Shining threads

Shining threads

Thursday 30 December 2010

The Shadow people

In the Shadowlands, live Shadow people who live shadow lives, doing shadow jobs, speaking shadow words and thinking shadow thoughts.

They always turn away from the light, and trample on fires to keep the temperature cold.

They don't believe in dreams, having forgotten theirs, long ago.

It wasn't always so.

No-one is born a shadow self, but it is something one becomes, having chosen shady ways of doing things.

People get hurt, and tired and cynical. People read too many books which make them think they are clever by thinking dismal thoughts. People turn into themselves and harden to keep the pain locked in a safe place, where they can't feel it.

Shadow people are like the puppets of grey clouds, and conspire to keep the consensus dreary and dull.

They have a whole industry keeping their agenda afloat and build schools and hospitals to make it so.

Shadow schools have only black-boards but no chalk to educate the kids. They want their pupils to stare into the black hole for long enough that any fighting spirit is given up.

Shadow hospitals have only one prognosis and that is despair. Mental health is about accepting the depression of life. Pain is a dangerous call to attention, so a bleak numbness is their panacea - submission, defeat.

The Sun is a myth for the Shadow people, who are sceptical to the nth degree about the warmth of its rays.

They sneer at people who sing eulogies about its life-giving beams and feel themselves superior to rise above such infantile superstition.

'What is true is darkness - why can't people accept the truth and live with it, as we do. That is the only way to come to terms with life.' They call it shadow realism.

Shadow people once lived in shadow caves, but never emerged, and relied on the efforts of others to do their gathering and hunting. They entertained themselves by watching the shadows cast on the walls by shards of light from outside, and became so absorbed in the shadow-play that they became utterly mad.

Now nothing will awaken them from the shadow slumber of the Shadow people who wander across continents and traverse oceans, denying that anything exists, apart from the dark apparitions of their shadow imagination.

The Shadow people live in the cold outer reaches and stomp on the sparks of those who glimpse something more. If someone becomes ablaze, they do their best to lock her up and label her, with clever-sounding terms, so she won't be listened to. The Shadow people inhabit a dark cloak of cynicism that surrounds the world.

They travel in hearses and wear burqas to the beach. Painting pictures of blackness and reciting monosyllabic drone poems, they call it a revolution in art.

Shadow people work in a black economy under a shadow government, in places like photographic dark-rooms or coal-mines.

The Shadow people look forward to death, when their imaginations will finally be engulfed by the darkness that they believe in so much.

Shadow philosophy teaches the way to give up and lose. 'Better collapse now, whilst it is of your own choice.'

The Shadow people conspire in dark alley-ways. They have been lurking in the underworld but now is the time when they have come to claim their dues. The smoke of the world is sucking at the health of the earth and Shadow people will defend to death their right to go that way.

Smog is their doing; cigarettes, concrete and oil, their trade; and tarmac-ing the world, their goal.

Grimaces and heavy sighs all round. The Shadow people want to take over.

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