Beyond Starlight: Beauty On the Edge of Oblivion
As different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire… — Emily Brontë
Life is lived between fire and ice… Skies are where ‘ifs’ haunt space, whether it’s the city looming over the sea, or the keyboard beneath your fingers, everything apart from us feels like it could be. Night justifies the owl, but it’s Dawn that breaks darkness’s possibilities and bids the owl sleep. Embers glow softly after a raging fire, while ice burns Summer-tongues, even if it tastes sickly sweet. Everything is shaped by what it’s not… Gray doesn’t lie between black and white, not when yellow adds richness to it, just as mice are neither here nor there, but everywhere and nowhere. We stand between everything, but there’s no middle ground, no measurement for anyone’s distance from inspiration or oblivion. Between fire and ice, there could be anything, but ice is still water and fire dances on plasma. Even outer space is punctuated by planets, questioned by spiraling galaxies and Ended by black holes. Destruction is shaped by what it destroys…
Each painted sign along the road Will melt away in source tags and in code… — …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
Thoughts take space, too… Synapses fire, like a storm bottled into Being. Hands typing words play through emptiness, this index finger giving rise to that pinky and thumb, in a manic performance heard only by one. Birds articulate the sky, dashing through Winter-winds, while scribbling along Summer thermals, before they’re shaken by consonant-currents. Oblivion dances along… Spaces between words and living things are mirages, ever-shimmering and unreachable, since every choice isn’t quite what was expected, no matter how near or far. There’s no grasping these chasms, not when every movement displaces what seemed so open, so free. We move through space and space flees from us, everlastingly… Horizons are such stuff emptiness dreams of, but it’s a body of water or land that makes it so, even if air and matter sleep apart…because of it. And yet we invite emptiness in, through every breath, revivifying the same lungs that expel what fills them. Between something and nothing, life carries on…
Only entropy comes easy… — Anton Checkhov
Entropy ripens fruit, too… Disorder cools a scalding dish, just as it tics away at every living thing in the world, relatively speaking. Music is proof that entropy finds mathematics, since a good song would never find fluidity without making its own cold-theory’s face melt. Entropy in the Universe is always increasing, pulling things apart, chillingly, but the Sun burns on, in spite of its dark destiny. Things drift apart, even from themselves… Horizons keep their secrets, while spaces between skip along, through each letter and step, every breath, embracing everything that displaces them. And yet…beauty lies in the limited, haunts spaces without names and knows how to make E = mc2 embrace, uniting fire and hearts, growth and decay. At the ever-expanding limits of the Universe, far beyond mortal reach, beauty is frozen beyond Time, drifting into Spaces of its own. Absolute-zero turns primordial dust to shapes beyond naming, far too breathtaking to ever take form in skies, or to be seen by starlight. In the abysmal darkness, emptiness embraces beauty…
Hayden Moore
