1001 Nights Cast

Where there is no light, one does not see: both a fact and a lie. True and untrue. Silence is darkness: true only so long as one is unable to speak or to see. To hear in the dark and see in the silence: one and the same.

He knows these things to be true because he has spent so much time looking into the darkness and is struck, always, by how different the darkness can look and how it sometimes can sound. He is struck, always, by how the darkness seems alive and breathing, deep and invasive, which is why he sometimes sits with his eyes closed instead. In this way he tries to push back against it, to make some room for himself, but this only sometimes works.

Mostly what happens is that he stares down the darkness until he can’t bear it anymore, until quiet rings loud and close and he can find no light to see by.

There are so many things he sees, strange half-dreams, but in the light he can hardly remember what they were. Real and true but also ephemeral, he tries to hold onto the faces that arise out of the darkness, but even with his eyes closed, they are gone as soon as the light arrives. He wonders what to make of them. He wonders if they might be ghosts. He wishes that they were, but he knows that they are not.

He knows this to be true because something about the darkness is tuned to the frequency of his heart and in that dim silence he hears his true name. Something rises from his heart to meet the darkness, like a secret impulse that comes alive at the end of the light. They are not ghosts. They might be his secrets.

There are so many secrets, half-broken and damaged, that he thinks the darkness can hardly contain them all. Yet somehow it seems to. And in this silent and living space his secrets breathe for the first time since he set to work forgetting them. Here he can see for the first time the shapes of his constant familiars, and for the first time he can see that he is not afraid.

He knows that this is true because he feels no impulse to flood them with light. He feels for the first time ready to move around in this spacious darkness through the path of his forgetting. In the darkness he can see as well as his heart will allow. For so long it was his eyes that were weaker than his fragile heart, but now, finally, he sees.