The flood darkens the sky, tho Constantine's death pours forth a major wind to clear away the haze

These - these thick clouds of Eurocentric history that block out the globe - must be seen.

For in all battles the eyes are vanquished first

"by means of terror and shadow of a ghostly army they cause panic, since no enemy can bear a sight so unexpected and hellish"

Tacitus, on the Germanic "ghost warriors" the harii.  (Who, by the way, are what Simek calls "the obviously living armies of the dead," the historical, black-clad,  flesh and blood foundation for the mythic conception of the Einherjar.)

Alternate histories of special effects, lightless guerilla warfare, the trompe l'oeil such that the night itself will rout the empire.  A haunted house theater of operations / of cruelty.

Tarred and flattened

and more than that, the cows weren't even black to start.  But when the night lasts so long, drags on, skips days, when thought's failed capture makes black objects out of its own darkness rather than face the terror (i.e. creeping, anticipating, tingling stench) of of gray (without value, without decision, without effect), when it demands that what is seen is what must be, pitched and tarred lightless by the act of speculation: how do the cows not start to believe?  Creatures of the night?  Very well. Morning has never changed a thing.

Notes toward two figures of darkness and stupidity (based on two phrases with substituted words)

That day in which all cows are black

(featureless identity doesn't get the news that day has come and the field's revealed.  What once was the flatness and indistinction of the dark stands out.  A marked, mooing blot of the ex-same.  For sure, owl of Minerva flies at dusk, we grasp only after the day is done, but what of the staining idiocy of the total night?  The next day begins and the leftovers of thinking's death still stand about and low and wait, painted thick by a total correspondence come and gone.  Once the stealth, comfort, and invasion of absent light - which isn't an absence of light, it's the feeling of being swallowed into a substance, eaten by the ink - is now an affront to space.  That's the birth of difference: embarassment of what was so of its time that it was indifferent, unthought, now it's a terrible inheritance that calls out to be destroyed: a placid herd so dark they're eating the light, just off the side of the road, not just chewing cud, spat back up, but the day itself...)

Shooting dusk for night

(too grayly close to real dark.  That weird zone that is closer to the effect you're trying to produce, looks more like it, but it all breaks down, no underexposure or red filter to go from blue to black.  The time of near-dead light, and the longest shadows, cannot be made into no light.  You need high noon for that.)

the structure of a prelude and there must be more to come

If you haven't seen yet, the joke that's been voiced by us all many times - Icelandic volcano as ultimate faceless demandless anarcho-saboteur! - gets a consummate version here.

"Instead, paraphrases the volcano, we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed tourists and airline workers into a declaration of war.

Now, sorry for the harsh interpretation – it was the radical students in California who spoke of war, and went surprisingly unnoticed by the global media. EJ is far more sophisticated in its approach, not saying a word, so not a word can be misinterpreted."

An anti-symbolic manifesto composed in silicate ash, cloud-writing to haunt and ground the skies. We've got a long way to go, apparently...

Enthusiasm in the dark

Sex, which many enthusiasts thought they had invented in the sixties, here makes its appearance in the science-fiction film. The relationship between sex and science fiction, or, more to the point, its virtual absence from the genre, has always been a puzzle - explained, I would guess, by the fact that science-fiction writers constitute an authentic community of naifs, generally nervous of change, politically ultraconservative, eager not to think about what adults do after dark.

- Ballard, on Barbarella

Du soleil ont éteint la gloire.

Sinister black butterflies

Have blacked out the radiant sun,

And the horizon seems a grimoire

Scrawled in ink when day is done.

From occult censers drift

Memory-troubling perfumes:

Sinister black butterflies

Have blacked out the radiant sun,

Monsters with viscous suckers

Searching for blood to drink,

And from the skies, a powder black,

Descends upon our despairs.

Sinister black butterflies.

Albert Giraud (Émile Albert Kayenberg),

'Pierrot Lunaire: Rondels Bergamasques', 1884.