ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Dogen's koan about metamorphosis in the dark is used experientially to embody in text itself the overwhelming power given to language-based cognition in so-called higher education. The ongoing mountain-top mining removal for coal or the historical removal of women from academia's ivory towers, this chapter writes the invisible, nonconscious place of trauma held by the body when overwhelmed by higher forces. Traumatic events often happen at night, in darkness, often invisibly, but now rather than lithic the metamorphosis is increasingly plastic and death bearing. As a child Terry Tempest Williams slept beneath the left and right panels of this triptych, which when turned inward reveal planet Earth within the cosmos as conceived by Hieronymus Bosch in the fifteenth century. The center panel in Bosch's painting, the one missing from her childhood bedroom wall and hidden from the view by the closed panels, corresponds with what was missing in Williams's life.
