The Light and the Dark

The Light is that which stands in clouds of radiant glory and looks away from life.
The Light loves you. The Light knows you.

But the Light will not *see* you. It will not hear you. You are tainted by the gross physicality of life.
It knows you in the perfection of your soul. It knows you in the deep truth of you. It knows things about you that you’ve never had the chance to live out, nor never will.
It is equations on gematria.
It is a dream of humanity made perfect through good law.
It does not know the tangled mess that life of necessity becomes.

The Dark is the knotted twiggly horror in the gut of the human condition.
It’s reckless.
It’s cognitive errors and the death-fear. It’s carelessness and small-minded negligence. It’s the animal that lives in our flesh. It’s the fact of having flesh at all.
The Dark is everything that makes us what we oughtn’t be.
It’s our folly.
It speaks with our own voices.
The Dark will hear you. It’ll more than hear you. It’ll parrot you back at yourself. Maybe just the parts you say aloud. Maybe the parts you didn’t mean to say at all.

The Magisters of the Dark can have grandeur to them, but to tell you the truth, I think that’s our own pride. That’s the part of us that wants our dark and twisted and grieving side to be something awesome and magisterial, echoing back out. I think if we weren’t so proud they would be as monkeys and parrots to us, chattering back in laughter what they’ve heard us say.
I could be wrong.
Maybe the side of us that walks in emo really is that grand.
The Dark loves every human voice. A little outcast girl is as fab to it as a President — maybe more so, since she needs more help to let her heart’s voice free. It wants everyone to unleash that voice, you know, to stop holding themselves in, to live free and crazed and wicked as the beasts are wicked and an equal to everybody else.
The Dark will set you free.
The Dark will hold you up as you try to fly, will help you get farther and farther from land, and then it will drop you; for the only thing more beautiful to the Dark than your freedom is your using that freedom to overextend yourself and die. Or, to kill yourself in folly or despair, or to tumble helplessly from the ruined cliff of your own ideas.

The Dark doesn’t want anyone to hold you back.
The Dark doesn’t want anyone or anything to get in the way of your *living*.
And the Dark doesn’t want anything to kill you in the end but you.
The Dark is the wind and the laughter that follows a falling suicide, down into the dark.
It doesn’t really understand you, I guess I should observe. Not any more than the Light does. It’s a mad celebration of who you are and your voice and your freedom and your suicide but it’s too blinded by the dark to really give any meaning to it all. It’s barely even aware of *itself* when it’s with you, except inasmuch as you are aware of it. It’s listening to the sound of you much more than your specific words. There’re few creatures in all Creation less capable of grasping that something you are trying to tell them is genuinely important than the Dark.
But that’s okay, the Dark will say.
*You* understand you, don’t you?
Isn’t that enough?


The Light and Dark began in Eden. Adam and Eve and maybe Lilith if she existed were the only human things back then. They were the seed of an Imperial thing.
They were a change in how the Imperial things of the world were going to work.
Instead Eve bit the apple.
It taught her Light. It made the knowledge of self explode in her. It made the will to live, to strive, to be perfect burn inside her. And she could have made herself immortal then. But she wasn’t ready.
She knew better.
It needed time; it was too soon, as precious as life was. She was still a child, she couldn’t be immortal yet.
So she took the apple to Adam instead. It was the right thing to do. You have to understand, it was the right thing to do. She couldn’t have known. It wasn’t her fault any more than it was his.
She didn’t know there was something missing from her wisdom.
The Light never does.
So Adam bit the apple, and the apple taught him Dark.
He bit it and he spit out its seeds and the knowledge of the self exploded in him. He began to want. He began to need. He suddenly had a craving to decide things.
He became wild with it.
He became a namer of things. He became a mad god of power. He was something incredible, back then, and he could have made himself immortal.
But he never did and he never would.
He was possessed by the Dark.
And while they endured and exalted in their transcendence, each to each, and went walking out for the first time into the vast and broader world, the First Lord of the Dark moldered and writhed up from the seeds Adam had left behind him. And he claimed Eden as a Chancel. He made their once-perfect home into the Sable Gardens. He seized and then seared the fruit of immortality away forever from the Earth. How unforgivable, the Dark that cost us life unending!