The Dark Room

On separateness

There is a limit everyone knows and no one has ever seen. What you feel, only you feel. What you think stays inside until you say it, and what comes across is words — not the thinking itself. The world is there, you are here, and between the two runs a line that begins nowhere and ends nowhere. Separateness is not a thought you ever adopted; it is the state you wake up in. Even that limit is called chosen here — limitation, says The Philosophy of Infinity, is a chosen experience. Which is why one sentence from its footnotes comes first. ‘Chosen does not mean blameworthy; many choices are not recognized as choices.’

The name above this text, meanwhile, does not bode well. A dark room is the place you did not want to enter as a child; dark is where sight ends and the filling in begins. But English closed the space between those two words long ago. Written as one, the dark room is the darkroom — the room where photographs are developed. There the dark is neither a lack nor a threat; it is the working condition. Turn on the light too soon and develop the sheet: what you get is not more but less — an even black, because paper that sees everything at once can no longer distinguish anything. Whatever appears in that room appears thanks to the dark. This text is about the limit from a moment ago, and it borrows that room to look at it.

Where the limit separates can be asked at two depths. The first lies in matter. Ask physics where you end and the world begins, and it points to no partition. In its strictest description — quantum field theory — individual particles are local condensations of fields that are everywhere. The vacuum there is not emptiness but the quietest setting of something that runs on. None of that proves oneness; images like these rhyme at best. But this much does rhyme: whoever looks for the limit in matter does not find it there.

The second depth lies in experience, and there this site has a witness. The Realisation of an Extraordinary Self-Image reports what happened when the demarcation dissolved: experiences ‘blended seamlessly into one another like the colours of a rainbow’, and it was both at once, blissful and terrifying. Once, the limit fell away for someone, and what he brought back was not only news of a freeing: without a limit, more fades than the partition between inside and outside — everything that could ever be distinguished slides together. The same text calls the experience of separateness ‘anchored only in our representation of the outside world’. That does not make the experience less real — ‘as real as any other’, says The Realisation — but it does say where it lives. Not in matter; in the picture we carry of the world.

Hear that, and you may think the limit is a mistake, then — something to see through, and be done with. The Deep End of this site says otherwise. In The Rock a sculptor is at work: ‘every blow takes something away, and what it says above all is: not this.’ A figure does not arise despite the leaving out; it is made of it. Escher cut a print of exactly that, Circle Limit IV, in which light and dark figures fill the plane together; no line in it belongs to either alone. The same contour closes one figure and opens the other; take one away, and both go. The line from the beginning is such a contour: it draws you, and it draws the world.

The Swerve says the same thing, with Lucretius’ rain — drops falling parallel, all of them, always. ‘Nothing would ever happen that way: no collision, no connection, no world — rain, and nothing more.’ Until one swerves and strikes another. There the world begins. There is something only where something stands apart from something else. The limit does not break the world into pieces; it makes something determinate appear. In the darkroom that is called exposure — light, but in measured doses. The dark has no source; only light can be let in. Almost all of it is held back; what does reach the paper falls where it is aimed. Everything at once would have given black. And what holds for the paper holds for the light — in reverse: everything at once is white there, not black. The Realisation describes the limit falling away as colours blending into one another; carried through, that movement ends in white, and run backwards it shows why there are colours at all. White is everything at once, and everything at once cannot be distinguished. Only apart is there colour to see.

Nowhere does the limit land harder than in pain. Pain is what can least be shared. Compassion exists, and it holds — though the word itself promises more: com-passion, suffering with. The literal suffering-with takes on no one’s pain, and that is exactly where the limit runs. Everything above this may be true — from the limit to the colours — and from inside it cannot be accepted. That sentence stands here at full strength; no but comes after it. Everything above this explains that in a world of forms there is such a thing as against. Why this against, in this life, in this person — about that it says nothing, and any text that lets the first sound like an answer to the second becomes cruel at that moment.

The Dream knows why there is no distance to be had from within. ‘With an illusion you can take a step back. With the dream you cannot; you are standing in the middle of it.’ The middle is not a fault, it is a place; whoever stands there does nothing wrong. One sentence lies within reach here, and this text leaves it where it lies: ‘it doesn’t matter’. Only one mouth can say it, and only afterwards; from any other mouth, at any earlier moment, it does exactly the damage it denies.

Nowhere does the limit look more final than at death. The curtain falls, and the house no longer sees the actor. Of the actor, the house never saw more than what came across, and now nothing comes across to the house. More than that, the house has never established — feared, at most, or hoped. Whoever still hears something after the curtain hears what no one else hears — no less real, but not for the house. Sight is what a curtain takes away. ‘A veil is not a limit’, says Necessity; whether the curtain is a veil, the house does not know. This page stays in the house. Gone from sight is not the same as gone.

In the darkroom the negative hangs drying first. No one would choose it as it is — everything that was light is dark there; everything that was dark, light — and yet nothing is missing: it is the complete image, with the values reversed. The witness, looking back on his own dark room, uses that form. His paranoia, writes The Realisation, was ‘the recognition of all-encompassing connectedness, given a negative reading’. That sentence could only be written afterwards, when there was light again — and only by the one who had stood in that dark. This room promises no one a print. Whether an image ever comes up in someone’s dark, no one knows from outside — and from inside, only afterwards.

The room you never wanted to enter and the room where images come into being stand one space apart in English — and English closed that space long ago. Not because the dark has a purpose, but because without the dark nothing ever comes to light. Perhaps the question is not where the limit separates, but what could never have been seen without it.

Kinship, recognized afterwards: Spinoza, who wrote in a letter to Jarig Jelles that form is determination, and determination negation; and the via negativa, the old road that approaches what has no limit only in negations — again and again: not this.