Dream d197-s: Instructions Written in Light

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the darkness had been written on.

The garden was behind me now more than around me. I could feel it at my back, the last of its softness, its breathing quality, its willingness to be whatever the eye needed. Ahead the ground was stone-grey and certain. The fire was further along the clearing's edge, and around it I could sense more than see a loose gathering, people-shaped presences at the margin of the light, not yet distinct, not yet named. The sound I had almost heard the night before was more present now, something with a pulse that was not quite a beat but was organized. It moved through the ground as much as the air.

The figure stood between me and the fire, and he was fully present. I could see him clearly. He was a person, a particular person, with a particular way of holding himself that spoke of long practice, of work done by hand over many years. His face was turned toward something he held, and he was looking at it with the attention of someone checking their own work.

What he held was a sheet of shadow. That is the only way I can describe it: shadow with substance, a panel of darkness that had weight and edge. And on its surface, lines of light. Not random light. Written light. Instructions, rendered in luminous script, each line precise and spaced from the next, each character sharp as if pressed rather than drawn. The lines ran across the dark surface and the dark surface held them, and together they were one thing, the writing and the darkness inseparable, each making the other legible.

Lano pressed against my ankle, looking at it.

"Escucha," he said.

I did not know what I was supposed to hear. But I tried. The written light had a quality that was almost audible, almost a frequency. If you looked at it long enough the lines seemed to do something, seemed to enact rather than describe.

The white crane bird stood at the outer edge of where the firelight reached. She was still. Lano's ear turned toward her briefly before returning to the figure.

The figure lowered the panel and held it at his side. He did not offer it to me. He simply let me see it. That was enough.

---

Instructions written in light on darkness. I kept thinking about the relationship between the two: that the dark was not absence, it was ground. Without it the luminous writing would have nowhere to be. And the writing needed to be exact because the darkness was exact. Imprecision on that surface would not be tolerated, would simply disappear. The precision was not decorative. It was structural. What I saw was a system in which every character had to mean something, had to do something, had to produce an effect or it was not worth the light it used. Beauty and function were the same thing. The lines were beautiful because they worked. They worked because they were constrained to work. I have been thinking about what it means to write something that must perform, not only signify. The dark panel knew the difference.