On the Edge of Noise and Nothing: Writing Through the Dark

What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark? — Ursula K. Le Guin

Nothingness begins somewhere. Creation weaves stories from the shores of this oblivion, over the sunless sea where imagined worlds hang from the Moon by a thread. Along that thread, words and notes gather like dewdrops, before they’re blown away by winds of uncertainty. Imagined worlds grow but Time constrains them, since songs find their harmony on the brink of silence and the edge of noise. We write into the darkness, always. If the light of the known shined beyond the moment, the horror of the predetermined would devour art, leaving nothing but the expected in its abysmal light. Nothing exists without forsaking all the rest. This is the nature of choice. Creating is an act of Chaos that destroys in order for something to remain. Without this ravenous act, imagined worlds of song and story would collapse in their own too much. Even dragons have limits. But the course of Chaos is all-encompassing and often devours everything: Notes, words and All. Paint remains in the bottles and nothingness takes the form of a blank palette. Noise and an ocean of words turn to relative silence. Chaos reigns. Then we remember that everything comes from this darkness of un-knowing. We reach with a pen or a paintbrush, a breath or a chisel and reach into the dark…

With my lightnin’ bolts a-glowin’ I can see where I am goin’ You better look out below… — Arcade Fire: Wake Up

There’s no looking ahead. Inspired moments play games with Time and Space, making what lies beneath an artist’s creative tool appear like the horizon. But everything unfolds along with us, never beyond, even if we hear that haunting song over the hills and far away. By the time we reach that song, it’s already been sung and another beckons us on, ever-elusive and impossible to reach. In the best of times, that song leaves behind traces of itself, just as winds from yesterday shape the waves of tomorrow. Even waves pass through, never to be retrieved. When fingers fail to find rhythm, the brutal truth of what lies beneath flattens out that imagined horizon, turns songs to noise and words to ciphers of nothing but themselves. We look on, searching for those imagined horizons, listening for the ghostly melody that never ends, since it never began, not when everything is always ‘away’. Nothing is, only was. We write the past into a seeming present, but it’s not the past it seems to be, since the illusion of the present shares its circumstance and influences shapes of creation, giving credence to Ovid’s tales of metamorphoses. Trees speak and streams sing… Creation is a paradox, one that is neither living nor dead, since this action takes place in the twilight of NOW and before, forever gray. No matter what direction the artist’s eyes are looking, they’re always focused ‘down’, down into the gray of this creative paradox, until that act of looking becomes seeing, turning perception inside out. A whole world emerges, within.

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something…but it is not always quite the something you were after. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Sometimes the darkness reaches back. Imagined worlds are as real as the one who experiences them. Reality is far more than measurable distances and elemental compositions. Just ask the brain. Through the eternal darkness of the unknown, there are moments when the future seems to beckon the artist on, whether it’s through that Siren song over the sunless sea, or a glimpse of worlds yet to be imagined. Illusory horizons beneath the creator’s hands are real enough. They have to be, or nothing unsettling would ever exist, not even this sentence. Illusions are the aromas of the imagination. Any good artist knows to follow their noses, even if it leads them astray. These aromatics source from as many ecosystems as there are minds. Without feeling the pull of that faint song, nothing follows but words, notes and impasto without a story. Mountains are only rocks without the wonder of our smallness. We hold our hands out in the dark and something reaches back, just as an Earthsea found Le Guin. Just as something finds someone, nobody knows what that something will be. And yet we reach…

Hayden Moore