The Star of Azazel - Azazelin Tähti

In Fosforos, death is described in a pure and respectful way, also the question of or fear in it:

"Those nocturnal forms in which our Master arrives will no longer be terrifying to humanity, who will understand the meaning of darkness and the deep beauty of dying"

Death, in its purest form, the absence for eternity between what is old and that who turn to new, that is the purest form of darkness, something that has all possibilities to become something new.
How is your personal view on the essence of darkness?

As a very urban person, I've gotten a new angle on literal darkness by spending more time in places without electricity and / or far removed from cities. For instance, reading Hölderlin's - the Night Poet's - work alone in a comparatively primitive cabin in the woods is, I've discovered, completely different from trying to grasp his concepts and images by streetlight in the center of Helsinki. The word "Nacht" carries far more weight when associated with blindness and potential terror, with not being able to do the normal daytime things, than when thought of as a haze of neon and alcohol, smoke and mirrors. Its meaning could actually be claimed to have changed since the beginning of the nineteenth century (when dear Friedrich wrote); and I guess it stayed the same for most people even in the industrialized world until very recently.

Simply put, darkness is the other face of nature. The sinister, frightening, uncontrollable - but also the soothing and renewing. It's so fundamental a concept that it really can't be given a satisfactory definition, one than would be understandable even to a hypothetical person who didn't already know what it means (in reality, of course, no such person can exist, at least not within the soul-enabling framework of the English language, or any other language that I know of). In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir identifies "man" and "woman" as this kind of concepts - definite yet infinitely variable in association and content - building-blocks of our minds. Many examples could be given besides. The main point is that when speaking or thinking, I am always already aware - among others - of the distinction between light and darkness. Without their kind of dependent separation, there could be only silence.

To me, death is the opponent of this desperate patriarchal dream about control, efficiency and domestication that is driven by fear and longing for safety. It's like a beautiful lightning compared to the controlled voltage of a LED. It is standing contrary to the idea of a world with predictable stability and foreseeable causalities so it still is the inherence of freedom and the mother of everything. Something is destroyed so something else can envolve. There is no ex nihilo in this world and no growth without an equal sacrifice. E.g. an econimic-minded person could build a bridge to our financial system that is based in the exact same illusion of eternal groth. It's always about more and the world seems to ignore the absurdity of this illusion which is doomed lead into destruction. Somehow this is comforting to me because the most terrifing thing is not destruction/death but this safety-profiding captivity, the glorifaction of a two-dimentional rationality, that puts us on the level of a machine, strictly rated by the materialistic outcome.

Cancer wrote:I've discovered, completely different from trying to grasp his concepts and images by streetlight in the center of Helsink

You take something away (electricity, mobile phone, TV ect.) and something else is growing, like the empathy for an authors writings. Like a blind man is able to hear better, absence aka darkness it the gatekeeper for groth- at least that's how I see it. With this in mind I like to spend a few weeks in complete isolation once a year, meaning no electronical devices and no contact to any other person. It's a wonderful eye-opener and the whole world appears in a different light afterwards.

Cancer wrote:As a very urban person, I've gotten a new angle on literal darkness by spending more time in places without electricity and / or far removed from cities. For instance, reading Hölderlin's - the Night Poet's - work alone in a comparatively primitive cabin in the woods is, I've discovered, completely different from trying to grasp his concepts and images by streetlight in the center of Helsinki. The word "Nacht" carries far more weight when associated with blindness and potential terror, with not being able to do the normal daytime things, than when thought of as a haze of neon and alcohol, smoke and mirrors. Its meaning could actually be claimed to have changed since the beginning of the nineteenth century (when dear Friedrich wrote); and I guess it stayed the same for most people even in the industrialized world until very recently.

This is a very good point.

A big city night would be more in tune with the decadent sensibility, which favours electric light and artificialy induced sensual stimulus.