Manifesto Obscurum

The Internet continues in its state of hyperspeed. Its last ten years have seen unparalleled activity, with billions of lights piercing the earth to live new lives online. From the primordial film of patchwork networks, squirming with hobbyists so base and tactile they evoke the bodies of early life, it has grown into a thing of nigh-unstoppable brightness. Now it is a tool that commands the attention of entire nations at a time. As a result, the experience of using this Internet nowadays is nothing short of a prolonged trance. For many, this fugue state remains endless. Amidst the robots, there are so many of us here we hardly feel real. I have to remind myself that you can all bleed. By now, the glow is so unrelentingly bright that I dare not face it head on.

For I post from a dark room.

1: I become bigger in a dark room.

1.1: When someone else enters my dark room, the knowledge of my presence ebbs into the darkness.
1.2: They know I sit in one place, yet the feeling in their chest tells them I surround them, almost threatening to engulf them.
1.3: So when they enter, they enter and meet something larger than a person.
1.4: I sound confident, because I am.
1.5: After all, they’ve entered my domain, even when I lie retiring.
1.6: It’s my patch of darkness that I know better than anyone else.
1.7: It’s the room I stumble around in half-asleep without tripping, like a childhood bedroom.

2: Things feel more focused in a dark room

2.1: When I’m in a dark room, they have to hear the exact nature of my voice and interpret it as a voice alone.
2.2: They know me, but it’s not about how I look at first sight. There’s no measuring me to the bright things outside this domain.
2.3: You can make an effort to, but I exist in my own world.
2.4: If I am not trying to compete, why measure me like I am?
2.5: You must hear my voice, without the distractions of my face, my surroundings, and your own conceptions of me.
2.6: You must learn focus, and see a version of me not curated for immediate consumption.
2.7: Instead you must interpret me for yourself, and retreat to your bright room with this in mind.
2.8: You can then either decide whether I’m too unsightly (and thus, leave me to my confines), or realise you were made to focus on something that you never realised you wanted.

3: Things intensify in a dark room

3.1: Having blurred the line between human and inhuman, corporeal form and shadow, I can now sculpt the dark room to my liking.
3.2: The black is a block of wax and my thoughts are the scalpel.
3.3: There is nothing that will amplify an idea harder in my head than hearing it come with no other sensory background.
3.4: I have no choice but to digest every last syllable and its implications.
3.5: The dark room removes all distractions and lets me focus on what is meaningful to me.

I will never forget that balmy September evening when I saw this to its absolute limits.

I’m lying in a room of the Millennium Knickerbocker, traffic of the Magnificent Mile purring about me while my friend stands in a darkness so still it feels clerical.

The air-conditioning has plunged the room into a solid chill, a desperate measure to soothe my wearied self.

I’m sleep deprived, and badly.

Amidst the pleasures of my trip, I’ve accumulated on-and-off days of sleep debt.

It is four days into this ordeal, and I have seen mirages of relief at best.

By now, my sternum throbs from the stress of the nightly cortisol highs.

I’m frantic to sleep, and my friend stands watch, praying my body finally gives in.

My body temperature spikes again.

I wonder if I’m going to die, then I manage to speak.

”I love you.” I rasp. “I love you”.

The silence so immense I can barely breathe. I feel like I’m shrinking beneath the weight of it, as it crumples beneath my words, which themselves trail off into the room and distort about its confines, warping yet never leaving.

”I love you too.”

It sends a shockwave through my feverish mind.

I’d heard it so many times, many in-person through this trip, yet the dark room sent it into an unimaginable frequency.

I struggle to articulate this even now. It was like two human souls, spilling and mingling together in a viscous cosmic rhythm.

Arcing, then branching off into dozens of sprawling, vein-like tendrils.

Time resumes once more. I’m in a positive stupor, not of dissociation but pure lovesick abandon. I barely comprehend their footsteps nearing the door. It creaks, and they’re about to leave. This isn’t the last time we’re to meet, but it’s late for me and I badly need to recuperate. We have another day before they have to drive home. Then, they creep from our blackness and leave me to it, in the hopes I finally sleep.

I did sleep that night. Cradled by the vivid colours of those words, cutting through the dark and reverberating through a pocket-realm of complete and utter obscurum. It happened completely outside the prying eyes, not a critic, not a voyeur, not even another illuminated thing. Certainly not millions of people on the internet, and even publishing this now I doubt this is a million people I’m speaking to. But you did not have to be there to see what a dark room can do. Maybe you’ve been in a room like this too. Maybe if you haven’t, you would like one for yourself.

4: Other things of this Dark

4.1: There are things I love that people barely know about, things considered obscure, arcane, ephemeral, yet deeply meaningful to me.
4.2: They’re not critically-acclaimed by any means, many are downright panned.
4.3: But my love overrides that knowledge, because it’s not about the others.
4.4: It’s about the emotion it gave to me when I first met it.
4.5: I have the confidence to love it this way, and more-so with how lonesome it is.
4.6: I feel lonesome too, even if it’s by my choice.
4.7: So, perhaps I see myself in the obscure.
4.8: The dark room, simultaneously unsettling and comfortable.
4.9: The confined space, a cage but also a bed.
4.10: The obscure, unloved but loveable.
4.11: So I want myself to take that energy, that feeling I have for the obscure, and direct it inward.
4.12: When I go out of sight, when I am a lurker, I haven’t stopped existing or lost my meaning.
4.13: I’ve only stopped feeding the attention spans of others.
4.14: I’ve returned to myself, to exist on my own terms.
4.15: It is instinctive of me to want connection, but it is also instinctive that I’ve pursued connection at the cost of my well-being.
4.16: It’s simply not sustainable to forego my need for a dark room.
4.17: I must have it at all costs, even if it’s mere obscurum.