Many People Succumb To Darkness

Many people succumb to darkness.  People such as I, instead of committing spiritual suicide or permitting surrender, have learned to embrace darkness as best we can.  An embrace differs from the hopelessness of a capitulation.  It is a voluntary decision to involve one’s self in the portions of the psyche that have often caused fear or discomfort.  Or so I’ve told myself repeatedly for many years in an effort to convince myself that insomnia and tense muscles are natural parts of being enlightened.  And as for enlightenment, I am not speaking of Nihilism; the nighttime doesn’t inherently contribute to the destruction.  The setting sun does not have to symbolize the departure of light.  It can indicate the beginning of starlight, or the rise of the moon.  I have faith in the greater good of the surrounding environment, and in the greater good of human potential.  Call me a pessimistic optimist, or an optimistic pessimist.  I never was capable of being entirely positive or negative about anything.  I have too much faith in energy to think of entropy as a negative state.  The interior of my apartment exists in far too great a state of change between chaotic displacement and orderly cleanliness.  I can’t hold to very many absolutes.

I check myself for a pulse, some remnant of a heart beat – and find none.

Outside the entryway to my living quarters, there is a sign posted with the word "Dungeon" written upon it.  Is this an ironic statement to indicate that I have locked myself away from the world, when I close the door?  I live on the second floor, rather than underground.  Occasionally I wonder whatever happened to the leather collar and leather leash I purchased in Arizona.  Arizona, the experience that makes me laugh and shake my head or scratch my scalp in question.  Tucson is one of the few places I’ve gone that has made me consider the potential existence of Hell.  There were moments during that time that I occasionally reference in my experimentation with human subjects and emotions, that I know were not terrible – just as there are positive elements from my Russian experience.

But like so many times I can run memories through thought, eventually those experiences become less about the actual person they were with, and more about the sensations and the surrounding environment.  The way the world remains so utterly strong and vivid, and the people erode into the background.  Transient elements vanish, variables approach whatever asymptotic limits they might be reaching for, and then become insignificant.

Just as average strangers often are, I myself to other people I pass – am insignificant.

Yet from where I stand, within the midst of midnight – I am the center of my axial perception.  The three derivative ideas, the three faces of divinity or the three states of life.  They are counted out upon the hands of a clock.  Seconds.  Minutes.  Hours.  Hands, be they two or three, are always reaching or grasping or cringing or clasping.  There is expression captured in the movement of muscle and the lines that radiate not from any one particular origin, but crease the surface of flesh as though the number of times folded have made it origami of a more personal kind.  I have made myself into a million different shadow puppets, and given them the sounds of assorted animals to bring a simulacrum to life.  I think there is more appearance of life in the shadows portrayed in films of vampires, than my poor attempts to animate my own displacement of light.  The miracles of film and mastery of the camera have given artists greater agility than most people possess in spontaneous acts of display.

This is not a cry for comfort, this is a statement that I know where I stand relative to my own desires.

I have never been one to turn to other people for shoulders upon which to cry.  Maybe that’s why I’ve felt the ground vanish momentarily beneath my feet and the sky heavy upon my shoulders.  I know I’ve used this theme before in other written monologues.  Yet again I reference Atlas, because as can be the stereotypic state of someone my age or of my gender – I feel I carry the load of many people.  This is a soliloquy in which I openly display a lot of self-righteous self-importance.

One common literary technique employed by authors (read also:  religious ministers, people preaching their beliefs) utilizes the simple act of repeating a statement throughout what is being said.  It is like writing a paper to argue in favor of a personal hypothesis, and repeating that thesis throughout in the hopes that unconsciously the person begins to accept the statement as truth through the simple act of repetition.  It’s long been known that if people hear something often enough from an angle or more, they tend to absorb it and accept it as empirical truth.

This is much the way the Nazis brainwashed the German people into genocide.

The Holocaust did take place, and it was simply one of the best publicized atrocities of the previous century.  There are countless records of times in which people have made use of one another for scapegoats.  Isn’t it so much easier to displace blame upon someone else, than to accept the burden of responsibility for the state in which one lives?  It’s much easier to work upon the destruction of someone or something, than it is to create.  Destruction is catabolism, the breaking of energetic bonds within stored systems.  It releases an exothermic reaction.  This is the opposite of carrying the world upon your shoulders and lifting it up.  This is carrying a bag of stones upon your shoulders and tossing them at every pedestrian you encounter.  Here, take the blame for my inability to understand proper metabolism.  Here, accept the fact that I don’t know how to exercise properly – I was taught the fastest way between two points involves a button or a switch or a remote control.  I was taught that it is better to embellish the truth, than it is to face the facts.  It is easier to let the light overhead count what I’ve purchased, than to stimulate the nerves in my body or use my atrophying fingers.

Just as average strangers often are, I myself to other people I pass – am insignificant.

This is not a cry for comfort, this is a statement that I know where I stand relative to my own desires.

I know where I stand relative to other people and their perceptions of me, and I’m not overly bothered by the separation I find between the standard smile and the actual intention behind the eyes that pretend to show endearment.  It’s acceptable to be fake, after all, because people have made use of facades for centuries.  It’s a way to hide what is really present and comfort the rest of the world.  Hide what’s really there, and you’ll never need to know what isn’t reality.

Reality, after all, is just a bunch of gravel you’d scrape your knees upon if you tripped while running too rapidly with exposed flesh.  You wouldn’t want scar.  Scars are evidence of the passage of time, evidence of your mortality slipping through the sieve of an hour glass.  Blood is evidence that you are swimming inside your own body rather than swimming externally.  People who die spontaneously in unexplained fashion might well simply be drowning in their own nutrients.  A red river made of your own requirements.

Just as average stragglers cannot complete a march, much less keep up with something that will alter society – I am not significant.  I am not famous or important.  I simply facilitate.

This is not a cry for comfort, this is a statement that I know where I stand relative to my own desires.

If you repeat something over and over and over, much like one might repeat a chant in a religious ceremony – does it become truth?  Is reality woven upon looms with tongues muttering the same soft silvery tones and guttural vibrations that people have used to induce comatose states?

Many people walk about in life comatose, too numb to acknowledge their own inability to reach beyond a comfort zone.  Isn’t it easier to remain within patterns that are familiar, than to push one’s self into unfamiliar territory?  Don’t look down now, the bridge you’re crossing isn’t made of concrete.  It is an old rope bridge, with wood cross-supports that have begun to rot.  With the weight you’ve put on from overeating and trying to consume the world into your flesh, you might just fall into the abyss.  There’s no way out of the abyss, or so I’m told.  I’ve never been into the most dismal places of gravitational pull.  It never seemed a necessity to me to face the absolute peril of impermanent dissatisfaction.  Only in death do people flat line.  On your way to the dungeon you’ll see a lot of things invented for torture, and you’ll question what made people create such items to bring about agony in one another.  Was it a lust for power?  Was it the nature of the predator emerging from some deep-rooted place where it was supposedly set to be chained for life?  If the dungeons within a person are broken and the monsters caged there are set free, what then?  Are these the beginnings of serial killers?  What is it life to have yourself completely figured out?  Sometimes I think I’m getting there, but then I realize that because almost everything is flexible and capable of alteration – I will never truly be able to divine every element of the one thing I am.  How can you understand everything that you are, if you yourself are constantly changing?  You eat something, and your body excretes waste products – these are the input and output of life.  You inhale one air and breathe out another.

The turnover of molecules that comprise your flesh is continuous.

This is not a cry for comfort, this is a statement that I know where I stand relative to my own desires – and my desires change.  There was a time when I desired to understand all there is to know about the living organisms upon this planet.  I wanted to be a naturalist.  I wanted to teach people about all the mysterious things I encountered.  Now instead of finding things and telling people about them, rather than revealing mysteries – I create them.  I have evolved away from lying and into absolute fabrication of reality when it doesn’t suit my necessity.  I am a legend, a myth.  You are reading the words, the wisdom, the existence of a tale.  I have lived numerous years of my life feeling old, and perhaps now I’m just beginning to feel young.  Maybe I’ll become Merlin.  I’ll age backwards.  You can keep the linear path of perpetuation to yourself, I’m going to dance around in perceived madness.  The shortest distance between two points is a random interval that I travel.

Many people succumb to darkness.  Instead, I just write about it.

–Ara Raven ~ Copyright 2006–