Sunday, September 19, 2010

The Purpose of Shadow


It is what we are made of and yet it’s all we can do to control this mass of organic material that clings to our consciousness.

Much less turn to the window and without any idea why, rant at the light – trying to enrapture its charge in the folds of our mental cloak; enable a lit idea that eludes us.

To capture shadow is to be forever free, and in the way of frequent arousals, find a basket of forever thoughts.

And yet

Thinking as some do, and some don’t, and we see that when they do they won’t.


Isn’t it odd to have a darker world that follows us wherever we go. A world that has been associated with bad things. More than sadness shadow bends beyond the walls. It shifts past the break in surfaces; it elucidates the barrier that surrounds the image of our moral selves. The equating of shadow to our sense of drama pulls at us like the moon pulls the ocean.

We live so close to the shadow world but then without it we would be formless, flat shapes of color, walking around like characters in a Miro painting. Two- dimensional figures pressed up against a landscape without a hiding space.

Then we always think of ourselves as being born out of darkness – a reflection of our individual births from the womb. And then our shadows irrepressibly stay with us as alternate selves; they are a reflection of our bisected minds compartmentalized by the barrier between positivity and negativity, living spirit and wasting death. For want of reason we cannot consider our corpus as negative so that leaves our shadows as such.

And so the more shadow we surround ourselves with the more we tend to think of ourselves as unreliable animals, unpredictable. That is because perhaps the more shadow that surrounds us the more we live in a world vibrant with imagination – beyond the social mores that contain us.

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