Darkness After Eden
Dark Star Crashes
A star shatters, exploding across the night sky, showering its body in particle below. The Dead play an ode to it, the abstractly connected, jam-on-the-beyond of Dark Star, a song made of loosely connected trajectories playing off each other by distance, filling in each other’s empty between as they trace ghostly lines across the sky, enough overlap to make an ephemeral line visible to the naked eye.
The crystalline nightfall becomes sand, twinkling particles of a once-solid mass, now scattered in fluidlike piles about the rockplains (the desert is born). Regarding the event, the lyrics directly implicate a cloud, as the particles are thrown about, the ocean of sand, movement passing through it as waves and whorls.
Such is the action of blizzards, sandstorms. The ground is made of particles only slightly removed from wholeness - still the thousand shards falling from cataclysm, not yet solidified into any mutation. One kneels in the endless dunes and sees the diamonds roll across their hands, looking up at the heavens, down at such a basic substance, as foundational as water, matter into an abstracted form. When turbulence comes across this, it goes through the same as through water - as a medium. Water cannot be reduced in its quality by force, and neither can sand. Force instead makes waves, storms, as each particle’s micromovements average to grand macromovements.
This is the fundamental logic of masses of particles, that of the flood, the storm, where masses of particles form a mass of raw material Real in water, in sand.
The storm comes over the landscape as a storm of Earth. The stable things of the world are themselves subjected to the same logic. The dust storm is contagious, buildings torn to their own elementary particles that join the whipping winds as sand, as dust. The landscape is dissolved as the solid and fragile departs to join its essence in their ecstasy of movement.
Where the dust storm resides over the landscape, a new landscape has been made. Akin to Pynchon’s Zone, a world once solid, now whipped to chaos, each thing broken down to its particular form and thrown about on the broad movements and infinitely tiny chaoses. The zone of chaos creates a temporary movement of total freedom, that bottom of the dynastic cycle where the country is reduced to nomadic violence. It’s here that things are resettled and over time, trends solidify, leading to a new state of things with the winds settle, a bright dawn rising after all had truly been made dark in the deepest part of night.
Dying From Home, And Lost
The introductory scene of Mr. C in Twin Peaks: The Return shows headlights penetrating darkness on a winding road, blue LED beams of uncannily new vehicles forcing themselves into the night. The dark of the wilderness falls as presence, like a fog that boils up from the ground.
The blue light echoes the light seen elsewhere. Sarah Palmer goes through cigarettes and vodka in front of a television burning the greyblue static of nightvision, a nature program where a lion mauls a gazelle in electric night-color. Johnny writhes on the ground as a toy with its soul ripped out and replaced with electric wiring and light crackles his name while his mother is assaulted and robbed behind him by the spawn of Mr. C.
The light of the eyes - behind Evil Cooper, it’s the color of industry, those orange lights that fuzz with the whims of dying concrete. In the ending of Inland Empire, theatre lights are turned around to pure-white, shining backwards to unite the two lost into one soul. Music plays reminiscent of Friends Past Reunited, and we hear what almost sounds like ascension.
The light of a soul struggles against darkness, perpetually. Headlights shine forwards against the wilderness, becoming part of the darkness in themselves. The darkness doesn’t so much as part as it makes a place for you, the headlights making a small ordered space where one can slot themselves into a shadow or silence and then quietly disintegrate as it waves goodbye, flickering and dying and leaving you to death. The Local 58 video You Are On The Fastest Available Route shows this, where a car drives along to a navigation computer’s direction, ending up in deepest emptiness that inevitably takes-in the driver.
Quiet dusk comes early, as the vision darkens. One of the middle symptoms of Alzheimer’s, the light of the world fades away as confusion takes hold, vision darkening like creeping drunkenness. The album description on Everywhere At the End of Time mentions grey mist forming and fading away. Memories appear like burning paper photographs, solid objects with creeping darkness where the fire consumes with embers.
And here, we lose what it means to be human. Stage 3 is the last of the lucid stages, the last to have recognizable songs, before the long ambient progressions of the next half of the album. In these stages, order unravels finally. Musical ideas begin and cannot complete, complete incorrectly, trail off, attempt to find their footing only to stumble and falter into a base mangle of noise.
Mists overtake the solid and pollute it, presence becoming a dark mass of passage into emptiness. Rocks once clung to are hollowed out from their surface darkening, their former solidity going the way of Hell Sirens - once a swelling orchestral triumph, now a shattered nightmare of a war too terrible to have been experienced, bombs and sirens collapsing like burning buildings to lead one down to darkness.
Grey mists form and fade away. Shadows deepen, darks intensify until the solid world is overtaken. The writhing mass of black and green on the cover of Stage 3 shows the vision, the elderly person sitting in their armchair and looking out on a world that darkens and in darkening, distorts, the light patches coming out of joint as they lose their coherence with each other. The shape that emerges is one of passage. The once-beloved, ordered world has become a dense wilderness, vanishing islands of thin lucidity divorced from context or meaning in the twisting growth. When the branches of the tortured mass that once was the world do part, all that lies beyond is an infinite emptiness.
Burning memories are no longer memories. A common symptom is sudden shifts in personality, as those memories become only dark forests of passage one has to navigate through to reach emptiness.
Hidden Sea Buried Deep
In the beginning, the Earth was without form and void, a lightless abyss of waters moving ceaselessly. The creation was an act of stilling and differentiating, where the dark mass of material was developed upwards into more specific forms, more solid orders. At the apex of this process was Eden, the world as perfectly ordered, which was then shattered, beginning a slow descent, all things cast out to the wilderness to slowly die back to that primordial ocean.
It’s through this line of thinking that Augustine derives his theodicy. Evil doesn’t emerge, but rather occurs, as God’s light lapses across the vast emptiness of the wilderness. Mankind broke free of the divine order and brought the rest of creation with them. Through this, shadows emerged, as sunlight recedes further and further from the source. Sin comes on the edges, corners where the light just misses, empty buildings where the electricity’s gone out, boarded up windows. Mankind walking across the sand after Eden looks down and sees himself reflected in sin by the castings of light’s absence. The convenience store where the beings of the Black Lodge hold court becomes the throne of mankind, - the realm of darkness, within darkness, to cut off more light with each day.
Dualism of this type often becomes, in higher theologies that take it for granted, not a regular system of presence and absence as in orthodoxy, but a divinely opposed substance - not the lack of light, but antilight, not emptiness, but antimatter. It’s seen in Dark Souls, where the primordial human, Manus, is awoken and tortured by the people of Oolacile. Through this, they uncovered the Abyss - a positive dark, a force of dark existing unto-itself, beyond mere negation. This is what lies at the heart, what was extracted to eventually plunge the town into its black mists, from the primordial man. Oolacile sorceries are mentioned as being particularly close to matter, to humanity, hitting hard and bluntly, and casting out from a more primal origin. From nature, made from the darkest places where nature exists without divine light, the Abyss originates. This substance is the sandstorm, matter made to act as foundational, darkest matter, the substance of the primordial waters without form and void.
In Twin Peaks The Return, the abyss is summoned into the glass box. As tides begin to shift behind the scenes a violence of darkness appears, presaging Cooper’s fall through that same box. A horrid fetus screams out like Manus in the grave, tearing the two lovers to shreds.
These same shrieks as the box-fetus are heard from the voice of the Arm. Evolved to its pure form, the severed physicality is an abstraction of the limb it once was, a singular soul-head atop a buzzing neural tree. The arm has been abstracted and as such, comes out as a native of the abyss, unleashed where it is, the brute arm of humanity. Like the sorceries uncovered by Oolacile, this abyss is the human itself, what lies at its bottom in Manus, echoed in all parts of his design - that blunt body of the arm without divinity or soul. This is the fetus native to darkness, beings born in Hell and as such, of it.
Later, Sarah Palmer shows the abyss again. As a locus point of evil unleashed onto the world, her personhood has become taken over by the abyss, made into a native of it. She removes her face and shows her interior - the howling fog from the glass box and the shrieking fetus of man within. A truck driver is torn in shrieks the same as the lovers were.
Piercing the Cloud of Unknowing
The writer of the Cloud of Unknowing instructs the reader to immerse themselves in a dark cloud of unknowing, silencing themselves completely to the wilderness of darkness. Only there, the text reads, can they know God, as their soul’s light and the divine light of God are able to meet each other in the purity of silent contemplation.
We then retreat to the wilderness. The desert after the duststorm has reduced it all to sand, the black earth in the spaces where light cannot reach. Within shadows, we find the terminus of all motion from Eden. Mankind is cast outwards into the wilderness, doomed to entropy, culminating in that final resting point of least motion, the waters yet to be divided before creation, all things reduced to their most basic particles, the dead abyss.
Jesus entered it twice. First in the wilderness, where the devil tempted him with promises of a higher point of entropy, before decay had reduced all to the barren desert Jesus wandered in. Jesus refused, venturing off into the sands, to seek darkness, the most barren recesses where all motion had quieted down to the bottom of it all.
In there, a substance is found - the substance of sand, the abyss. At the bottom of entropy, we find the alchemist’s lead.
This lead, the dark mass after decay becomes the rotten material, the soil of the wilderness. The formula of INRI, of the resurrection is a formula of upwards transformation which begins with the black Earth at the core.
This blackness is created from decay, as entropy and sin fall away to those realms of pure shadow and even that disintegrates into a solid mass of least-energy, the heat-death matter at the end of the line. This lead is placed into the furnace, where solvents from Hell and coagulants from Heaven wash it back and forth in a great firing, transmuting it upwards into the philosopher’s stone.
Such is the power of divinity. The divine spark still exists to ignite and it energizes the lead as an external power, from without, bring it closer to the source, reversing its long fall in movement back towards Eden.
The leaden flesh is burned upwards. One enters the darkness and then fires it, ascending it. The mortification of crucifixion is an alchemical furnace, a great firing of the leaden body to transmute it upwards. Nature is then reborn whole as it ascends, darkness being returned to its original state, reversing the fall, reversing entropy.
Bibliography
Dark Star, the Grateful Dead (various performances)
The 2019 polar vortex (personal experience)
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Twin Peaks, David Lynch & Mark Frost
Everywhere at the End of Time, The Caretaker
Autopsies of the brains of Alzheimer’s patients
Various artworks by Alzheimer’s patients, ranging from the famous self-portrait series by Williaam Untermohlen to large collections of cognitive test drawings
Augustinian answers to the problem of theodicy
Dark Souls, FromSoft
The Cloud of Unknowing, Anonymous
Martin Cabello III’s Tiktok videos