Mutatis Mutandis

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

-Antonio Gramsci

Far below the world: darkness.

Humans tend to define darkness as an absence. When light is taken away, darkness remains. A dark room can be lit again, if the curtains are pulled back or the fire is banked. That darkness is a waiting darkness, a darkness that knows it is temporary at best. That darkness exists to cease. When it flees from a kindled flame or the warm rays of the sun, it knows it will be back.

Not this darkness. This is the darkness that has never known light, a selfish darkness that claims the deep places of the earth, the caverns and tunnels and underground seas. It presses in, cloying, thick, heavy, a darkness as thick and black as ink. In this darkness, one can see the ultimate folly of light and the impossibility of its triumph. This is the ground state of the universe. Light is an aberration, a fleeting imperfection. It is to be chased off wherever it appears, its hateful illumination snuffed, so that the secrets of the world may be preserved from prying eyes. No light has ever sullied this darkness. It stretches back continuously to the dawn of time in an unbroken black ribbon. It will outlast the stars and, in the distant future, reclaim the universe. It lies dreaming of the time when it may extinguish the usurping light and return to the quiet order of endless night.

In the stygian gloom, something moves.