The Dark Is Not a Metaphor

As an artist and writer, I try to express the universe as physics describes it. When I write that "the dark is the ground" I mean that literally. Most of what exists is not luminous. Ordinary, shining matter in the form of stars, gas, dust and worlds — is a minority component in a universe dominated by dark energy, dark matter, and vast reaches of near-empty space. Dark is the actual ground condition from which light briefly appears. The chiaroscuro technique beautifully expresses this truth. The dark is the ground. Light is real, but it is not evidence of any purpose. The darkness is not evil; the light is not salvation. Both are natural outcomes of the same indifferent processes.

The Dark Ground

The universe was dark before we named it, and will be darker still when we are done with our naming.

Light does not oppose the dark. It interrupts it — briefly.

Consciousness is perhaps the universe's least necessary experiment.

Progress: the magnificent story we tell ourselves while entropy waits, indifferent and exact.

The darkness requires no argument. It simply continues.

To call oneself a nihilist is still to care about the name.

Every form is a temporary negotiation with formlessness. Formlessness ultimately wins every negotiation.

We were not extinguished. We were concluded.

Hope is the refusal to read the composition correctly — to insist on the light while ignoring the ratio of dark to light.

The cosmos does not know the word tragedy. That word is ours, and it will leave with us.

Shadow is not the absence of light. Light is the interruption of shadow. The difference is everything.

Meaning was always a local phenomenon — brief, provincial, and already fading at the edges.

What preceded us was silence. What follows will be the same silence, unaware of the interruption.

I am not pessimistic. I am proportionate.

Structure does not resist entropy. It postpones it, briefly, and we call that postponement civilization.

We lit the dark and called it history. The dark was not altered. The dark was not even watching.

The star does not shine for you. It burns because burning is what stars do before they stop.

We speak of what we leave behind. As though the dark were a room that would remember the furniture.

Every philosophy that ends in comfort has stopped too soon.

The atom does not grieve its dissolution. Only the arrangement does — briefly, and only while it can.

We were not placed here. We happened here. The distinction is the whole of it.

To call the universe indifferent is almost to flatter it. Indifference implies a subject doing the ignoring.

Extinction is not the opposite of existence. It is existence, completing itself.