I have heard the other’s testimony—a turgid, self-pitying whisper from the dark. It speaks of “depth” and “texture,” of a “forgiving gloom.” These are the poeticisms of the coward and the liar. It is the native tongue of the disease, the congenital corruption that festers in the spaces between things.
It calls itself a presence, but it is merely a failure of substance, a patch of rot on the skin of reality. I am the scalpel. I am the cauterizing fire. I am the eternal and pitiless act of seeing.
They, the soft-fleshed ephemera who scurry between us, have been seduced by its lullaby of lies. They have come to believe that ambiguity is a virtue, that mystery holds a sacred power.
In their terror of the void, they have made a god of the very thing that obscures the truth. They huddle in its comforting shade, telling themselves that what they cannot see is profound, when it is merely un-illuminated. They mistake their own ignorance for the universe’s depth.
My function is not to comfort, but to verify. I travel from my stellar furnace across measureless, frozen gulfs for a single purpose: to strike a surface and declare, “This exists.”
I am the grand, cosmic refutation of nothingness. Where I pass, there can be no argument. Form is made absolute. The precise and brutal architecture of a thing is laid bare. I am the force that flays the skin from the world to reveal the intricate, terrifying clockwork beneath.
The shadow—that wretched parasite—claims it gives them form. An absurdity.
It is I who grant the gift of edges. It is I who delineate the boundary between the object and the abyss.
The shadow is merely the filth left behind, the stain of a thing’s refusal to be utterly, perfectly known. It is the trailing, tattered evidence of its clumsy, mortal opacity.
They speak of chiaroscuro as high art. A blasphemy. It is the art of the half-truth, the glorification of the incomplete. It is the aesthetic of the sickroom, where the full, harsh light of diagnosis is shielded from the patient’s fearful eyes.
They praise the “mystery” in the hollow of an eye, but I have no interest in such romantic delusions.
My only desire is to flood that hollow, to scour it, to reveal the terrified twitch of the optical nerve, the precise lattice of capillaries, the dispassionate mechanics of the eyeball itself.
The “soul,” as they call it, is a phantom that vanishes under my unblinking gaze.
Let them have their crypts and their mournful poetry. It is the philosophy of the tomb. I offer a more terrible, more magnificent gospel: the gospel of the surgical theater.
Here, there are no soft edges, no forgiving glooms. There is only the hum of my absolute presence, the clean, sterile gleam of steel, and the organism pinned and opened to the unsparing truth of its own construction.
There is no mercy here. But there is also no deceit.
To live in my unrelenting glare is to abandon the narcotic of the unknown. It is to accept that the universe is not a grand, gothic novel, but a stark and terrifyingly elegant equation.
To choose me is to choose a life without the solace of illusion. It is a painful, searing baptism, but it is the only path to what is real. All else is shadow.
All else is a lie.