All This Darkness That Lay Ahead

Literary critic Hugh Wright delivered in a thesis at Princeton during one of his most celebrated lectures that the truest art comes from the mystery of death, as only absolute life in its purest form can spawn from such darkness.

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In February of 1939, the blues singer Minister Silver Hughes was shot in the heart while playing at a dive bar in Jefferson, Mississippi and died eighteen hours later in his mother’s house while a veterinarian tended to his wounds.

While on his deathbed, a song collector from the Library of Congress came to record him play one last song. It is said that the Minister made up the final song on the spot.

Its last word cannot be clearly deciphered. He sings, “The voice rang and echoed of thunder—Come hither unto the meadows/shadows.”

He either sings ‘meadows’ or ‘shadows’. Each word clearly indicates an entirely different theme.

The song itself seems to be a passage unto another world. You can hear the strings tether and bend like candles being lit and his own voice haunts the song as it were the recording of a ghost. He hums the outro—either as a gospel singer or demented soul lost at sea.

It transports you unto the ship where he steers. The destination is either a garden or darkness and is impossible to know which.

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The painter Virgil Day’s masterpiece is considered “Chickamauga,” where he depicts in detrimental detail the dying faces of dozens of Union and Confederate soldiers on the battlefield.

Each soldier Day painted was real, and really died that. Each not yet twenty years old.

Overhead hang clouds shaped as Greek gods and constellations referencing imagery of the New Testsment. The soldiers look up into the night. What are they looking at, I always wondered. It haunts me. What do they whisper into the eternal night.

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One of my favorite poets died of liver failure while on a reading tour in a hotel bath tub. He had a tray of paper and a pencil where he wrote down his final words. They were, “All this darkness that lay ahead…”

It is apparent when looking at the original document that he intended to write something more, some revelation about this world and a world to come, but, obviously died mid-sentence, leaving the reader to agonize forever what comes next.

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I have a recurring dream where I’m being brought to hang in some town in the old west.

There’s the deputy sheriff there to throw a black mask over me before they lower the gallows and a gathering of a hundred some-odd folks who have paid money to bare witness to it. They are excited to see me die.

I see some beautiful eyes out there. I see clouds. Birds. A breeze whispers across my body, casting waves of chills through me. It almost fills like ecstasy.

I am always just fixing to speak my final words on earth before I wake up.