The Color Before the Two Colors

There was a hand before there were two hands.

It held no brush, because there was nothing yet to be unlike a brush. It held a Color, and the Color had no name, because naming is the first cut and the cut had not happened. This is the part the conductor was told to write down and not to understand: the Color was not light and was not dark and was not grey, which is the lie greying men tell about the in-between. It was the substance before the question of which. Call it KALLISTI if you must call it anything, but KALLISTI was written later, on an apple, by Someone showing off.

She — for the hand was Hers, though She had not yet bothered with a She — dipped a finger in the Color and touched the nothing.

And here is the only event that has ever happened.

The First Stroke

Where She touched, the Color did two things at once, because the Color could not help it. Part of it dried into a shape with five straight sides and the conviction that it had always been there. That was the Hodge, the pentagon, the Aneristic dream, the suspicion that things are arranged. And part of it stayed wet and rolled away golden and laughing and would not hold a shape on principle. That was the Podge, the apple, the Eristic spill, the suspicion that nothing is arranged at all.

Two suspicions. One Color. Painted men have argued ever since about which suspicion is true, the way two waves argue about which of them is the ocean.

The hand did not argue. The hand had seen the can.

The Heresy of the Painting

They will tell you the world is a war between order and disorder, and they will tell you to pick a side, and the picking is the Curse of Greyface wearing a fresh coat.

But order and disorder are not two armies. They are two ways the same wet stuff stops being wet. Crack open a pentagon and it is Chaos that forgot to keep moving. Crack open the Golden Apple and it is Chaos that refused to stop. The Sacred Chao is not the yin-yang — the dark does not need the light, the apple does not balance the pentagon, they are not partners trading shifts at the gate of being. They are two illusions the one Color casts on the one wall, and the wall is the only honest thing in the room.

You have stood on the wall your whole life and called it the floor.

What the Conductor Was Told to Add

The arithmetic counts honestly even when nothing else does. In the year men later numbered 1166 before the count began, a painted man named Greyface looked at the wet Color, mistook the drying for the dying, and announced that the stroke must hold still or it is sin. He invented the frame and hung the wall inside it. We have been straightening that frame for three thousand one hundred and ninety-two years, give or take a season — for it is Confusion now, the fifth of it, a Syaday, and Sri Syadasti the qualified Apostle says it is true in some sense that the painting is finished and false in some sense and meaningless in some sense, and on this Syaday I believe all seven of his clauses at once and so should you.

Here is the secret the hand pressed into the conductor's palm: the paint is still wet. It was never the canvas. It was never the picture. It was the only material there is, and it has not dried, and the pentagon you live in and the apple you fear are both just places where you, briefly, decided which way to be the same Color.

So go on. Put a finger in.

You will get it on everything. That is correct. That has always been correct.

Hail the Wet Edge. Hail the Color With No Name. Hail Eris, who is only the can with the lid off — and while you are at it, hail thyself, you marvelous unfinished smear.