easier to talk, I felt - people attended so much more carefully, and I could devote more of my mind to what I was saying rather than how I was appearing - those tedious negotiations with eye-contact, personal space, gestures etc.
Overall, then, a point that I will not be the first to remark upon: that light plays a central role in our understanding of truth - of who we are, who others are and how it is with the world.
Not everybody felt the same way. I am a radio listener - I don't watch television. But I wondered if there was something of a spectrum of attitudes along these lines: how addicted are we to visual stimulation? People's ability to converse, to follow a train of thought has certainly been eroded in recent years - perhaps these are the people who are most afraid of the dark.