from the program for ALN micro-production, Cosmos Night: Flood of Light, risograph zine

Our research and preparation for the project found quite a few examples of human awareness of the material reality that dark exists within light, light exists within dark. Our risograph zine produced for Cosmos Night: Flood of Light is our creative response to these examples. One is the Sandokai, a Chinese poem from the 700s (which we’ve written about before) — [Our project, Turning into the Night, has found a deep a home within the lines of Zen ancestor Shitou’s 1300 year old poem entitled the Sandokai (known in English as the Identity of the Relative and Absolute). We first encountered the poem several years ago. Now, both our project and the increased pressure of the Anthropocene have opened new pathways into two of its lines: “Within light there is darkness, but do not try to understand that darkness; Within darkness there is light, but do not look for that light”. John Daido Loori’s translation (available via Zen Mountain Monastery), in particular links us to the deep, enigmatic roots of Daoism, which conceptualized human existence within evolving planetary limits.] — reads in part: ”Within light there is darkness, but do not try to understand that darkness; Within darkness there is light, but do not look for that light.”). And, in David Hinton’s translation of a collection of Zen koans (No-Gate Gateway), Case #39, entitled “CLOUD GATE ALL WRONG” begins, “A monk asked Cloud-Gate Mountain, “Radiant brilliance silently illuminates this Cosmos vast as Ganges sands…”

We are inspired by the history of humans sitting still, observing, sensing, thinking, and creating in relation to the vast material realities that shape our lives intimately—while using nothing more or less than their brains/bodies/minds.

Cosmos Night: Flood of Light aims to be an occasion where, together with participants, we will empirically experience the 360 degrees of wild, blinding light stretching before us for billions of light-years, and unhinge a few of the names we’ve used to point at (and miss) the wildly unpredictable forces that are neither nameable objects nor binary opposites: night, day, light, dark, sun, moon. We hope to do this in an undistracted state, using the “technologies” of our bodies, the out of doors, the night sky, and aesthetic experience. We hope to gain (re-discover?) an embodied experience of reweaving our selves into the cosmos.

Additional documentation will be posted in October 002019.

Source: Cosmos Night: Flood of Light | FOP