The Dark Ground
Light Out of Dark
A question I keep returning to is whether light and dark are genuinely distinct things, or whether the distinction is less certain than the way I've been drawing it.
I have called light an interruption of the dark — and I stand by that framing as far as it goes. The ground is not altered by what it briefly produces. But interruption carries an implication: that light arrives from somewhere other than the ground itself. That isn't quite right.
Stars form from cold gas and dust collapsing under gravity. They burn through nuclear fusion — an entropy process, the star spending down its potential toward a more disordered state. When the fuel is gone, the star dies, scattering heavy elements into the surrounding dark, which becomes the cloud from which the next generation of stars may form. The sequence is: darkness, briefly light, darkness again. Thus, the light was always the dark, in a temporarily organized form. It doesn't arrive from outside the ground. It is the ground's own activity.
Darkness is the noun. Light is the verb. Light is what darkness temporarily does. Not two entities in proportion — one substance, and its occasional burning activity. The burning doesn't alter the ground any more than a wave alters the ocean. The ocean was always doing the waving.
This brings me to an edge: something close to monism. There may be only one thing, and it sometimes burns. The burning is real — as real as anything. But it is the one thing being briefly, locally, something other than what it overwhelmingly and permanently is. I don't know what to do with that except continue to contemplate further.