to pass over in a plane a city at night – is
this not a vision less of the indication of civilized constructs of a species
and more of the stirred dreams in the human looking down? and when the plane moves from its island of
light to oceans of darkness, what then the dreams?
we may be better thinking less of darkness as
anything visual and more as sound. not
silence, for only the space between darkness and light would be silent, but atonal
moods at the margins of noise.
we know that darkness – like eternity,
justice, love, light, goodness – doesn’t exist in any raw or pure form. thus
what we call darkness is always an admixture with light and so its ratios – the
amount of light in it – are always shifting.
darkness is variegated and impurified light.
darkness is less darkness and more our giving
ourselves over to it. darkness is the
gift of ourselves, a yielding without object.
night is simply day made visible, for isn't crepuscularity the onset of the unknown?
enlightenment if it is anything is endarkenment.
isn’t darkness life that has not been turned
into an event and so the overwhelming bulk of life?
aren’t there literatures of light and
literatures of darkness? in the former, tristram shandy, shakespeare’s comedies,
orlando, aristophanes, groups and
atolls of others; in the latter almost everything. between but on darkness’ side a range from hamlet to the master and margarita. this
may make it seem as if light laughs, darkness weeps or is mute. and this is not untrue. but rather, to be literature, both laugh and
weep and are mute. it is more that the
former enter existence through social ritual, the latter through the grave. both are insufficient comedies, different
genres of wit.
that the mystics experience light when
through their circles of ordeals, that the dying see tunnels of light, that the
supposed achievement of the guru and the goal of the spiritually seeking is
enlightenment … all this points only to darkness containing within it its
opposite, a concentration of everything, at its center, a sphere with almost no
diameter, and this almost-not-thereness only increasing its potency and
apparency in the overwhelming black.
what is the distance between you and i, i and
i, between memory and forgetting, the unseen and the seen? aren’t these distances darkness?
this wiring that connects light to life and
goodness and truth, darkness to death and evil and falsity – only a particular
standard in the linguistic-energy configurations of the universe. what would rewire us to new standards of
possibilities and impossibilities? where
might be the vision to become wireless in ourselves, all connecting to all and
from all, the playful and free democracies of consciousness?
necessity perhaps is related to darkness as
freedom is, in some collective-oneiric genealogy. and light? is light the manufactured apparati that
permit screenings of the familial relationships? the dubious, searing, and unmitigated beams
of civilization and culture turned on our irrevocable and lost origins?
if i must speak your language to understand
it, is darkness all the speakings i have not spoken, that have not summoned me
to enter them? if so, don’t i live and
speak in darkness and my little languages, these candle flickerings, which so
often seem to the i as stars larger than the universe, primarily indicators of
what i do not know?
so ignorance and darkness and doubt may be
the only and vague harbingers of truth, and what we call knowledge an edifice
of falsities. the human in its bulk
places its bets on the latter, but the odds of time are set in obscure places,
and hardly read.
in the light of knowledge, darkness is no
longer possible. i simulate it in the
laboratories of the absent. i package it
in capsules of varied legalities, shoot it in the wretched alleys of god. i visit the prostitute of art. i am laid down in the soils of the damned. these are my rites and sex, my semiotics of
love.
