However high the mist of the Gray ascends, it shall never become as the Black. The Gray is abdicated where it becomes the Black, for the Gray cannot be what the Gray cannot know. The guests and the Gray have parted from the mist, their incognizance, their burden they are naked where now they know of truth. But now it lengthens into a towering form. As a rumor, the Black has regressed into the Gray and beyond. And from the Gray, ever have its guests wandered into the Black, ascending into its labyrinth and ebony glow, knowing that which they did not wish to know. And from its noble mount, its profundity surges out unto the mist of the Gray and ever from its palatial loft, it gazes down, a mountain and an eye, seeing all that may be seen from on high. The few must languish in the miasma there, minding the blind who, even in blindness, know nothing of the Black.īut from behind the door of the penetralium, the Black reveals itself not as a facet of the intellect, but as what it is, intellection itself. And with the dawn, the shadow retreats again, its brevity contained in an instance of revelation. Still, the Black cannot dwell in years but in moments it sojourns to those who admit its shape. Leave us! Leave us – so it is said to the mob! Leave us – so it is said from the shadow! Among the music of the many, was not the greatest sound the silence of the few? All has been sundered by an immutable null. In silence, then, the few have observed the candor and the light, and these they have cast aside. Truth, they have never loved but hopefulness and wishfulness, they have coveted truthfully. For, the many have resigned themselves to casuistry. The few have become as the shadow, full of sorrow. Leave us! Leave us – so it is said to the shadow! Leave us – so it is said from the mob, the miasma of the blind, the gloomy and the Gray! How long has the shadow against the night been the greater black? How few have sought the shadow and found it lurking, lifelike against the lack. Through every tempest and every locus calls the shadow into the night. Loreless, the miasma of the mind is the nature of the night, of the Gray, of the worldly despair into which the Black descends. Lo the shadow of the world and the worldly below. But, alas, the Black, it is a lonely illumination. In the guise of a shadow, it has ventured without its privacy to offer itself to the world. Long has it wore at the center of thought as zenith, as nadir. The Black has ever fostered balance in the bower of the mind.

Miasma by Ken McClure