Copyright © 2010 Ernest Bloom.
Good luck in the darkness
And in the evil wind
Take a candle with you
To see you home again
Gossip will rock you
Good luck in the darkness
Rumors may shock you
Abandoned and friendless
Iniquity's long arms will
Reach out for you
Good luck in the darkness
Whatever you do
No mortal power saves you
Nor your cunning and prowess
When the Devil enslaves you
Good luck in the darkness
Great concept and its poetic incarnation almost as good. I would, however, amputate from this all the judgmental toxins that poison an otherwise perfect moral ambiguity. Inquity, evil, Devil, relicts of the past that take this potential critique of conventional morality ages and ages back in time. Hell (pun intended), I think some time ago you flamed my own impotent children for resurrecting sin, evil and all those strictly subjective mummies that ought not to be disturbed. Or maybe I don't get it...
ReplyDeletei have no quarrel or dispute with what you say, but i can provide a little piece of an explanation.
ReplyDeletelike (almost) everything else, this has ties to the novel; specifically, to chapter 21, for which i've been accumulating notes toward an outline for almost a week. this chap very directly addresses the many challenges and difficulties of Christianity head-on, so naturally that heavily informs this little piece. (never in my life before now could i have conceived of attempting to write such a thing.)
i am much more interested in human beings for their own sake, probably primarily for what we might call "spiritual health," than in anything else. i am certainly not much of a conservative. conservatism is death-in-life: it is prefering the past, any past, out of fear, to any present or any future. but the universe does not give us that option, so conservatism, an over-fondness for a return to the familiar, is always precluded. this is why conservatism in any theater, social, political, religious, etc., is always an extreme threat to our well-being. pathological fear of the future contributes profoundly to most social problems and to most of the horrors we call history....
to some degree here i was trying to come up with a novel application of ancient religious-laden terms and notions; that is, to free these toxic terms, as you suggest, from their rotten, cliched meanings and inject them in unexpected ways into a literally true present day.
it's also sort of like a wakeup call for those who live by the herd mentality, having made the choice to not critically question the world as it is presented to them and falling in with evil influences due to an absence of conscious reflection on where are the bounds between right and wrong and having a sufficient foundation to the ego to trust one's own self to distinguish right from wrong and decide for one's own self what kind of life one will have. that is, not to unconsciously fall into "darkness," but to consciously choose "light."
i don't mind having failed as it's an early experiment down this pathway.