Anamnesis
—The Heresy of Light—
Before light, there was no darkness—
only the fathomless unarticulated,
where neither here nor elsewhere
had yet divided the infinite.
Then one photon,
an infinitesimal apostate of the void,
crossed the primordial silence—
and existence acquired
its first distinction.
Here.
Beyond it:
Elsewhere.
Thus distance was born,
and time, that patient devourer,
received its first wound.
A star kindled.
The universe became capable
of remembering itself.
We named this creation.
Perhaps it was the first betrayal
of the invisible.
For ever since,
we have mistaken the name
for the thing named:
we call a mountain mountain
and think we have contained its immensity;
a flower flower
and mistake taxonomy for perfume;
we draw constellations through ancient fires
and praise ourselves for discovering
what the heavens never inscribed.
Yet the unseen is not emptiness.
It is plenitude exceeding apprehension—
reality overflowing
the narrow vessel of the perceiver.
Even love refuses our jurisdiction.
Learn the beloved's face,
the genealogy of every scar,
the cadence of every silence—
and still, when that face withdraws,
there remains an inward country
to which knowledge has no road.
Perhaps this is the secret wound of absence:
presence gives the senses an object;
absence reveals
that the beloved was never an object
to begin with.
And death—
what if gone means only
beyond the jurisdiction of sight?
A star may perish
before its radiance reaches us;
yet centuries after its furnace is ash,
its last light enters a living eye.
So extinction is not necessarily silence.
What has ceased to burn
may yet arrive.
What has become dust
may remain luminous in consequence.
We are, perhaps,
the afterlife of vanished fires.
Therefore, when my own light falters,
do not say I have entered darkness.
Say only:
he has crossed beyond
the vocabulary of sight.
For darkness was never light's opposite.
It was the immeasurable
within which light,
having committed its first heresy,
was still learning
what it meant
to be seen.
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