dark days poetry

Picture by Georg Gatsas

Inspired in my days of darkness from the land of Werner Herzog, I would like to share this thread of poetry written by Alexandra Blätter describing the mood for "process dark", the exhibition she curated...

A dark scene is holding court. Its current capital city is New York. 

The Anglo-Saxon world is – and always has been – so very much darker than the rest of the world. Of course, the French have also had their dark and even dismal phases, but over a century has run its course since then. The Germans, the Scandinavians, the Dutch, the central and southern Europeans have probably never had it – this propensity for an all-embracing melancholy.

In Eastern Europe, the Russians have no doubts cultivated their own brand of devotion to darkness but nothing of the kind has penetrated our climes via dark Asians, dark Africans or dark South Americans. That makes the Anglo-Saxons veritable kings and queens of darkness.

Dark was La Belle Dame sans Merci, black romanticism, the Romantic Agony, Lou Reed at his best, Arthur Rimbaud and his colleagues, Iggy & the Stooges, Kurt Cobain and others. Caspar David Friedrich is probably a romantic but not necessarily dark. If at all, it would more likely be Gustave Moreau or Gabriele D’Annunzio (Italian, yes, but an exception), Lord Byron or August C. Swinburne. Possibly also Bas Jan Ader, Dutch expatriate and American-by choice, metaphorically balancing on the brink of the abyss in his films and photographs. On the verge of the abyss, there is something lustrous, mighty and especially seductive about dark. Except that contemporary figures are less inclined to venture beyond the abyss; instead they skillfully skirt around the danger zone, an agenda also embodied by the no longer fledgling New York (art) commune represented here.

Dark is a state of mind. Not necessarily black, but certainly offbeat; dark – unconventional and shady – also walks abroad in the twilight zone. Dark feels good in the vicinity of dopey narcotics. Opium and absinthe are classics; Coke and viagra cocktails are more contemporary. Symbols are legion: death’s heads and other tattoes, black leather coats and sunglasses, peachy skin and additional clichés. Laughing is not good, dark rings around the eyes are much more authentic, fat won’t do, the emaciated look is more appropriate (Franz Kafka – German, yes, but an exception – was supposedly anorexic) and casting a melancholy eye on the world-at-large right on target. 

Dark is a state of mind, the above-mentioned ingredients its unmistakable symptoms.