Notes on Dhalgren, Chapter 7: The Anathemata: a Plague Journal

The condition of paranoia is one in which meaning is attributed to arbitrary occurrences, disparate elements are tied conspiratorially together, and patterns are superimposed onto chaos. This is a state that is somewhat intrinsic to the way in which the human psyche works. Meaning is generally understood to be ephemeral; it is not something that has inherent existence in any one thing or another. Rather it is imposed, a matter of interpretation. The mind has always had a tendency to contextualize all signals. Chaos is not permitted in the human psyche. The soul deprived of meaning simply creates meaning of its own; this is true in both for the artist and the paranoiac, and no less for the most vulgar among us.

Literature bears much in common with mental illness. The reader is compelled to draw connections between disparate events and feelings, to become convinced that a higher order exists within the variety of the narrative, and to seek some grand solution to the matter. Perhaps the reader, while immersed in the story, even feels that they are just on the verge of grasping that solution. Kidd explains as much during his psychiatric evaluation with Madame Brown as he glances uneasily at the scar on her leg, noting again the chain she bears as he fingers his own.

“When I was in the hospital - “ remembering, I smiled – “I used to have a friend who’d say: ‘When you’re paranoid, everything makes sense.’ But that’s not quite it. It’s that all sorts of things you know don’t relate suddenly have the air of things that do. Everything you look at seems just an inch away from its place in a perfectly clear pattern.”

The very motifs that appear in both narrative and in mental illness are also present in the initiatory ordeal. In fact, the whole of the book might be considered as an extended initiation in which Kidd plays the parts of both initiate and Hierophant. Kidd’s quest for the Lost Word may be taken also as the journey to adulthood, roughly taking the form of the Ouroboros in much the same way as does Finnegan’s Wake.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s all just meaningless after all. Delany certainly seems to take his pleasure in walking the knife edge between meaning and chaos. We are presented, within the depths of the final chapter, with a string of nonsense phrases from Kidd’s journal. About halfway through the journal entry in question we find the phrase, “I have come to wound the autumnal city”, suggesting that all of the meaning which we have attributed to this cryptic proclamation may be mistaken, that the phrase is simply the result of free-association after all, as meaningless as any of the epithets which surround it (“Pavement sausages split; the cabbage remembers. […] Fondle my noodle, love my dog. […] Pentacle pie in hunger city…”)

Several among the artists of the avant-garde over the last century (the anathematized) have attempted to escape the bounds of the narrative art. Some have attempted to capture the dizzying chaos of life, while others have striven to reach beyond all that we know and all that we are. While the avant-garde has often succeeded at providing a change in perspective for the reader or viewer, it has never quite managed to destroy the classical techniques against which it has striven. It has failed to wound the autumnal city. The human psyche cannot escape its own context, its own tendency to endow all that it encounters with meaning, to tie the sensory data that is presented to it into some sort of pattern. Our experience is all bound up with the process of interpretation, leaving us powerless to perceive the naked truth of the matter. The truth is that we do not perceive the world directly, but rather through a series of mirrors, prisms and lenses of our own making.

Within the space of seven rambling chapters, making liberal use of great beauty and banality, explicit sex and violence, long drifts of unnavigable ruin amidst the shifting streets of a hostile city, Delany has shown us, by way of example, a ubiquitous governing principal which regulates all signals, and to which we are inextricably bound. It is up to us to decide whether we wish to hide behind this principal, to use it as a weapon, or wield it as a tool, whether we wish to take our place in the endless narrative as victim, oppressor, or initiate.

“Pray with me! Pray! Pray that this city is the one, pure, logical space from which, without being a poet or a god, we can all actually leave if – what?”

Notes on Dhalgren, Chapter 6: Palimpsest

A palimpsest is a piece of writing (commonly – though the term is sometimes used to refer to other media, even architecture) which has been written over an older text, such that at least some of the previous text can be detected. It is a blending of past and present, often unintentional, as the past bleeds through the text that was intended to obliterate it. All narrative necessarily partakes of this dynamic, building as it does on previously established themes, cultural constructs, and the personal experiences of the narrator among other things. The avant-garde, especially insomuch as it tends to attempt a break with past forms, is palimpsestic in nature. It cannot escape its roots no matter how hard it tries, and its struggles merely bind it more tightly to its origins.

Dhalgren often reads like a stochastic mixture of pulp and literature, never quite settling comfortably into any particular genre, long passages drifting unsteadily in no discernible direction, having the same disregard for narrative formality that we find in our own lives, yet revealing a common set of themes in a manner which marks the difference between life and art. The book dispenses with narrative tropes, yet embraces them in more subtle ways. It is almost as if Delany were trying to demonstrate the fact that there is no escape from traditional notions of theme and recurrence in art.

In this chapter, Kidd finds a warehouse filled with the very objects that have most mystified, identified, and transformed him throughout the story: boxes of mirror/prism/lens chains, animal light balls, brass orchids and red eyes. These objects, endowed with significance and power, would seem to be reduced to commonplace novelties, shattering any trace of meaning within Kidd’s mind.

On the other hand, they may be seen as props to be used in a sort of initiation. Initiatory props have no significance outside of their ritual context, yet within that context they contain great transformative power. A sheaf of wheat, commonplace in itself, was said to be shown to initiates at the climax of the Eleusinian Mysteries, resulting in cathartic transformation. It is as if Kidd has been engaged thus far in a ritual reenactment of the Masonic search for the lost Word. He has now been shown the holy of holies, shattering his illusions and suggesting perhaps that his Word is just a common name after all. But is this the final revelation, or is there more to come? Will further revelations reverse the meaning of this mystery as this one has done to those which were revealed before it? Kidd wonders briefly if he will forget the incidence, but ultimately acknowledges that it has left a mark on him: “More likely it is one of those things that I will never be able to speak of, and never forget.” It is worth noting that Kidd steals a brass orchid from this holy chamber, as he were Mercury, the lord of thieves, or perhaps Prometheus stealing one last flame from heaven.

The endowing of an ordinary object with special power based on the context in which it is found relates again to the theme of the palimpsest. Delany seems to take delight in ambiguity – is the warehouse a Holy Temple of the Mysteries masquerading as a common building, or is it the other way around? Is the chain an initiatory mark or a simple decoration? Meaning is given and taken away in layers, each additional layer bearing in some way the significance or lack thereof of all of the layers beneath it. We are being shown, as in an initiatory drama, to find the hidden meaning inherent in our own lives and to descry the themes which dominate our existence, to find our own lost Word, and yet always to beware of regarding anything as absolute, to never be so rigid in our perceptions as to deny the possibility that life is meaningless after all.

Notes on Dhalgren, Chapter 5: Creatures of Light and Darkness

To wound the autumnal city is to upset the balance between light and darkness.

The themes of light and darkness run light a thread throughout every aspect of the book. A mirror is quite meaningless, after all, without any light to reflect. The same holds true for a lens or a prism, and light is defined by darkness.

In the creation myth recounted in Genesis, the stellar luminaries of the sun and moon divide the night from the day. In Bellona their enlarged twins loom large in the heavens and are adopted by its citizens as part of the city’s mythology. George is associated with the monstrous moon, the raw force of unrestrained sexuality. Countering this is the civilizing force of June, who circles around George like the moon ought to circle around the sun, but in Bellona all things are skewed and many things reversed. June doesn’t represent the established order so much as that which is entrenched within it, and it doesn’t seem quite right that she should be associated with the gigantic sun that strikes terror into the hearts of the inhabitants of the city (excepting Kidd). June, her name designating the month of summer solstice but rhyming with “moon”, seems more to indicate the moon’s moon, a satellite circling a satellite, not so much George’s consort as his follower. George’s true consort is Bellona Herself, and it is She who appears in the sky as a tremendous blazing light which stirs panic amongst the natives, just as it is She who sets the buildings afire, and She who brings the bombardment that finally causes Kidd to leave the city.

“But the arcane and unspoken name of what rose on this so extraordinary day, for which George is only consort, that alone will free you from this city!”

If the solar force, typically associated with light, represents poetic vision in both its creative and destructive aspects, the darker lunar force is more visceral, animal, and immediate. It is the experience of raw sexuality and violent impulse. Kidd maintains a foot in both worlds. He is truly a creature of light and darkness.  This is true even in the color of his skin (people generally assume that he’s of Native American descent). Part of the theme indicated by this particular chapter title is concerned with cultural assumptions regarding race, about which there is so much to say that it almost requires another set of essays to explore in full. Ambiguity is liberally employed to highlight the reader’s own preconceptions about race and culture.

The interplay of light and darkness is further demonstrated by the Scorpions, who hide themselves with light forms, veiling their bodies with those of animals. The shields used by the scorpions have little to do with the poet’s shield referred to by Newboy. Rather, these shields are employed to conceal instead of reveal. They form darkness out of light. If Calkins has a garden for each month, the Scorpions are like a wayward zodiac, forever circling around the house on the top of the hill, never allowed to enter except but once during the celebration for the publication of Kidd’s book of poems. The celebration itself appears to be a sort of equinox in which the light and the dark are brought together in equal measure. Again, there is a sense of ambiguity – is it the Scorpions or Calkins and crew who represent the darkness here? The Scorpions operate with little to no foresight, bound to their instincts as they drift rudderless along the shifting tides of the city of chaos. On the other hand, they are the true eyes and ears of the city, while Calkins serves as a false prophet of sorts, a beacon of misinformation desperately trying to maintain his hold over the minds of the populace.

The establishment and the counter-culture each maintain a hold on certain aspects of the light, while yet grasping at the parts they cannot quite reach. Both seem plunged, in equal measure, into their own particular darkness. Kidd appears to play the part of the wounded hero (a cultural icon who did indeed manage to manifest enough to make a discernible difference in the latter half of the 1960s). He has come to wound the Autumnal city, to shift the balance of light and darkness fortuitously against those who seek to control the flow of information so as to impose rigid limitations upon the culture. Or perhaps he’s simply another aimless wanderer, more at effect to the vacillations and unpredictability of the city that at any sort of cause, having as little say in the shifts of balance between light and darkness as the reader has in the events that occur throughout the course of the narrative. 

Notes on Dhalgren, Chapter 4: In Time of Plague

Several parallels are drawn throughout the book between the nature of narrative and the experience of various types of mental illness. The fourth chapter is very much tied to the seventh (The Anathemata: A Plague Journal). The former explores the theme of mental illness insomuch as it relates to narrative, while the latter is more focused on narrative as it relates to mental illness.

The reference to ‘time’ in the chapter title refers, among other things, to Kidd’s tendency to lose significant stretches of time. Kidd seems to be entirely absent during the spaces of time which he has lost. Nobody sees or hears from him during these periods. It is as if he has simply vanished for a time, then re-appeared again some time afterward.

Kidd’s tendency to lose time is explicitly referred to as an illness in the book. Perhaps he’s simply experiencing a break in the narrative, a section of the story in which he doesn’t appear. In any story, there are times in which one character or another ceases to exist. The story follows other characters or jumps to a different time, and the character in question perhaps reappears later in the story. Can the character be said to persist when they are not being followed by the narrative, especially if there is no indication of what the character was up to during that time? A character in such a circumstance seems to exist in a kind of limbo. If something of this nature were to happen to a person in the outer world, a real person as opposed to a character in a story, their experience (or lack thereof) might resemble Kidd’s.

It seems that Delany may have endowed his protagonist with extra-narrative tendencies and abilities. Instead of receiving god-like powers, the character who has received these gifts is crippled by them, and can only relate to them as a sort of illness.

Somewhere in the middle of the fourth chapter, Kidd is doing a run on the shopping mall with several members of the Scorpions. At one point he gazes into a mirror and appears to see Delany himself reflected therein. The mystical experience of the created looking upon the face of its creator is deflated, for Kidd is merely confused by this and fails to attribute any special significance to the apparition. The symbol of the mirror is one of the main motifs of the book, and it’s clear that many of Kidd’s experiences are drawn from various points in Delany’s life, the former mirroring the latter. On the other hand, maybe the object through which Kidd and Delaney gaze upon each other isn’t a mirror at all but a lens. Or maybe it’s a prism, dividing a single light into the twin poles of creator and created, that each may be analyzed independently of the other.

Of further interest is the fact that Delany’s image in the mirror seems to be holding Kidd’s notebook. The notebook itself, containing as it does several of Kidd’s own thoughts, seems to have somehow found its way into the story from the outer world. The notebook seems to act almost as if it were a power object or fetish of some sort, bestowing upon Kidd his unasked for powers. Perhaps it is the very means of his ‘illness’. Delany is a cruel god to bestow such gifts on his creation. But then the gift of poetry is classically bound with some sort of affliction, so much so that it is often said to be an infernal rather than a divine gift.

The time of the plague, of course, refers also to the span of time during which Bellona is afflicted. At some point Bellona was presumably a relatively normal city. The constant fog that permeates the city is perhaps of the same nature as that of Kidd’s absent periods. The stars, those lights in the heavens which orient the traveler and aid in navigation, are almost entirely blotted out by clouds and smoke. It is impossible to see anything at a distance other than vague forms. It is this that allows the city to shift and re-arrange its streets and byways, for what is not known cannot me mapped or charted. Even when one is afforded a view of the city from an elevated place, whole stretches of it are blotted and obscured, the flare of burning buildings through the mist and smoke serve as wayward stars in an inverted night sky that drifts and strays according to no known plan or structure.

“The night? What of it. It is filled with bestial watchmen, travelling the extremities of the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen, constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with dark.”

Notes on Dhalgren, Chapter 3: House of the Ax

The name of the building that the Richards occupy, and with which much of the 3^rd chapter is concerned, is The Labry Apartments. This bears a close resemblance to the word labrys, which is the term for a symmetrical double-headed axe which was originally found in Crete. The labrys is considered to be one of the oldest symbols of Greek civilization (it’s also curiously known as a “bipennis”).

The palace of Knossos, thought to be the place of the labyrinth in which Theseus fought the minotaur, was known as “The House of the Double Axe”. The palace was said to be made up of five great complexes of labyrinthine complexity, comprised of over one 1500 rooms. Deep within this network of buildings was hidden the ritual center. (Interestingly, Calkins’ complex has five towers in the back for servants, of which there are said to be fifteen).

“He had a momentary image of all these walls on pivots controlled by subterranean machines, so that, after he had passed, they might suddenly swing to face another direction, parting at this corner, joining now at that one, like a great maze – forever adjustable, therefore unlearnable – “

The theme of the labyrinth also calls to mind that of the quest. Kidd is, willingly or otherwise, immersed in a quest to find his lost name. This very much mirrors the Masonic quest involving the discovery of the lost Word. The name, as with the Word, would theoretically be found at the center of the labyrinth, which represents the end of the quest. Bellona presents itself as a labyrinth, with its shifting geography and seeming lack of consistency, and thus Kidd wanders through the city streets and living spaces. The thread he lays down, mirroring that of Ariadne who accompanied Theseus on his quest, is his poetry, written on the unused pages of the journal. It must be observed that he does indeed find his way back out of the maze by the end of the book. It seems that the journal contains parts of the book Dhalgren, offered to us perhaps as a thread by which to find our way back from the inner depths of the novel.

Later on in the book, in the final chapter, Kidd finds himself daydreaming while in the midst of orgasm. He pictures himself holding hands with someone, and “running among leafless trees laced with moonlight while the person behind me kept repeating: ‘…Grendal, Grendal, Grendal…” A short while later Kidd realizes that he’d arranged the syllables the wrong way. That the word that he’d heard repeated over and over was “Dhalgren”.  At this point in the book, it seems quite feasible that Kidd is in fact William Dhalgren, whose name appears listed among several others in the journal.

Several parallels exist between the story of Beowulf and Grendal and that of Theseus and the minotaur. The stories of Beowulf and Theseus each involve a character who comes to the aid of a city that is not the city in which he lives, and which is menaced by a mysterious beast. Each cross a body of water; Beowulf crosses a body of water to get to Denmark, and Theseus crosses the Aegean to get to the minotaur’s labyrinth. Beowulf swipes a magic sword from the treasury of Grendal’s mother and uses it to kill her as well as her wounded son. Theseus is directed, by his mother, to reclaim the sword of his father from beneath a stone as his birthright. Both heroes use their weapon to decapitate their enemy.

Kidd resembles both Theseus and Beowulf. The optical chain, found in a cave upon a rock ledge, is his weapon. With this weapon, Kidd defends the wasted city by analyzing the nature of the light which has destroyed it, as well as by reflecting that light and focusing it through a series of lenses.

Later on in the book it is strongly suggested that Kidd is not Dhalgren at all, that William Dhalgren is a reporter working for Calkins. Dhalgren as the reporter represents the enemy. Where Kidd allows himself to descend right down into the mud and muck of the labyrinth, grappling with it in all of its gritty chaos, the reporter chooses to stand back in an attempt to understand the city from afar. Kidd becomes directly involved with the light, using poetry not only in order to represent it in all of its rawness, but also to come to terms with it himself. The reporter, conversely, attempts to confine the light to ‘facts’, eschewing both poetry and direct experience. Kidd is the savage hero, and the reporter the civilized beast. Kidd’s poetry is intended as a wound to the engine of distortion presented by the press, which, in its quest for facts, distorts and ultimately loses touch with the true nature of the light of experience.

On second thought, perhaps Kidd is closer in nature to the beast. He has come to wound the city after all, not to defend it. Both Theseus and Beowulf become kings after having defeated their enemy. Beowulf, after defeating Grendal, returns to Geatland and there becomes the Lord of the Geats. Theseus, after defeating the minotaur, becomes the king of Athens. The name Theseus is thought to be descended from a Greek root word meaning “institution”. Kidd is certainly depicted as the enemy of institutions. Much of the book in fact is built upon the tension between the roles of Kidd and Calkins. The newspaper is the largest institution in Bellona, and Calkins clearly considers himself owner and king of the city. Kidd, on the other hand, quickly becomes somewhat of a legend, and is naturally adopted as the leader of the scorpions (ironically, since each member of the scorpions choses an iconic name, whereas Kidd’s has been given to him). Kidd is arguably the true, if unintentional, king of Bellona.

The ambiguity between hero and villain, king and usurper, outlaw and institution, is one of the keys by which to navigate the book, which itself appears as a labyrinth with seven centers instead of one.

“Like everything else in town, you just hear about it until it bumps into you. You have to put yourself at the mercy of the geography, and hope the down-hills and up-hills, working propitiously with how much you feel like fighting and how much you feel like accepting, manage to get you there. You’ll find it eventually.” 

Notes on Dhalgren, Chapter 2: The Ruins of Morning

Bellona is a city in ruins, a place in which civilization has collapsed. There are no laws, no official agencies, no government of any type. Even the laws of nature don’t run a stable course, the sun and moon behave erratically and the stars overhead are blotted out by smoke and fog. This is a place of total freedom. There are no guidelines, no social order, no justice. The days and months and years revolve upon the whim of Calkins, self-proclaimed overseer of the city, who himself seems to be completely out of touch with the people in it, secluding himself as he does within his mansion.

Every character in the book responds to the freedom of Bellona in a different way. Some keep to themselves, others form groups. Some are violent, others promiscuous. Some, such as the Richards, attempt to carry on as if nothing had happened. What meaning is to be found in the autumnal ruins must be created by the city’s inhabitants, and I think herein lies the key to the theme denoted by the title of the second chapter – when the rules and conventions by which we live fall away, what do we make of the wreckage?

The book itself is subject to this same freedom. It is unrestrained by the conventions of standard plot and narrative. Setting, exposition, central conflict, climax, resolution - all of these things have been laid to waste. The novel unfolds amidst the ruins of its elements. The book is the Bellona and Bellona is the book. As readers, we are left to find meaning amongst the wreckage in much the same way as are the city’s inhabitants.

Discerning meaning from chaos is the method of the diviner. The elements of chance and randomness in divination enable the fortuitous conjunction of intuition and narrative by which the unknown may be brought into greater light. The city of Bellona, and hence Dhalgren as a book, resembles a deck of tarot cards which has been shuffled. What meaning is to be found therein is up to the diviner, who must assemble the impressions laid before them into a coherent story.

This is not to say that there is no inherent meaning in the book. Rather, one of the methods by which the book is made to reveal itself is through the use of chance or randomness. This level of meaning is not entirely under the control of the author (or the reader, for that matter). There is nothing so chaotic as to completely eschew meaning. The human psyche is gifted with an amazing capacity to find a coherent narrative in anything. By presenting us with a city, and a book, in ruins, Delany has given us a rich field of chaos from which to derive something of worth that he as author could not provide in its entirety on his own.

The title of the second chapter of Dhalgren is a little tricky. I prefer to think that it refers to an event that occurred in the morning, leaving the city in ruins. An alternative would suggest that the ruins are found in the morning, and that they are presumably the result of a cataclysm that occurred in the night. The former interpretation suggests that it was none other than the rising of the sun, the shining of a devastating light, that wreaked havoc upon the city.

Imagine a city blinded by the light of greater awareness. The light slowly fades, but nobody can forget what they had seen. Most of the cities inhabitants leave town in an effort to forget the light and get on with their normal lives. Those that stay can never live the way they’d lived before. They are changed through and through. What remains of the city may be the ruins of morning, the unalterable result of the cataclysm of sunrise. 

Notes on Dhalgren, Chapter 1: Prism, Mirror, Lens

Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren has been called “a riddle that was never meant to be solved.” I would contend that any book that has a “solution” is somewhat shallow. Literature at its best reveals depths of mystery in which any given solution merely gives way to greater depths. Mystery creates a debt which can only be repaid (though never in full) by engaging with the questions which it raises. In such engagement do we find meaning, the debt and its repayment being mere devices which serve to facilitate the art.

Seven distinct themes seem to run like rivers through Delany’s book. These themes are indicated by the chapter titles. The themes are interrelated, yet each stands on its own. Each is highlighted in its particular chapter, yet is explored throughout the whole of the book.

The chapters are as follows:

I           Prism, Mirror, Lens

II         The Ruins of Morning

III        House of the Ax

IV        In Time of Plague

V         Creatures of Light and Darkness

VI        Palimpsest

VII      The Anathemata: A Plague Journal

Somewhere in the depths of the 3rd chapter, the poet Newboy pontificates upon the “shield of the poet” as he calls it. On one side of the shield is written “be true to your art so that you can be true to yourself”, and on the other, “be true to yourself so that you can be true to your art”. The shield, he says, first appears as a mirror, then becomes a lens, and then a prism. So does the poet’s narcissism slowly transform into the means of observation, at length refining into an instrument by which the very nature of light itself may be analyzed.

In the title of the first chapter, it is the prism which comes first. A prism divides light into seven particular rays. It is fitting that the prism is indicated first in the chapter title, as the table of contents is the first thing in the book that the reader encounters. Delany seems to indicate that the seven themes that run throughout the book each have their source in a single light, but, in order to analyze the nature of that light, it must first be broken down into its constituent parts so that each part may be understood independent of the rest.

After determining and naming the components into which the light has been divided, it is indicated that this light will serve as a mirror. The mirror is intended to reflect the image not only of the reader and of the author, but also of the main character. After all, having forgotten his name, he is not without need of one. Lastly, the light will serve as a lens through which to see not only ourselves but something of the world in which we live.

Thus is the intent of the book encapsulated in three simple words. The fact that the main character (we’ll call him Kidd) has forgotten his name makes him an appropriate mirror for the reader. It’s easier to identify with a character that has no official name, just as it’s easier to identify with a simple image than it is with a complex image. The lack of particularity and distinction allow us to project our own image upon the ambiguity. The fact that Kidd is bisexual (and androgynously monikered) may be an attempt to allow readers of both sexes to identify, at least to some degree, with this character.

A river, reminiscent of the river Lethe, runs along the border of Bellona. A river makes a lousy mirror. The waters are ever flowing and constantly changing, unlike a pond who’s waters offer a still surface for reflection. This river, appearing as it does at the beginning and end of the book, calls to mind the first sentence of Finnegan’s Wake, which is wrapped around from the end: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

The first sentence of the first chapter of Dhalgren, as with the Wake, is pregnant with a thousand meanings: “to wound the autumnal city.” Strangely, the first sentence doesn’t wrap around so perfectly with the last, “I have come to”. The ‘to’ is repeated. Is this a pun on ‘to’ and ‘two’? The result of the ‘wound’? A typo? It seems somehow fitting that the end of the book would jar ever so slightly with the beginning.

A city in the autumn of its years is a city who’s time is nearly up. Bellona is the name of a Greek Goddess who is also called the waster of cities. She has come to wound, indeed. Autumn is also the time of the equinox, a time when light and darkness are equal. After the autumnal equinox the light descends toward the time of greatest darkness in winter. Both aspects of autumn will be explored in greater depth in the analysis of the remaining themes.