Dark

The days were getting shorter and shorter, light lessening, pulled towards non-existence. Would this all end in an end to the light? Well no surely because history tells us, or rather memory, for what is history but memory, even if it’s just fabricated ... but anyway memory, history, of course informs us this darkness will not triumph, instead there’s a halt, a pause, a standoff and then a reversal, light cautiously begins to crawl forwards, eats and keeps on eating into the worlds of darkness, marching on till… well, you know the rest, the pendulum one way then another, and so backwards and forwards it swings year after year. Balanced, monotonous, reassuring.

So that’s the pattern. But patterns however reassuring can be broken, and from the debris maybe a new pattern emerging - and so why not here with our ominously advancing darkness? So with this wintry progress of night into diminishing day, let’s say it could be that there is a thread, and hanging from the thread a dark and heavy mass, and this mass is pulling downwards towards a greater darkness, a parent sea of it, and so every year they get to almost within touching distance of each other, and if they meet an infinity of blackness ensues ... But then just before Christmas the thread from which the weight hangs is stretched to the full, reaches no further, the descent stops and then the retreat.

But what if in time, the thread suffers wear and tear, becomes worn and finally snaps, and into the greater darkness plummets the lesser one, and out entirely goes the light. Maybe after the shock of all this has settled you could try lowering into the darkness other threads with hooks attached at the end, and feeling around with these hooks, to pull the fallen weight from the black void, and, the snapped thread replaced, set the pendulum in motion once again, the old flow thankfully resumed. This strange episode lingers a while as a memory, then as a fading myth before finally presumably dissolving altogether. But instead unfortunately no, all that happens with you and your hooks is you pull from the sea treacly drops of night which slide down, off and away, even as they’re being raised up from below. 

Hooks failing, into the darkness are lowered fishing-nets to trawl the depths. But however big the nets, what kind of depths are these, and whatever kind they are the nets again yield nothing but a load of black drops again falling mockingly away as the nets are pulled up. Threads and hooks are lowered again, and hanging from the hooks now volunteers, heroic, equipped with torches carefully lowered into the blackness, but their little lights are swallowed up in the first few feet, illuminate nothing, and back up they return with nothing. We should I suppose be glad at least of their returning.

*

But this is all nonsense, the thread won’t snap...or forget about snapping, what bloody thread?! This is all just some stupid myth, and what’s worse a made up one - though of course they’re all made up, but this one worse again because it’s made up on purpose, and by someone living in of all times the present. What ingratitude.