All That's Best of Dark and Bright...

Ah, it's been longer than I wanted since I wrote here last, had to get settled into the new dorm, figure out a set schedule for life, the usual beginning of semester busy-work. Hopefully I'll have more regular postings here, at least bi-weekly if not weekly, poetry and short stories will appear shortly - especially since I have a ton of poetry ideas written down, and a few beers to help with the inspiration (though wine is typically better for verse!). Anyways, I do have something real to write about, so I'll stop this current ramble and move onto a more pretentious one so I can get some sleep. Speaking of sleep...
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I'm afraid of the dark. I've written about it before, I'm not shy about telling people, at the most I find it frustrating - midnight snacks, or I should say 3 in the morning snacks, are a little less fun when all the shadows in the adjoining room are silhouettes of boogie-men and ghosts. But there isn't much abnormal about my fear, that is, no blatantly illogical reason for this fear. It is not a phobia, since they tend to be debilitating and I am sitting in darkness right now and am perfectly fine. It actually fits in with my personality fairly well.

Let me start with a question: have you ever tried to think of infinity? As in, really considered the end of the endless? In high school, when I started my downward slope into atheism (sorry to give atheism a negative connotation, I just didn't want to become an atheist, I had hoped my wonder and child-like innocence would afford me a God but no such luck - this is all another blog post), I thought about, if there is a God, what is He like, why did He make us, etc. Sometimes my ponderings took me to the question of, even if something did intentionally create us, couldn't something have created that? Which left the inevitable reasoning that something could have created that, and something could have created that, as far back as time can extend (which is a pretty far ways). I would also think of what would happen after the universe died off, entropy took its course, and all the stars faded into black and there was only darkness, the google of years of nothingness and then infinity still to go. Just thinking about these endless progressions though, I would get started and find myself trapped in them, until I grew actually scared and uneasy at considering a time so far beyond myself. Outside the boundary of knowable time sat a world I could not comprehend, and it frightened me.

The thing about infinity is that, when trying to think about it in terms of time, there is the foreseeable future and the conceivable past, things that light can be shed on or at least faintly touch and illuminate, but outside of that there is only an absolute blackness that can't be breached by any realm of the imagination.

I realized why I was scared of the dark when thinking about it one night. It is actually incorrect to say that one is afraid of the dark - darkness itself is never what one is truly afraid of, but what could possibly (or impossibly for that matter) be dwelling in the darkness. Darkness itself will not consume you but the monsters that lie in hiding just might. And what do these monsters look like? They can be anything, from ghosts to vampires to a mysterious stranger waiting along the alleyways. The thing that's frightening about darkness is that anything can be hiding in it. Imagine coming across a doorway that was filled with solid blackness, so thick that if you stuck your hand in it, it would immediately disappear, and you would have to trust by your trembling that they still existed. What would grab at your hand? Perhaps nothing, perhaps just another hand, perhaps a slimy tentacle, perhaps some amorphous mass of flesh and bone. You cannot guess what it could be, you can only dream, and any and every dream could be a possibility.

I couldn't help but think of the relation of blackness, then, to whiteness? If blackness is terrifying because it is infinite, because anything can be called forth from it, why does whiteness not inspire such fear? Can't it be just as infinite, being one solid color? Yet whiteness is often associated with the canvas, with the blank page, with something that's physically solid. The blank easle can be terrifying too, though, in it's own right - does one dare to disturb the pristine perfection already lying there with some self-rightous dash? How does one tell if a sketch is important enough to say of it that it must exist and that others must know of it as well? There is an aspect of limitlessness with whiteness as well, only it is not how far one can reach into it, it is what can one do with it, what can one put on it? What can be created on this whiteness?

Imagine darkness as inspiration, imagination, and whiteness as creation, since every creation needs some sort of inspiration, and for any inspiration to take form, it needs to be created. Drag something from the dark pits of blackness and toss it against a wall of whiteness and you have art - black and white combined in an infinite selection of possibilities.

Yet this infinity can still be terrifying, for what will you find there in the darkness? And once found, exactly how should it be tossed against the white canvas? At every step in the artistic process, for every second between an artist conceiving the bare bones of an idea and the final punctuation mark, there is an overwhelming question: is this right? It is as simple as that, because coupled with that question is the possibility that there is something better, and there is always something better. What if Crime and Punishment had been told by a writer of the Lost Generation, or if Garden State had been done in the golden age of Hollywood? Perhaps the story could not have been conceived the exact same way, but the differences wouldn't necessarily detract from anything, and who knows, perhaps in the new setting there would be some aspect that connects so much closer to the audience. Could this idea have been more complex, more enlightening? Was it told the right way?

How ironic, though, that this chance for infinite possibilities is one of the greatest assets to art as well! It is wonderful to have a thought and let it grow as you would have it, give or take the inevitable conditioning of life. And then to have no boundaries on how this thought should take form in the world! It is a fearful thing to create, but it is a marvelous thing too. I am scared to look into dark closets, fearful of what I might find, and yet I love to close my eyes, and in the darkness of my mind to dream. And I grow anxious as to whether a story sounds right, whether it could be done better, but then if I should feel that the words should be orderly and proper, or tossed wildly with reckless passion, I am able to choose, and how they fall upon the page.

I do not know if there is a God, but perhaps I can be one either way - after all, why need I be fearful of the infinity of the outer universe when I can control the infinity of my own universe?