I.
The text that most directly informs this poem is Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit. Philosophy of Spirit is the third of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia which is constructed of the Science of Logic, Nature, and Spirit. An encyclopedia, the text is circular. It begins, of course, at the beginning. But then it returns back to the beginning at the end, again. Not only is the Encyclopaedia circular, Hegel’s system, itself, is a circle, beginning at the beginning, and then, returning to the beginning, again. As Hegel explains, “This transformation is the circle returning into itself, which presupposes its beginning and reaches its beginning only at the end.” Furthermore, each part of the system—Logic, Nature, and Spirit— is also, within itself, a circle. What we have, then, is a revolutionary system, if by revolutionary we mean “to revolve,” to “perform a circular motion.” Hegel’s system is circular because spirit’s process of becoming spirit is a system through which spirit dies and is resurrected over and over again, a system of revolution, of change without end. The structure of “Dark Register” mirrors the structure of the encyclopedia. The speaker of the poem leaves home to “begin” their life, to “become” who they are meant to be.
II.
Before leaving, the speaker is cautioned not to allow the world’s desires to contaminate them which would result in their ruin:
If you leave,
he said,
keep who you are,
Don’t let the world
and its desires
ruin you.
And yet, to enter the world—to be born into the world—is already to be changed by it.
By leaving, the speaker is changed. Not into themselves but into a semblance of the world, a change that cannot be undone or what Freud calls “Ungeschehenmachen” which literally means “making un-happened.”
What is gone
cannot be put back.
III.
“Habit,” in the third stanza refers to Hegel’s concept of habit: the act of repeating an action that, through this repetition, becomes second nature. For Hegel, habit implies forgetting: we forget what we are doing once the action becomes habit.
Hegel posits habit as both a form of freedom and death. Habit brings about freedom because through habit we are able to master an action that allows us to do something else. That, for instance, I am able to walk and talk at the same time is due to habit. I don’t notice that I am walking just as I no longer notice I am speaking. And yet, because habit is a form of forgetting, it can also bring about mechanism, and a form of death.
V.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, the second text in the Encyclopedia, ends with the death of an animal. Spirit arises from out of this death. Spirit’s spirit originates from this waste. This destructive constructivity that produces novelty is at the core of Hegel’s system of Aufhebung. With capitalism, this constructive destruction is perverted and, instead of constructivity arising from destruction, we have only pure destruction. Stanzas four through six speak to this destruction, capitalism’s contamination. In, for example, the lines, “Damage/from the inside,” the contamination occurs through subject formation which means it happens internally, through the mind.
While spirit is formed through nature, with capitalism, capitalism becomes second nature, replacing nature and, as a result, humans are formed through capitalism. The result is that each individual’s desires, though they seem to each individual as their own, originate externally, from capitalist society (“the world/and its desires”).
VI.
The poem’s ending, “I came back home/but I came back/gone,” speaks to the radical shifts that occur to subjects under capitalism. “Dark Register” is a registering of this historical shift, and, through this registering, begins to sort out the riddle we find ourselves in and, in so doing, begin the work of locating a solution to it.
