Whatever happened to Merlin? I’m the only one who knows. I followed him to the end, because he was my teacher – and I loved him. With nowhere to go, love becomes grief. Unless memory is somewhere. I remember the day he found me, the very day he raised from the worm-dirt of an old battlefield the ghost of Arthur Rex…
He watches us in the beforeness of the Dark. From before he is born. From before the world begins. Before time begins. He watches us, the Dark Dweller.
The sulk of fog. Shadow-footed moonbeams. Ruined trees. It’s hard to tell what’s real. The decrepit garden in faltering moonlight unravels mist dense as a tray of burning incense or the risen dead noiselessly reaching for the hereafter.
Darkness is without shadow. Light stands alone and alone casts shadows. They will not see it. In their curving world, light reigns. The radiant kingdom of empty. The luminous realm of absence. See it! No shadow without light.
O Dark Dweller in the black, the black inside night, the black behind all eyes, the speechless black in our bones, speak!
Destruction is the Dark Dweller’s only utility. And so, we must meet him with the indestructible heart of a woman who loves – truly loves. Merlin’s mother loved with such a heart. She had married the divine, which suffers all for love.
Memory cuts life into little big pieces, trying to re-member the corpse and undo death. But the walls of time have fallen. After death, our light appears in a different darkness than the body.
High above, something turns its face toward us. The Dark Dweller tastes feathers burning. The rebellion in heaven? He says there is no heaven. On the subject of religion, he’s a caution to mad dogs. Don’t be fooled.
In the beforeness of the Dark, the stars’ busy engines are there, the power of all the suns is there. But not the light. The light stands apart, having already arrived everywhere else. The light stands apart. Time and space are its shadows.
Lovers eternal, ugly and beautiful, pluck and intelligence, man and woman. These are the crossed beginnings, opposites attracting, coupling, fusing into something luminously new. Such is why lovers are dangerous to each other. Love is the floor of the sun.
Prayer, more intimate than a secret, an incantation for overcoming, untamed love of the impossible, the warmth of a dream, prayer touches the creaturely self with listening.
The Dark Dweller did not make swords. He makes wounds to fit the sword.
He shares our atoms and our wet brains in the black behind our eyes. He feels into our world with his darkness. He feels into the black of our blood and deeper into the black of our bones. He feels us chewing earth to a scream. Until terror clots our cries to silence. And then, in one black instant, atoms and wet brains believe the Dark Dweller into being.
Light leans on its shadow.