Falls the Shadow

  Out on mid-ocean is no place for a man to be. Bareback, clinging fearfully to the mane, scudding slyly across Death's confident belly. The fishermen show it in their faces, sun-dried and salted, or let it out in their speech of cured flesh and fishbone. I sit on the balustrade and stare at the horizon, trying to prise it open with my gaze, to separate sea from sky and glimpse at what lies between. To my left the beach stretches and rolls over onto its back. The waves like flat wet flames flicker along the coast as I think of all the images I've had or seen or been given, of how they overlap or drain back from each other, and how I never coincide with anyone, not even myself. There is only land or sea or this chaotic ever-shifting coastline.

  I can feel it all come tumbling down now, as it did when she died, a cascade of memories and dream sequences and half-remembered fantasies. There was a Greek man who knocked down and crushed a dragon fly to demonstrate his manliness ... I was a ghost on a train and I felt so calm and relaxed and amused because I was dead and knew no fear ... there were two quails in cages on another wall and one would sit still as if resigned to his fate and the other would peck and push and fight against it and I didn't know which one to admire ... the girl in white who I found in the mist and made love to on an altar ... Falling down around me I have no power to stop it. I am indifferent too in a vague way, neither conscious nor unaware, a mere observer levelling everything until life becomes a two-dimensional event at the edge of sight, empty and tiresome: inhuman.

  So the choice is made clear again. As we stand on the edge, and looked down into the abyss of amorality and death, and see nothing to stop us falling into its depths but the flimsy man-made bridges of religions, the decision is ours once more. We can plunge head-first into it all and be done with it, convert ourselves into dead flesh, join the eternity of matter, or chance it on one of those bridges that stretch into the distance, any one will do, they are perfectly safe. The other option is to turn back, to leave the gaping emptiness to itself and to wander back into town where life goes on as always, despite religion and philosophy, in well-structured chaos. If that chasm of universal indifference is the last word in logic, immorality, order, if all routes of reason can be traced back to nothingness, then what we are left with is a human debate in which human realities and points of reference suffice. It is the heat within our living bodies that matters, that which inevitably will abandon us all, but for now is our common bond. Death, and the cold uncaring nature of time and space are our counterparts, not our enemies, and the balance, for once, is perfect.