Dark Water by Du Bois - Microcosm of Tragedy and Comedy

These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death and War.

To this thinking I have only to add a point of view: I have been in the world, but not of it. I have seen the human drama from a veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproduced themselves in microcosm within. From this inner torment of souls the human scene without has interpreted itself to me in unusual and even illuminating ways.

For this reason, and this alone, I venture to write again on themes on which great souls have already said greater words, in the hope that I may strike here and there a half-tone, newer even if slighter, up from the heart of my problem and the problems of my people.

Dark Water

Penned one hundred years ago, these reflections from W.E.B. Du Bois ring equally true in the present, perhaps striking a chord in the process of resounding. Included as a Postscript in the first of his three autobiographies titled Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, Du Bois documents his observations of the human condition, probing the roots of suffering in society.

Among the text's many focal points is race. Du Bois was acutely aware of his mixed race ancestry during a period of tense race relations in the United States. Descended from African, Dutch, English, and French relatives, he was nonetheless black in the eyes of his contemporaries and bore the brunt of racism from a young age.

We here investigate a select few key excerpts from Darkwater in honor of the literary legacy of Du Bois, who was both a prolific writer and civil rights activist, among filling various other roles. While undoubtedly leaving a lasting impact in the realm of literature, his reflections were also generally well-received at the time as well, illuminating issues of racial discrimination in America.

Tantalizing Contradiction

And so the contemplative path of Du Bois begins. We start by offering Du Bois the floor, standing alongside him in his discussion of the tantalizing contradiction of the human condition.

Here, then, is beauty and ugliness, a wide vision of world-sacrifice, a fierce gleam of world-hate. Which is life and what is death and how shall we face so tantalizing a contradiction? Any explanation must necessarily be subtle and involved. No pert and easy word of encouragement, no merely dark despair, can lay hold of the roots of these things. And first and before all, we cannot forget that this world is beautiful. Grant all its ugliness and sin—the petty, horrible snarl of its putrid threads, which few have seen more near or more often than I—notwithstanding all this, the beauty of this world is not to be denied.

Casting my eyes about I dare not let them rest on the beauty of Love and Friend, for even if my tongue were cunning enough to sing this, the revelation of reality here is too sacred and the fancy too untrue. Of one world-beauty alone may we at once be brutally frank and that is the glory of physical nature; this, though the last of beauties, is divine!

And so, too, there are depths of human degradation which it is not fair for us to probe. With all their horrible prevalence, we cannot call them natural. But may we not compare the least of the world's beauty with the least of its ugliness—not murder, starvation, and rapine, with love and friendship and creation—but the glory of sea and sky and city, with the little hatefulnesses and thoughtfulnesses of race prejudice, that out of such juxtaposition we may, perhaps, deduce some rule of beauty and life—or death?
Excerpted from the section "Of Beauty and Death," we as readers of Du Bois may begin to envision the reality he faced, which in many ways mirrors our own.


Through these passages, we encounter the paradox, the tantalizing contradiction, with which Du Bois found himself constantly confronted. His life was plagued by the racism of his era, from which he and others suffered tremendously. The "horrible snarl of its putrid threads" bound him in their stinking web, and yet Du Bois never became a cynic.

In fact, it might be said that Du Bois was an optimist at heart. Despite the struggles he faced, growing up fatherless and losing his mother at 16 years old, he earned his way into Harvard, where he eventually completed a Ph.D. in history, the university's first black doctorate.

Perhaps his success may be attributed to his attitude toward life. Focusing on the positive at every turn, Du Bois at the same time shone light on society's ills, the dark corners full of cobwebs and corpses, never ignoring them. He speaks of human degradation, horrific and unnatural, without ever losing faith in life itself.


Du Bois further expands on this vision in vivid detail, also included in the visionary section "Of Birth and Death," painting an entire landscape filled with both literal significance and symbolic extrapolation, all in service of depicting the microcosm of tragedy and comedy that characterized his experience.

God molded his world largely and mightily off this marvelous coast and meant that in the tired days of life men should come and worship here and renew their spirit. This I have done and turning I go to work again. As we go, ever the mountains of Mount Desert rise and greet us on our going—somber, rock-ribbed and silent, looking unmoved on the moving world, yet conscious of their everlasting strength.

About us beats the sea—the sail-flecked, restless sea, humming its tune about our flying keel, unmindful of the voices of men. The land sinks to meadows, black pine forests, with here and there a blue and wistful mountain. Then there are islands—bold rocks above the sea, curled meadows; through and about them roll ships, weather-beaten and patched of sail, strong-hulled and smoking, light gray and shining. All the colors of the sea lie about us—gray and yellowing greens and doubtful blues, blacks not quite black, tinted silvers and golds and dreaming whites.



Long tongues of dark and golden land lick far out into the tossing waters, and the white gulls sail and scream above them. It is a mighty coast—ground out and pounded, scarred, crushed, and carven in massive, frightful lineaments. Everywhere stand the pines—the little dark and steadfast pines that smile not, neither weep, but wait and wait. Near us lie isles of flesh and blood, white cottages, tiled and meadowed. Afar lie shadow-lands, high mist-hidden hills, mountains boldly limned, yet shading to the sky, faint and unreal.

We skirt the pine-clad shores, chary of men, and know how bitterly winter kisses these lonely shores to fill yon row of beaked ice houses that creep up the hills. We are sailing due westward and the sun, yet two hours high, is blazoning a fiery glory on the sea that spreads and gleams like some broad, jeweled trail, to where the blue and distant shadow-land lifts its carven front aloft, leaving, as it gropes, shades of shadows beyond.
With each reference to aspects of the natural world - its sweeping meadows and rugged mountains - we are offered a glimpse into the microcosmic terrain of the mind. Although Du Bois doesn't say so directly, perhaps these features stand theatrically for experiences he encountered on his contemplative path.

Microcosm of Tragedy and Comedy

To conclude our reflections here, we return to a passage from the Postscript, included at the outset. "To this thinking I have only to add a point of view: I have been in the world, but not of it. I have seen the human drama from a veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproduced themselves in microcosm within. From this inner torment of souls the human scene without has interpreted itself to me in unusual and even illuminating ways." In this microcosm of tragedy and comedy we find represented the macrocosm of existence.

Racism is a undeniable felt reality. To turn one's back to the world, overlooking its weather-beaten, wind-torn, ship-wrecked elements, tossed about at sea, is to indulge in ignorance - a misguided ignoring of actuality, an ignoring of the churning sea in foolish fantasy of smooth sailing. For Du Bois, facing racism was to be in the world but not of the world, navigating the microcosm of tragedy and comedy like a ship at sail at sea.

For Du Bois, the microcosm of tragedy and comedy enacts itself in nature and in humanity's relationships, collectively forming a macrocosm encompassing all existence. Each of these relations, no matter how cloaked in shadows, was for Du Bois a valuable lesson and teacher. By confronting these shadows, we stand to overcome their grip, freeing both ourselves and our spiritual brothers and sisters from bondage, sailing toward the sun so that we may, perhaps, reach the further shore together.


To be continued...

On Moving Beyond Myopic Musings - Seeing the Elephant as it is

The Blind Men and the Elephant

Scattered throughout the literature of ancient India, the parable of the blind men and the elephant has been told in variations preserved in Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu sources. It paints an image of the violence and vitriol that may erupt in the clash between different interpretations of reality, each surmised from a limited vantage point. We here examine one version of the story in detail, its early Buddhist depiction based on the Tittha Sutta of the Pāli Canon.



In exploring the parable of the blind men and the elephant, we aim to draw out its implications for our present state of affairs in a world characterized largely by contention and competing views, many of them starkly contrasting. In untangling the perspectives from the story, we hope they may be pieced together to allow for a collaborative understanding of the bigger picture, allowing the elephant to be seen as a whole rather than parts mistaken for something they are not.

Myopic Musings

The Buddhist version of the blind men and the elephant offers a critique of the tendency toward myopic musings, the narrow-minded and short-sighted perspectives we may be prone to entertain, informed by distorted perceptions of the world. Providing some context, the narration begins by setting the scene.

“There were many contemplatives, brahmans, & wanderers of various sects living around Sāvatthī with differing views, differing opinions, differing beliefs, dependent for support on their differing views.”

Here, the participants in the story are described as being in some way attached and identified with competing sets of doctrine, on which they depend for the sake of sustenance or status in society. For them, their prized views have become a crutch, the basis for their sense of self. Any challenge to such views is taken as a direct threat to their identity.



This attachment and identification is a felt reality for many in the modern world as much as in ancient times, lending itself to the emergence of divided factions in politics and religion. Pitting their precious views against each other, each camp advocates its own perspective as ultimate reality while dismissing all others as unworthy even of consideration.

“Only this is true; anything otherwise is worthless.”

In such a declaration, a single truth is pushed to the exclusion of all competing perspectives. We may witness this all around us, especially in light of differing portrayals of the coronavirus pandemic in the media by various sources, each laying sole claim to reality. In obsessing over their myopic musings, they lose sight of the bigger picture.

Missing the Bigger Picture

Not only do these individuals attach to and identify with their theories, they furiously debate over them, inflicting harm upon each other in the process.

“They kept on arguing, quarreling, & disputing, wounding one another with weapons of the mouth, saying, ‘The Dhamma is like this, it’s not like that. The Dhamma’s not like that, it’s like this.’”

The harm that comes from such vehement attachment and identification is evidenced throughout history up to the present day by wars waged and lives taken over doctrines and dogmas. Illustrating the absurdity of clinging to myopic perspectives, the Buddha in the Tittha Sutta compares these sectarians who quarrel over their cherished views to blind men arguing over their limited understanding of an elephant when coming into contact with but one of its various parts.


From their limited vantage points, each insists that the part they perceive (the trunk, the tail, etc.) is all there is, as illustrated by the image opening our reflections here. Not only that, they fail to even recognize the trunk as a trunk, mistaking it for a pole. The same applies to each of the elephant's various other body parts.

“Saying, ‘The elephant is like this, it’s not like that. The elephant’s not like that, it’s like this,’ they struck one another with their fists.”
Each of these men neglect the forest for the trees, over which they fight each another relentlessly, hacking away at the forest itself. In their frenzy, they miss the bigger picture. Much like many today, they are blinded by their narrow-minded, short-sighted insistence on their own perspectives. Their refusal to closely examine others stands in the way of seeing clearly.

Settled Clarity

We are thus reminded of the importance in considering experience collectively. In Jain contexts, here is where the notion of anekāntavāda or "many-sidedness" comes into play. The parts of the elephant function as valuable pieces of the puzzle, but such parts must be accurately discerned with settled clarity rather than mistaken for something they are not.

In a Hindu version of the story, the blind men conclude that each of them must have encountered an entirely different animal, and so they are at least spared of the fundamental delusion of mistaking parts of the elephant for inanimate objects found lying around the house or yard. However, this does not go far enough.

Rather, we are invited to consider the possibility that we perceive different sides of the elephant. If one can understand the elephant's trunk as the elephant's trunk, the elephant's tail as the elephant's tail, and so on, all belonging to the same elephant, then eventually one may piece the parts together and perceive the elephant as a unified whole, as it actually is.


In contemplative contexts, this discerning capacity is chiseled by practices such as meditation to facilitate the mind's settling and clarifying processes. By bringing such settled clarity into our everyday activities, we may develop greater immunity to the forces of attachment and identification, psychological drives that draw us into unwholesome relationships with our unchecked versions of reality, often informed by obstructions to settled clarity in vision. In so doing, we stand to widen our perspective.

Even so, successfully integrating such a widening of perspective into the broader realm of politics in an effort to resolve interpersonal conflict continues to prove itself an immense challenge.

Some "blind men" of our day and age refuse to step back and entertain any perspective other than their own. In those cases, without stirring up more dust to obscure both our own and their vision, we may attempt to calmly and clearly demonstrate to them, to whatever extent is possible in individual exchanges, that a rope is a rope and not the snake for which they mistake it. This may at least begin to shift the directional momentum of perspectives on the whole from a contracting to expanding orientation. To be continued.

Riding the Waves - Virginia Woolf on the Churning Currents of Existence

"The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.

Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually."

Virginia Woolf

Riding the Waves

Excerpted from The Waves, an experimental tapestry of soliloquies woven in word by British novelist Virginia Woolf in 1931, this scene opening the book paints a picture both poetic and poignantly reminiscent of a world beset by perpetual waves of unfolding tragedy.

The Waves documents the turbulence of Woolf's life, charting its valleys and crests, affectionately called a "play poem" by Woolf herself. Its structure takes the shape of a wave-like arc, stretching from sunrise to sunset along the coast, a simultaneously literal and metaphorical setting. Its churning currents and contents consist of the internal monologues of six characters, flowing into and out of each other, mixing poetry with prose like sea water. Each of their voices bleed and blend together in harmony.

Given its relevance to times like our own, characterized by relentless waves of disease, death, desperation, perhaps even depression, distance, desolation, we here let The Waves wash over us as we join Woolf in riding them out.

Churning Currents

The churning currents of existence occupy much of the oceanic expanse encompassed by The Waves. Throughout the text, Woolf frequently weaves in references to her struggles with solitude and society, alone and alienated. In the voice of an imaginative child, she writes:

"...my ships may ride the waves. Some will flounder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chains. The waves rise; their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship, which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter..."

Woolf proceeds to share her visceral sense of numbness in a world alien to her. As if perched precariously on a cliff's edge, she risks plummeting into the void of solitude, cut off from embodied modes of being. Immersed in imagination, nothing can snap her out of her stupor, a world of ruminative ideation.

"I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness."

Continuing with the seaside imagery, Woolf further pours her alienation onto the page, like hot water gushing forth from a vessel, escaping the spout, spilling everywhere at once, scalding children at a tea party. Yet her emotions are muted, her heart desolate, burning but without heat. She envisions being but a strand of seaweed or lump of seafoam tossed about without care or concern. Worthless to others, she is swept asunder by the waves.

"The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping."

Painted here is a scene so delicate yet powerful. As Woolf describes the coming and going of waves, almost as if from a distance, the immersed reader is consumed by them. These waves, figments of our own imaginations, gallop like a stampede across the mind's rugged terrain, like choppy currents dancing across the sea.

"I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me."

Woolf later encounters the waves, making contact as they crash upon her. Her life, our lives, are like these churning currents, rising and falling with the stirring of conditions. She appears to put up no resistance to being swept under by them, perhaps even finding relief in her own dissolution, as if finally being cleansed of her own mind's torment.

"And in me too the wave rises."

Indeed, Woolf's entire arc in The Waves is but a mirror image of her inner world. In times of isolation and stress, many in the present pandemic may be feeling quite similarly. Woolf retreated inward yet found little to no solace in the confines of her own mind. How would each of us respond to the waves inside us rising as if to devour us whole?

Riding the Waves

Virginia Woolf lived a morbid existence, her mother dying when Woolf was 13 years old, inducing the first of her various mental breakdowns, followed shortly by the untimely death of her half-sister and close friend. Institutionalized multiple times, she suffered severely from mental illness throughout her life. Woolf attempted suicide at least twice and finally succeeded at drowning herself at 59 in the River Ouse at its juncture with the town of Lewes in England.

The waves broke on the shore.

Riding the waves of her own life, yet unable to surface from them, Woolf succumbed to their onslaught. In times like ours, there are simultaneously more stressors and more resources offering relief. Given our present conditions, how shall we go about navigating these vicious waves so as not to be drowned by them? What can Virginia Woolf's reflections teach us about riding the waves? Is there anything further to be done or undone in order to not endure the same fate? To be continued.