Close your eyes and breathe deep.

Do whatever you must to relax, please.

Tell me, what do you see?

nothing? ... the dark.

Do you know what you can do with that darkness behind your eyes? No, don't move. Sit still, close your eyes and breathe deep.

In this darkness there are no boundaries, no bondage to the senses. In this darkness which is everywhere yet nowhere many wonders are to be wrought. Miracles beget themselves.

Can you float in that space which is no space? Feel the dark within your eyes moving with sporadic flashes of colour. Shift into that darkness and drift with no care, at ease with all.

Where are you? Nowhere... or any place you want to be.

Open your eyes.

What? Here you are drifting in this non-existent darkness, you have no eyes? I will concede this - your eyes are open; you are not using them.

What? Will I please make some sense? but who is it drifting somewhere which is nowhere and eyeless, at that?

Have you no imagination?

The dark is the canvas of creation. Naught but love will suffice to mark it.

Here can I imprison you within a sphere of emerald. The cutting of the stone is sweeter than the expiration of orgasm. I can suspend you within one facet on the eye of a fly. You shall see nothing but filth and the eaters thereof. I may clothe you with the body of an eagle, and you will know the embrace of sky and cloud and sun. The dizzy giddiness of soaring, enraptured spirals through the gorgeous blue. Or I may enshroud you within the flesh of a jackal. So shall you know the hunger of the moon, and the cold distance of night. Or a fish with rainbow scales, caught up and eaten by men.

Behold! We are come upon a stout oaken door midst a billowing cloud of misty darkness.

Go ahead. Open the door.

What lies beyond? If you need ask you shall never know. There is a burst of azure, then gold. Now random colours against a dull haze. This becomes a verdant mist through which snakes of gold light chase each other.

There is a voice.

"I am life, love; the rapacious light of the sun."

"I am the wash of flame engulfing thee at orgasm, the blinding light of utter ecstasy. The uprushing flight of a spirit afire with love. The drifting of the ash from a spirit annihilated in Her fires."

"I am the gnawing desire to know. The mad love for beauty unattainable; the endless pursuit of vision through dream. Grasping always, yet somehow askew."

"I am a voice, sweet and subtle within thee, ever murmuring yet scarcely heard."

"IAGNA is the name of my name and the reflection of my name."

Now the mists are gold with snakes of green light chasing themselves.

Each serpent stops and takes its tail into its mouth. The serpents diminish rapidly, each to a point.

The mists turn a deep blue. Each snake appears as a golden mote of light.

The mists disperse. The nuclear light of the stars appears within the vault of night.

We are back in the imaginary nothingness, the dark. Before you is a door of cold, grey stone. It returns you to the world you know.

©2004 by Daniel Kemp, from The Book of Night