It looks as if it was rocking a moment ago, and it was only your gaze that stopped it moving. A blade, or a shaving from a silver disk, hanging above the hump of Ubocze Mountain like one side of a curved pair of shears over a sheep’s back, or like a hook right by the mouth of a big fish. It’s the first night of the first quarter of October, when the moon has barely an hour in the sky. Then it’s swallowed up by the earth near Grybów and you’re left alone in the darkness.
You can’t see your own hand, or other people, you can’t see the things whose shape existence usually takes, you can’t even see the air moving between your fingers. To believe in your own life you have to take hold of yourself, or escape into memory. Without the world, without the variety of forms all around, a person is naught but a mirror in which nothing is reflected. During the day this cannot be seen, because light is thinner and more weightless than air. It sneaks into every crevice, which is to say all shapes—the tangible, the visible, and at times the invisible too. Now things are different. The primal matter of the dark enters the veins and circulates like blood.
Somewhere a dog barks. In their houses, people make the day last longer with lamps and television sets. They want to see their lives, their objects, all they’ve accumulated between their four walls since the beginning of the world, since the time they made the first fire. From above, from very far up, the towns and villages look like the remains of campfires.
In the beginning was darkness and now, at six forty in the evening in 1996, the oldest time is in progress. In my pocket I have Marlboro cigarettes and other things that people carry with them at the end of the twentieth century, but if it weren’t for the vagaries of memory I’d only be a piece of matter barely brought to life and plunged into the dark of ages. It’s quite possible that the body is a warm, compact variety of darkness, and that at moments such as this one the night is simply reaching out to claim its own. The black extends into infinity. Nothing greater comes to mind. This is what a droplet must feel like when it falls into water.
The remnants of the glow over Ubocze fade soundlessly and the mountain disappears in a gulf of dark blue. The village of Ropa reminds you of a legend about a drowned world in which, in order to see anything, people have to emit their own light.
Darkness and time—weightless, invisible substances that expose human frailty. The mind is nothing but a match flame in the wind. The soul cowers in the body from fear of the gloom, while the body double-checks its existence by touching its own skin. And so in the end what remains is that simplest of the senses, thanks to which insects crawl in the earth, and we can distinguish what’s living from what’s dead, and very little else.