Grey eyes of the world

A grey, grey evening sky, with the promise -- as all things grey -- of something inestimable. As though one not only turned away, but also retraced one's steps infinitely far, infinitely slowly, toward an absolute nullity, a pure and all encompassing void.

I love grey, since it summons so acutely the moments just past, the moments still breathing on the other side of the pane; it is like the great, coiled masses of different and now impossible futures, outdated and redundant, which perhaps is why, whenever I meet people with grey eyes, something about them always reminds me of the past.

Grey eyes are at one with their greyness, perhaps because greyness is an outward reflection, perhaps because it is an inward manifestation. Whichever the case, grey is the tenor of understanding; and it is only by means of grey, by the indulgence it allows, that emotion and intellect come to play upon it.

"Worldly wise with the whole world behind them": the first words that come to mind. There are some things that offer us the future, and grey is no exception; it's just that its proposition is the overindulgence, the broken walls, the unrestrainable powerlessness of the past.

Greyness doesn't have to do with books; it is at the heart of aesthetics, but it is the art that attracts no comment. It is akin to the immense residue of the creative effort, the misshapen dreams and imprecise offcuts of ideas, the great stir, and bulk, and hallucination of vibrant colours, all refluxed and revolved, held taut beyond their time and rendered equal against their will. It is the promise of extinction, but the promise, also, of sharing that space with every other thing, the promise of absolute community where all meanings fail and have been set aside.

Looking toward grey, I look toward the *necessarily greater*, not some kind of arch solution to a private life. It is great, final, diffuse, unreflecting, and absolutely self-unaware. It is inherently powerless, yet it overpowers simply by dint of its extent. It has nothing with which to distract us, and yet it holds our attention precisely for that reason. It is the common shape of the world that was not, the enduring distillate of our dreams after they have had all identity stripped from them, and instead have been crushed to a self-annulling mulch of different thoughts, from different lives, all more or less transient, and from all of which only a single quality can be deduced: greyness, greying, -- grey.

It is like a blessing that has died.