in the absence of visible darkness yet with its
desire persistent, remnant, and present, with darkness having migrated from
exteriority to interiority, our relations with it shift on psycho-mythic
registers, and we seek for the unseen darkness in the human as we once sought
the unseen light of god. so the human
disappears, while our seeking, while remaining infinite, turns toward our
absent selves.
in the age of knowledge, with the human
more tangibly and relatively omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient than god
once was, darkness becomes the ungraspable, apocalypse the dream,
disintegration the hope.
only flesh in its darkest knowledge can
rise to look light in the eye.
to love darkness is to avoid in its
entirety the statement – let there be
light (and consequently let there be
…, which is always and simply a variation) – and rather remain hovering on
voids, exhorting nothing. this is no
statement of fate, any more than let
there be light or money or love or knowledge be statements of fate, but of
the indivisibility of fate and freedom and chance. this indivisibility is darkness.
to exist on the margins – but rather,
no: to exist in places those with money
and hierarchical social power name as outside the light, their light – and not
attempt to move (or rather to move only among these places so named by such) is
to subject one’s selves (oneselves) to visions that, in language, are given by
and to darkness, but outside of language (or rather in languages other than
language), and this outside given to
a deeper darkness: that of not knowing
whether the visions are comprised of light or darkness.
to see, it is said, requires
light. and yet can we not say that the
blind-from-birth see, yet through language.
words are dark eyes. language has
the capacity to bypass light and see.
this is its energy – energy that subverts the power of the beasts of the
world and the screams and resentments they plod on.
and so when we say in the beginning was the word, we know the word existed before
light, and the word was void, and vision was only the capacity to remain in
relation to word. so technology permits
new paths of remaining in relation, new patterns of darkness, new visions of
creating.
i take the lights of society and weave
them – though weaving be now an art of industry – with the scattered skeins of
my flesh’s black thread. how do i know
this weaving when its schools are destroyed and its masters dead? i take my lessons in the night, i read the
texts of void. madness becomes my lover
and emptiness my friend.
mysticism, as its more visible sibling,
society, takes on darkness as root metaphor rather than light – for darkness is
the present greater energy.
i am oriented to those without names in
the world – not as any advocate to give them names or to protest their
namelessness or even to judge the named in their greed for names and all that
clambering entails or to become through advocacy or other means among the named
– but as a naturalized citizen of the tribe of the anamed. i recognize my kinspeople; we are those who
find it difficult to breathe in the air of names; we are those whose rough and disturbing
comfort is wandering in the darkness between creation and destruction, affirmation
and protest, between the ruling and the ruled.
we are the nomads of darkness.
should we – through chance or fortune or talent or love – come too close
to the republic of names, we cannot help but sabotage any process of citizenry
that might be thrust upon us … neither through denial nor hate but an eyed and
replete acceptance … and return to our people, the people of night and the
impossible eternity of words, those who stumble, without object, objects, through
the alleys in those dark regions that connect city and soul.
