Contemporary writers often emphasize growth and advance. Someone should also speak for being still and not getting anywhere. The entire rhythm is crucial.

Psychology tends to be solar, wanting to bring all things to light, to overcome the darkness and make everything manageable. It wants to banish darkness with any means at its disposal. But no one needs such a harsh cleansing and brightening. It would be better to be deepened and darkened by an experience of the night. You would then become more complex, more interesting, less one-dimensional.

It’s tempting to become the hero and savior, but getting life in apparent order is not the same as giving the soul what it needs. It may need more chaos, deeper impasse, and increased darkness.

There is a difference, however, between becoming more mature through dark sexuality and literalizing that darkness in actual violence. There, you have gone over the line, out of the ritual of sex, in which symbolically you visit the underworld of fantasy, and into actuality, which is not an initiation but victimization.

At a deep level, society’s challenge at the moment is to convert its infantile sexuality into a thorough life of sensual pleasure, beauty, intimacy, and community. We have to transform our materialism into soulful physicality.