//Hail thee, holy darkness! - The INCAL//
//But in the beginning there is not light,
there is not life,
there is the black universe.
- Daniel Barber, Whylessness//
//I am neither god nor creature. - Meister Eckhart//
//I am the spirit that negates.
and rightly so, for all that comes to be
deserves to perish wretchedly.
- Mephisto, Faust//
The threat of possession, of being swarmed by the intangible unknowable, presses incessantly on the light. The slightest break in light is pervasively swamped by blackness, voiding the safety of referential anchors and //making slits in the umbrella - (Deleuze/Guattari)// through which the outside peers back. Abyssal mirrors lurking in every gap capture our emptiness and reflect it back through these slits, entrancing, encircling, oppressing, embracing, restraining : a nebulous army of dark potential that resonates with the harmonic undertones of our own self-repression. We see our selves and our laughable negligibility in the void, but also a preeminently sovereign intensity hidden in the nigredo and it is this dual realization that generates anxiety, profound to the point of nausea. The realization of the power of darkness is the recognition of //the exponential multiplicity of all which will never be known - VC//, and //what more do you want, o soul? And what else do you search for outside? - St. John of the Cross//
The realization that our shadow, and not our light, is the shape of god; that the supreme power motivating the infinite clockwork of heaven is the supreme negation of nihil : sublimation of Self into Black. The mystics chase possession and cure themselves - and afterward count themselves among the dead, a pinprick nothingness among a field of undifferentiated dark matter. This heretical reversal is a circular inversion, a being-in-the-world being-turned-inside-out, the alignment with a black universe that is the [ur/un]ground for the Great Death called sunyatta.
//Unbearable, isn't it? The suffering of strangers, the agony
of friends. There is a secret song at the center
of the world, and its sound is like razors
through flesh. - Pinhead, Hellraiser//
//To have a body is to suffer. - Bodhidharma//
//Who holds the devil, let him hold him well, he hardly
will be caught a second time. - Dr. Faustus//
Friction: the body is gripped by ghosts and the grasping distorts the mirror. The black universe is nothing more than reflection, harshly illuminating the nothing inside and projecting it onto the firmament. We mistake a glimpse into a hole for a self; staring into deep space with telescopic lenses has replaced the sensation of existing as an infinite space - we no longer recognize that it is us we are looking at. The resistance to this recursive realization accretes on us; a body forming from layers upon layers of fear: of the dark, of separation, of differentiation.
Dreaming of arresting decay is already a misunderstanding: to hold the true image fast we must nail ourselves to the cross - god is not dead, we are, and this recognition shreds liminal boundaries as easily as it does the spirit and flesh on either side. We must nail ourselves to the cross for god is not dead: god is death, and rebirth and re-death is the passage through the secret webwork of the underworld that inscribes the negative image, penetrating darkness to reveal Black. The mouth of Yama opens onto the nunc stans: the standing NOW is held tightly by hidden teeth, constricting and compressing carbon-based lifeforms into lapis philosophorum. To paraphrase Alan Watts, as long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, the wretched earth will conceal the black universe.
//For what remains of the representable if the object is to
evade representation? What remains is to represent
the conditions of this evasion. - Samuel Beckett, Disjecta//
//bathe in the horror that the blood of time carries
with the plague, and befoul yourself with
worship - Sunn O))), Bàthory Erzsébet//
//For we know that all creation keeps on groaning
together - St. Paul, Romans 8:18-22//
Dark matter : dark meaning : inverse topology : non-tology : Black had already taken its apophatic unshape before the beginning of time. Black is the deep sphera of non-differentiation where tomb and womb become smeared as if soaked with acetone. At this depth there can be no delimitation of Black to color, as we sink below the surface of the light - where no light reaches, everything is Black, and one may come to forget the barrier between inside and outside. The ontological primacy of Black is the corporeality of the Warp and Plex and sinew behind the World; the screen upon which the light plays is a necrotic purgatory whiteness marking the stagnation of the material. Light and life is but a transient flicker on the vault: //They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. -Samuel Beckett//
Light does not exist at an oppositional end of a linear spectrum from blackness, nor does it emerge from a field of blackness in an evolutionary gesture, nor does it remain when blackness is cleansed.
Light is color corrupted, burning up on reentry into Black: the spectacle that traps the gaze and ruins our nightvision: a negentropic plague haunts anything that clings to the light.
Light is color corrupted, burning up on reentry into Black: the spectacle that traps the gaze and ruins our nightvision: a negentropic plague haunts anything that clings to the light.
Everywhere light exists, Black grips.
Everywhere, light slips.
Black out the light - be what seeks to become secret for //only the secret sees into the secret like Black in Black - Francois Laruelle//
