She’s in love

With her broken heart

She’s in love

With the dark

She’s in love

With her broken heart

She’s in love with the dark

– With the Dark / They Might Be Giants

I’ve been thinking about evil, lately. Or rather I’ve been thinking about Evil.

Mainly in a literary sense, but never just. The membrane that separates Fiction from Reality is quite porous, and I’ve never quite understood where one leaves off and the other begins — if there even is a clear demarcation. I don’t think they are binary, is what I’m saying. Our eyes, our hands, the senses five — all can lie, and the story of a hero can make pulses quick and move the heart blood of a nation. Things that aren’t Real still are. Certain ideas and stories and incarnate ideals have a weight, a presence. They matter. They have matter and mass, and gravity begins to bow at their approach.

Without dipping into too theological depths, allow me to elucidate. Superman, The Doctor, Jesus, Coyote, Heracles, the Monkey King, Shiva, Sam and Dean Winchester, Frodo, Katniss, Tyrion,Santa Claus, Odin, Horus. They aren’t just empty names — they have meaning, they have weight. They have a place in their own stories, but also in the stories of our own lives. As a symbol, a periodic element of courage, or grace, or love, or cunning — these names have wrought great change. Measurable, quantifiable change in the laboratory of Reality. I may be assuming a lot, but I know that in my own mind, my own psycho-chemistry these names have had their effect.  I try to align myself with the good, and avoid the evil.

So, as I tell my own stories — I realize that I’m creating my own pantheon.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that the Evil Ones, the dark shadows to these heroes’ light, they matter too. Sauron, Shai’tan, Lucifer, the Master, Lex Luthor. If there must be an absolute negative pole in my view of the cosmos, what am I to name it?

Names matter too, maybe most of all.

Which is an even more roundabout way of saying, I’m calling it The Dark. Whatever it is, that quiet force of End, the blotter of sunny skies, the sideways laughter in empty halls. The Option serves The Dark, of that I’m reasonably certain.

So, no one asked, isn’t this just the Nothing and the Gmork all over again? Probably. But I like to think I’m reflecting a universal truth, a universal name.  As a child I was afraid of the Nothing  and it’s servant — and now when I write I am afraid of  the Option and its master.

I’m honestly not sure what I’m getting at.

“It’s one of those things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.”
― Edward Albee, The American Dream & The Zoo Story