darkness

I tremble with primitive panic.1 The vision returns: the river is running; the sun is suspended above the horizon and the sky is red.2 The sun does not appear to move, but we know it moves—our vessels tell us it is certain. The vessels track the sun’s position with incredible accuracy. Now is the perfect time to take a photo of your face. Now is the time to leave the cave and pay attention, there is something happening outside. Feel the hot air that the screen foretold. The construction of the Great Net is underway. As the glass threads are woven together the sun slides nearer to the limit we have defined for it and for ourselves. The screens of our vessels light up in unison. Our glass minds tense and shriek.

  • Hurry.

We worry about the inversion of the world. Hung out to dry; abandoned by God and forsaken by Reason. We worry about arriving and not arriving. We worry about the shadow of the Earth;3 about the counter-logic of night.

I imagine that even in the night, the air will still be hot. A hot wind is blowing my vessel toward a gathering of boulders a little way down the river. Something else is there. The wind overpowers the motors of my vessel.

I hesitate. The portion of the Net that I was working on slides off the glass surface of the screen and into the water. A gleam of red before it is swallowed by green in motion.

  • My hand moves to switch off the screen.

  1. “There have always been two kinds of arcadia: shaggy and smooth; dark and light; a place of bucolic leisure and a place of primitive panic.”  —Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory ↩︎

  2. “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. … Red is a moment in time. Blue constant. Red is quickly spent. An explosion of intensity. It burns itself. Disappears like fiery sparks into the gathering shadow. To warm ourselves in the long dark winter when the red has departed.”  —Derek Jarman, Chroma ↩︎

  3. “For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.” —Ted Chiang, Tower of Babylon ↩︎