Dear Readers,
A year ago, my personal essay, “The Darkness One Sees By,” was published by Canadice Press in their journal These Wilds.
Since they run only print, and because I retain copyright, I am posting the entire piece below for my lovely readers to access.
It explores a story that’s lived inside me for years—one that first took shape in on a hot day in Paris haunted by the quiet of the Finger Lakes—and continued to evolve across oceans and decades.
For those of you who have followed my work on the Bluff Point Ruins, the themes here will feel familiar: longing, mystery, myth, and the pull of ancient land.
cover art which happens to be by my good, lovely, and very talented friend, Erin Green
The Darkness One Sees By:
A Meditation on Wonder and Longing in the Finger Lakes
“I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke -- take your pick -- an apprehension of the divine.” -Maggie Nelson, Bluets
Part I: The Longing
On a sweltering August afternoon in Paris, 2008—the city emptied out like a ghost town—a story began to haunt me. Not of the Seine or its lovers’ bridges, not even of the famous Spanish guitarist who had seduced me handily and left me full of longing. No, the haunting was of cool, mysterious hills I’d left behind four years earlier in New York’s Finger Lakes. Hills that had whispered to me during my solitary days teaching, living in a house that welcomed anything that crawled or crept.
There was something in the higher forests, something that stirred feelings of longing so intense they bordered on madness. I would drive the winding roads, overcome by sensations I couldn’t name—desire, yearning, a sense that something ancient and powerful dwelled in these hills.
I wrote frantically, possessed by visions of a Dancing Man who claimed souls through seduction, of a dark goddess who watched from shadow-draped heights, of stone circles that shouldn’t exist in the New World. The stories poured out raw and unformed, ever changing, ever staying the same.
These stories intertwined like roots beneath the forest floor, making it impossible to know if I was ever telling the story correctly, or where it began or ended. The Wolf cursed with immortal hunger for taking a maiden’s life in an ancient stone circle. Four women across four centuries having spiritual and sexual awakenings on the same hill. A father named Silas, carrying his daughter’s body to the ancient stones in supplication. Mary, marked with “the dim”—”the darkness one sees by,” able to see deeper truths at the cost of her own soul.
The darkness one sees by. That phrase haunts me still, echoing through the years of research and writing, through versions abandoned and reimagined. It speaks to something fundamental about these hills, about the way truth reveals itself in shadow as much as light.
Part II: The Weaving
Over the years, I rewrote and revised, trying to capture what I had glimpsed. A story of obsessive longing for something beyond the ordinary, beyond the human.
I learned of the Wild Hunt and its ravenous, raging hunger, how it took those who wandered too long by themselves on the moors. I read the “Hosting Of the Sidhe” by Yeats to myself out loud. “And if any gaze on our rushing band, We come between him and the deed of his hand” like an incantation.
And I wrote, among many things, of characters in early settlement towns, in the spirit of the American Gothic tradition, calling to the hills:
For the townspeople had dull eyes and unhappy hearts. It was because they were too close to each other and too close to the church, from which a man of God was always peering. Telling them which way to break bread or make love. And how those unhappy people were trapped in a cage of their own design. But what they didn’t know was that a part of them didn’t want to be trapped. And it called out to the hill without them knowing it. It called out to the high peaks that crowned their valley and cast long shadows over their lake. It called for something to come between them and their workaday world. And when they called, it listened.
I imagined the hill had called to people for eons, each in different ways. That before the settlement people, it had called to the Seneca, the O-non-dowa-gah, who lived in profound connection with these hills. While men hunted in the dense woods and fished the crystalline waters of Keuka Lake, it was the women who held the land itself in trust, passing it down through their matrilineal lines. They decided when to plant and when to harvest, when to hold council and when to declare war. Their connection to this land ran deep, rooted in the cycles of joy, sorrow, birth, and death.
The Seneca spoke of Bare Hill, where ancient stones marked the skeleton of a great serpent, defeated by their ancestors in the time before time. This thread of ancient stoneworks in the Finger Lakes lead me to the Bluff Point Ruins. My hands trembled as I read the Wikipedia entry. On Keuka Lake, a few lakes over from Bare Hill, a different site had been found, one not claimed by the Seneca. In the late 1930s, an amateur digger said he had found Celtic or Etruscan artifacts there, echoing the very stories that had flowed from my pen in that Paris apartment.
The floor seemed to drop away beneath me, as if the universe itself was confirming something I’d known only in dreams.
What began as creative inspiration in that sweltering Paris apartment had led me into deeper waters than I could have imagined. The more I researched, the more the line between fiction and reality began to blur, until I found myself following the footsteps of scientists, scholars, and dreamers, who had tread this obsessive path before me.
Part III: The Dig
The First Discovery (1830)
When a farmer named Howland Hemphill first discovered unusual stoneworks on the Bluff in Keuka in the 1830s while quarrying materials for farmhouses, he sought answers from the local Seneca people. Their response only deepened the mystery: they claimed no cultural connection to these ancient works. And so Hemphill, thinking he was disturbing no sacred site, continued to take apart the mystery, stone by stone, for use in building the first farmhouses on the bluff.
The Scientific Survey (1880)
In 1880, Berlin Wright and his father, S. Hart Wright, conducted Yates County’s first geological survey. They documented an elaborate complex spanning the seven acres left of what was once fourteen acres of stonework. They surveyed:
Graded ways 3-8 feet wide
Large flat stones set edgewise
Monuments arranged in circles, squares, and arcs
Mathematical precision in layout
S. Hart Wright wrote: “I have not been able to find any relics of this work, which is one of the strangest in the state. I find nothing similar to it figured in any work on archaeology.” They petitioned the state to protect the area for future study, but it fell on deaf ears and over the coming years, every stone was removed for use in building the houses on the bluff.
The Amateur Archaeologist (1938)
A half-century later, a self-promoting newspaper man and amateur archaeologist, Gilbert T. Brewer, arrived with dreams of uncovering a pre-Columbian European presence in America. His extensive dig promised revelations—and delivered controversy. He reported finding:
Iron ornaments with red enamel
Metal artifacts with garnet-like stones
Pottery fragments bearing mysterious designs
A piece of stone in which he claimed to see the countenance of a goddess
But professional geologists dismissed his claims. The money ran out, the reporters left, and Brewer disappeared from public view. I searched old newspapers for traces of him, but all references ended abruptly. After weeks of research, I uncovered that he had been institutionalized in Florida after WWII. Somewhere along the way, he had lost his mind—perhaps in the depths of the dig, or to the alcoholism that fueled his heady dreams, or in the war. His collection vanished, taking with it whatever secrets it might have held about Bluff Point’s origins.
The trail of broken dreams and vanished artifacts left by Brewer serves as both warning and invitation—a reminder that while these mysteries can transform us but also consume us. His story echoes through the decades, a cautionary tale about the fine line between illumination and obsession.
And then, unexpectedly, the story became even more personal.
When I lived in the Finger Lakes—South Bristol, near Naples, NY to be exact—it was just a brief period—two years—but one that left a lasting mark. In that house by the woods, I first felt the pull—haunting ideas that wouldn’t let go. There, longing took shape, like an invisible current running through the hills.
Gil Brewer lived in South Bristol, New York, too—nearly 70 years before I did. With its dense forests, deep valleys carved by Mud and Mill Creeks, and its proximity to Canandaigua Lake, South Bristol is a place where the uncanny feels close at hand.
I had never heard of Brewer when I lived there. But the hills had. And without knowing it, I had been retracing his footsteps—drawn toward the same mysteries.
I used to think Brewer and I were nothing alike. He was a showman, a self-promoter, a man who built a public spectacle around his quest for a grand lost civilization. I have always sought my mysteries in quieter ways, in the margins, in the liminal spaces where the world feels thin.
And yet—
There are stories of him, long after the reporters had gone, working tirelessly with his stone rubbings alone at home, seeing the face of a goddess in them. How different is that, really, from the way I have spent years reaching for that dark goddess who watches from shadow-draped heights, the way I have listened to the whisperings of hills and ruins, waiting for them to reveal what they know?
Brewer longed to bring the hidden into the light. But some things resist daylight. Some things live in the dim—the darkness one sees by. Some things live in the dim, the darkness one sees by. The very act of searching changes the nature of what is found.
I do not search for proof.
I search for the doorway.
Part IV: The Darkness One Sees By
I spoke with David B. Kelley, author “Ancient Earth and Stone Ruins in Yates County, NY” and he suggested that, though the site is undiggable, modern technology like LiDAR offers new possibilities for investigation. But institutional support remains elusive, as it always has for those longing to uncover the true mysteries of the Bluff Point Ruins.
Perhaps that’s fitting. Some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved completely. They exist to remind us that wonder still dwells in the world, that certain places hold power beyond our understanding. The ghosts of the stones of Bluff Point continue their silent vigil above Keuka’s waters, calling to new generations of seekers, dreamers, and storytellers—each adding their own questions to the weight of wonder that has accumulated over centuries.
Now, after years of studying these mysteries, I understand that some stories refuse to be rushed. They must be approached like wild creatures—carefully, respectfully, with patience and wonder. The Bluff Point Ruins, like the characters who haunt my pages, demand nothing less than complete surrender to their mystery.
For in the end, this is not just a story about ancient stones or forgotten peoples. It’s about the way certain places call to us, the way they reshape our understanding of reality itself. It’s about the thin places where worlds touch, where the veil between what we know and what we sense grows gossamer-fine.
Sometimes I think of the Spanish guitar floating across a courtyard from a high window, beckoning a young woman to her Parisian lover. I think about the poignancy of longing, and how loneliness led me here, to this place where mystery still dwells all these years later. Perhaps that’s the real power of these hills—not just the secrets they keep, but the way they transform those who seek to understand them. They remind us that some truths can only be glimpsed in moments of wonder, in the spaces between knowing and not knowing, in the darkness one sees by.
We call out for something to come between us and our workaday world.
And when we call, it listens.