Inward towards the darkness

            I have always watched a lot of news, I read a lot of news on the internet, a lot of international news.  And always, it is a never- ending cycle of sad and dark and unnecessary death and destruction and suffering, exposing myself to these images every day.   My friends ask me how I do it to myself, surround myself in so much darkness.  But this isn’t even the beginning of the darkness.  This is just the darkness on the surface.  Because I can’t help but extrapolate to all the points of dispersal, the points from which the suffering and darkness comes from, and a lot of it is a direct result of our affluence and lifestyle here in Australia and in the western world, which makes the solution easy.  It’s not that we can’t live sustainably, it’s that we don’t want to.  But this isn’t the darkness.

 Because then I go darker and look at why we don’t want to.  I look deeper into the darkness, into our culture.  I see the distortion of the feminine, the love affair with the logical and the material world, the vicious circle of social media likes, the fear of the natural world.  From fear of looking inward, we’d rather go to mars. Our culture is in love with dark, and dystopian stories.  And all the hopeful stories we wrote previously seem meaningless now. Every failed revolution becomes a meme.  At this time of existential crisis, we need critical and imaginative thinkers, in a rational logical and unimaginative culture that leaves no room for imaginative thinking and either ignores it, devalues it, brands it insane and distorts it into a pizza gate.  It’s a fluid but unidirectional culture.  It’s a culture that demands that in talking about darkness I need to explain that I am talking merely about the absence of light, not about skin colour and no, the fact that I have to state this does not make me a better writer by the way.  Because imagination has no place in race identity or whatever woke paradigm that particular circle of friends belongs to, it belongs to a universal consciousness that doesn’t fit these politics.  Homogenous thought is mistaken for community.  There are no real communities.  We don’t know where the song lines lie.  We are disconnected from the earth.  Everything is being alphabetised and numerated and everybody has a smart phone which means they know everything.  And this is the culture in which we are moving towards death and destruction on a deeper level, on a cultural level, and on a deep soul level.  But that’s not dark. 

Because then I go darker and I realise that I am that critical imaginative thinker that could have made a difference.  And I didn’t.  And I only have myself to blame.  Because I haven’t gone dark enough.  I got scared off by the giant hairy spiders in the other world and I didn’t want to bring them back.  Because there is always a darker place.  A darkness that goes beyond words.  A darkness that is nothing but grief, pure grief.  No words can drag me out of this darkness.  No painting, no writing.  It’s a darkness where my heart breaks open and bleeds on the floor, which I can’t see because it is so dark.  And this is the only darkness that holds any hope.  Because it is from this darkness the journey begins.