Acts of leaving and returning invite contemplation. The trip out and the trip in threaten to cancel each other out but might also usher us into a place transformed, whether by our experience, the tidal indifference of time, or an apotheosis. “We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,” T. S. Eliot writes of the return of the Magi, “But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.” Something always seems to have happened while we were gone, even if it’s only in our minds. Maybe that’s why the Australian philosopher, theologian, and poet Kevin Hart has spent his life thinking about coming back.

His memoir Dark-Land, which covers his London childhood and emigration to Australia, brings that theoretical interest home. Narrative has always been a part of his writing, starting with his earliest collection of poems, The Departure (1978), which also recounts a journey, this one from and to Australia. There we already find hints of what would become a recurrent worry: that the significance of a journey may be entirely made up, its meaning a pure fiction woven by the imagination. In “For Brisbane,” the poet has returned to Australia and is walking the city streets when he has this epiphany:

Now you are walking through an arcade when suddenly

                two shops with unlit windows surprise you, some light

leaks from a passing car, and there—inhuman 

                uncomprehending—yourself thrust up in front,

behind, image reflecting image, all shrinking into

        the dark, quickly. You know that it is true.        

An infinite regression of images receding in the dark—that is all you are. A similar visual parataxis drives Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” where we see “Everything connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’” Except that in Hart’s poem, the gaze is directed not at the page but at the person. Meaning, in Bishop’s line, is matter arranged at random. Self, for Hart, is “thrust up” by a void. Faced with oblivion, Hart’s poem asks silently if our lives are real and if we know what we think we do. It looks for lessons in the dark.

Darkness is home both to the nihilist and the mystic, and in his later writings Hart more openly moves in both of those directions. What always haunts him is what changes when we move through life. “We write the pronoun ‘I’ so easily, yet as life lengthens it sometimes seems that someone else, leaning over one’s shoulder, is writing for us,” he writes. “When we spin around quickly, no one is there.” Much of Dark-Land takes place in working-class London, where Hart’s experiences in the British secondary-school system can be summed up by the scene of a ball flying out of the schoolyard smog and striking him in the face. We read story after story of his bewilderment in the classroom, of his inability to comprehend basic subjects like arithmetic, much to the chagrin of his teachers and parents, who turn to physical and verbal abuse. Those failures conceal a more complex inner life. Privately, he enjoys comics and is bemused by mandatory hymns about Jesus. Publicly, he is a disappointment or, more generously, a puzzle—unfit for the butcher shop or the factory, or for anything else. Fog becomes a recurrent metaphor for that condition. He is, to recall his early poem, “unknowing.” Then, following the voyage to Australia, something happens. His mind begins to spool.

It is not uncommon for spiritual memoirs to contain scenes of revelation. Augustine in the garden. Thomas Merton on the metro. Hart’s revelation arrives in a hasty introduction to “3x=x².” “I suddenly felt as though my mind was moving,” he recalls. Primed as we have been by scene after scene of the author disappointing everyone around him, the sudden focus he experiences seems almost unbelievable. The question of how it occurs and whether it is permanent fascinates and worries him. He never fully answers it. One thing that we can say confidently is that he didn’t wake himself up on his own. The mind moves as if apart from us, drawn by desire. “The Road / Opens like a hand, will not let you go,” as Hart puts it in another early poem. “You are not in control.”

The title Dark-Land refers to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, whose eponymous narrator leaves on a journey up “the hill of Difficulty.” It was one of the few books available to Hart as a child; its virtual landscape was easily mapped onto the factory district of London where he grew up, but also onto the severe Australian countryside where he found himself years later, with its Bunyanesque naming conventions (“Lake Disappointment, Mount Despair, Mount Hopeless”). His awakening begins with departures from these areas to other worlds. One is “the Chase,” where “the languid afternoons seemed to stretch out forever.” Another is the Australian bush, where he has an hallucinatory experience in the wilderness, and is told, seemingly by the bush itself, that he does not belong. These zones may seem like Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” sites of sublime encounter with nature or transcendental consciousness that counterpoint ordinary life in an increasingly mechanized world. But here nature is often littered with industrial trash—within Hopkins’s “Windhover” there is Eliot’s “Waste Land”—and that pollution seeps into Hart’s certainties about personhood and authorship.

Those wild places are metaphors for inner spaces of intellectual exploration in the memoir. They operate like “the zone” in Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. Once we take the risks to get there, bewitching things begin to occur, though we never see who does them. They also lead back to the same questions that emerge in Hart’s early poetry. What is this numinous force commanding transformation, or is there one? What are our techniques for looking at it?

Hart would probably point us to the practice of contemplation in response to those questions. Etymologically, contemplation derives from the work of interpreting the moods of the gods by following the flight patterns of birds from within the temple. For later practitioners, from the mystic Bernard of St. Victor to the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, contemplation was a receptive (rather than active or passive) practice of engagement. When inanimate worlds in Dark-Land take on human qualities—when a landscape speaks or a poem gets up and walks—something like contemplation is operating. “On the red wooden train back to Oxley, we had a compartment to ourselves,” Hart writes, for example. “Dad started to doze, and Mum gazed outside silently as the city sped away behind us and the river glittered. I read [Wallace Stevens’s poem] ‘Domination of Black’ once, twice, and found it would not let me go.” The poem has hands that grip us. “Domination of Black” describes just this kind of encounter:  

At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes

And of the fallen leaves,

Repeating themselves,

Turned in the room,

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind….

Out of the window,

I saw how the planets gathered

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,

Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks

I felt afraid.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Fire in the hearth, shapes on the wall, and hemlock branches animate night, “striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.” What do we call what we encounter in these turns of consciousness? Stevens calls it “night” here. Hart calls it “dark” in “For Brisbane.” Both seem to assign power to it; both suggest it is doing something to us, though we can’t quite make it out. This is also how a parable works. Hart writes that a parable “lets us on a path to approach God in the darkness of unknowing.” For many years, he has been working on a phenomenology shaped by the parable of the prodigal son. It is his life’s work. None of it has been published yet, except for a series of remarkable lectures intended to correct rumors about the larger work. A common interpretation of this parable centers on the son’s experience. The moral: Just as the son repents, so should we. Hart’s lectures on the parable instead point us toward the behavior of the father. We have never seen a forgiveness like this “lyrical forgiveness,” they argue. This forgiveness is immediate: it inhabits the “eternal present” we associate with a lyric poem, by contrast to a rational sequence. The father’s forgiveness is free, a total gift; nothing is expected in return. It has the soil of another world on its feet.

That world and its god remain hidden. In certain attitudes, “we feel its look upon us,” but the path a parable—or a poem—sets us on is a path into night. What is “revealed,” as Hart puts it in a reading of the parable, is “re-veiled.” He alternates between different readings of his life for this same reason. He remains worried that the revelation that was given to him in youth will be withdrawn. A cloud lifts and resettles. “An upsurge of psychic darkness” sets in. Hart reminds us that the doubtfulness that prompts us to leave and return to the narratives we craft of our lives is not an obstacle but an offering. Without it, we would not walk one step toward each other, or into the night.

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