Walk in the dark

Duration: a few seconds

Props: a dark room

Effect: disorientating

 

Suddenly it's pitch dark. Power cut, or sudden awakening, or attempt to avoid waking those who are asleep... The reason doesn't matter. You are walking in the dark. Preferbly without expecting to. No light to give your usual bearings as to obstacles and distances. With only your memory to guide you, you must cross a familiar room, your bedroom or your sitting room, in total darkness. What is worth exploring here are your moments of uncertainty. Your gropings seem to suggest that you don't know how to navigate the familiar space you've crossed a thousand times. how many steps are there between the bed and the door? Is there nothing between? Where's the arm of that chair? The corner of the bed? These reasuring places bristle suddenly with question marks.

The simplest movements become fraught with risk and perplexity. Worst of all, you can no longer judge distances. What you thought you knew, in the light, has become uncertain. Nothing is guaranteed. You stretch out your arms, thinking you're about to bump into something, touch the wall or brush past the doorframe... Nothing there. You keep groping in the void. Almost from the start, what invades you without your wholly realizing it is in fact the benightedess of ignorance. The darkness makes you stupid. It has thinkened your head and destroyed your bearings. Suddenly you bump into the corner of the chest of drawers. You hadn't imagined it was there. So you were completely wrong in your calculations. You were not where you thought you were. The chest has looed out of the darkness and struck you a calculated blow, high up on your thigh, just where it hurts most.

The absence of light skews all your estimations. It confuses your contours, and your body seems uncertain and at a loss. You can only move in limited fits and tiny starts. And yet, very little is actually missing from your picture of things. Known reality is still unmoved and in place. Nothing has budged, neither the objects nor the relations between them. Nevertheless, they have become incomprehensible. Distanced and vaguely menacing.

In the dark, the world is supposed to be 'the same' as in the light. But you have only to test this proposition to find that the world changes completely, depending on whether it's visible or not. What we call 'the world', 'reality', 'normal life' reposes inside a thin, easily disturbed stratum.

 

From 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger-pol Droit