Dark Factory

The machinery does not require light

Large, robotic arms in the industrial plant parallel both sides of the assembly line of metal car frames that jolt ahead and abruptly stop. Jolt ahead and abruptly stop. The synchronized arms bend and reach over the metallic skeletons. Bolting something into place. Welding something into place. Pressing down. Lifting up. Puncturing holes. Bit-by-bit the car’s frame gains mechanism and the likeness of a car, that is, if you squint hard enough when the sparks fly from the metal, illuminating small orbs of space in the dimness of the dark factory where light isn’t necessary.

*

We squinted up at the inconspicuous Milky Way that graced the sky like spilled salt on a dark table. All the lights in the house had been turned off so that we could better view the meteor shower from our yard. The pink-purple protein rhodopsin came into play, assisting the rods and cones in our eyes to promote night vision. Rhodopsin, broken down, means rose sight. Reclined in anti-gravity chairs, we waited for meteors to scratch at the dark ceiling.

*

First, worms—those blind aerators—move the soil, allowing oxygen and water to navigate through channels of soil. The worms, tasting everything with their bodies, may even caress the seed’s coat with the long muscle of their bristled body. Warmth, oxygen, and water reach the seed in a fortunate fantasia of just-rightness. Within the tiny dark vessel, stored fats, carbohydrates, and proteins stir in complete darkness.

*

Having given up depression medications years ago, I sometimes find myself navigating the dark corridors of my mind, my hands feeling up and down the walls for a light switch. Sometimes the light switch is there but there is no light to turn on.

*

Elsewhere in the dark factory, large rolls of corrosion-resistant steel are lifted by robotic claws, transported, unraveled, pressed, and stamped. Then come the dies, attached to an elegant robotic mechanism resembling a darkness-dwelling mosquito with long legs, landing on the metal. In all this darkness, not a drop of prolactin, that nocturnal chemical that causes birds to rest in the nest, human mothers to calmly tend to the midnight milk-hunger of their children. The mosquito dies lift and land, lift and land, guided by their artificial intelligence. In all the darkness, one can only hear the mosquito’s whirr.

*

Our eyes adjust to the darkness of our backyard. In order to see the stars, our star needs to retire to the invisible recesses of the sky. In order to see the meteor’s sodium and magnesium ignite with the friction of our atmosphere, our star and its mirror, the moon, need to depart. As we wait, airplanes, space detritus, and satellites cross-stitch the sky. From our vantage point, hundreds of humans are condensed to a bright dot the size of an ant crawling across the skyskape. We close our eyes and open them in our dark-intelligence.

*

It is the Goldilocks moment when the temperature, moisture, and oxygenation are just right. The fibrous capsule of potential energy softens and swells, sprouting a downward, white radicle root and an upward plumule full of light-intelligence in the pitch of the soil. The soil, the earth’s history of death, writhes with protozoa, mites, and fungi which the plumule bypasses in the rich darknesses of what rose and fell before it.

*

Sometimes I finally find the light switch in the corridor of my dark mind and I’ll switch it on but I only hear a whirring sound. Sometimes the light switch is there but when I switch it on, the light is farther down the corridor.

*

In the dark factory, our realities are made. The cars we drive with a muscle memory, even in the dark when the dashboard lights illuminate our exhausted faces. The smart phones we swipe and press in order to see our way through the dark. Depression medications so that we don’t need to navigate dark corridors in our minds. Our realities are manufactured in the image of light. When we made fire in our caves, our bodies began to believe that the days were like long summer days, when food was most plentiful and therefore women, more fertile. Brightness, lightness, sheen, and shine are desirable. As the mechanical, synchronized arms stretch and bend over product in complete darkness, our bodies live in a perpetual summer of abundance and manufactured light.

*

One can’t help but wonder if there is a word for that liminal moment when a star suddenly appears in what a moment ago was just a dark void. If all the outwardness was compressed, how thick would the wall of elementals be? Sitting in my gravity chair, gazing at deep time, the stars that moved a half an inch farther above the tree line did not actually move. I balanced my empty can of La Croix on my palm as we hurdled mechanistically through space at three different intense speeds at once. A meteor scratched the dark factory of the sky.

*

Etiolation is the process in which the seed’s light-intelligent stem elongates, pale and yellow, in the darkness of earthly rot. Spindly and thin, all the seed’s reserves went into the burst of the stem’s quick journey to lux aeterna where finally a leaf will unfurl for a cup of sun. Meanwhile, the cool machinery of roots beneath absorb, store, and anchor amongst the granule and grain of the world. In dark factories, the same granules and grains are manufactured into capsules called antibiotics.

*

Sometimes I finally find the light switch in the dark corridor of my mind and it is one of those glorious evenings where as soon as we stepped outside, I spread my arms wide open up to the sky as if it were reaching for me, too. We decided to take a walk along River Road as distant wildfires rendered the evening sky in a smoky wash. What did you just take a picture of? I asked my husband as we walked along the meandering country lane. Our shadows, he said and I glanced down at our dark companions, the sunset’s sepia reflecting off the asphalt. Our shadows stretched ahead of us, devoid of our dimensions and mechanisms.