When the eye becomes accustomed to the darkness, when the blackness of night has been suffered through, the white light of the moon emerges. The light of the moon is reflected light; it creates a world of imagination that is at home in the dark. The metal is silver. It is a world of echoes, sounds, and voices, help-ful voices as well as lunatic convictions and instructions. Reflective surfaces of water, mirrors, laundry, washing machines, and all kinds of cleaning agents, soap (the albedo is often also called the ablutio, the whitewashing after the nigredo). Poems, letters, and anything to do with nonrational language belongs to the albedo atmosphere. Neon lights (cold light), ice and snow landscapes. Drifting without direction, dling over backward, walking backward, crabs. Voyeurism and itastic eroticism. Glasses, basins, receptacles that you can t something in. Passive hanging around, daydreaming, tak- ■g consciousness-altering drugs (not stimulants such as cof-ree). Transvestites, transsexuals, sex changes. Pregnancy, incubation, and eggs. Pearls, crystals, and glasswork. Pale faces, bodies, and plants. Convalescents and illnesses in the process of healing. The moods are pensive, full of fantasy, not tinged with strong emotion, cool.
— Robert Bosnak
Bosnak is describing a state the soul reaches only after it has given up trying to force its way through. The nigredo — that prior blackness — is not a problem to be solved but a pressure to be endured until the pressure itself changes the quality of what can be received. The albedo arrives as reflected light, not generated light, and that distinction matters more than it first appears. Everything in this list — mirrors, water, moonshine, ice, passive waiting, the slow metabolisms of pregnancy and convalescence — shares the quality of not-initiating. The soul here is a basin, a receptacle, something you can put things in rather than something reaching outward to acquire them.
This is the other side of the desire-ratio's exhaustion. When the project of obtaining the longed-for thing has been suspended, not abandoned in defeat but suspended in fatigue, a different kind of imagining becomes possible — cooler, less charged, willing to receive without immediately converting what arrives into fuel for the next attempt. Bosnak's inclusion of transvestites and sex changes here is precise: these belong to the albedo not as pathology but as figures of in-between, identity held in solution rather than declared. The mood he names — pensive, cool, not tinged with strong emotion — is not numbness. It is what the psyche feels like when it has stopped generating its own heat long enough to notice what the dark is actually offering.
Robert Bosnak·A Little Course in Dreams·1986