Falls the Shadow

  Sitting on the bus, feeling over-large crammed between the window and a young boy, like an adult on a children's ride at the funfair, he remembered his defeat by the other bus. Could it be the same one? It was unlikely. He wondered idly if he would have beaten this one had he been walking. Unlikely again. Anyway, he reasoned, this time it would at least be a dead heat.

  'It all began there' he said to himself vaguely, not really paying attention to his thoughts, simply allowing himself to be driven to the country, passively accepting the views, staring at the cars and people in the streets without seeing anything more specific than cars and people in the street: the detail was so overwhelming that it blurred into a mass, became generalised and unreal, like a dream.

  He repeated the line again, and gradually became aware of what he was saying. At first he thought it was a song, or a poem, something he had read or heard or seen somewhere else. He momentarily lost its connection and saw it only as a disjointed sentence that his mind had refound on a whim. Then he remembered, the bus, the race, the defeat. Now the sentence took on its full significance; but could he say that it was true? Did it really start there? No, of course not, it started when he was born, before that even, before his parents were born, before Britain or Athens or Knossos, way back to early man. He started to lose his thread again, finding it virtually impossible to imagine Homo erectus forging the first notions of constitution or founding a centre of inter-communal trade. But he knew what he meant. He meant that nothing ever began, it all flowed on, with time, each forward motion as complete, as irreparable, as unable of regression as a passing second. And the seconds make the hours, and so on to the present time, which passes as we speak, on into the future, though, paradoxically, always in the present. He had a word for it. Evolution. Under this banner he excused himself his past. Nonetheless something had started with that bus, a line of thought, an awareness of something which before had been too subtle, too obvious to notice. It had led to those chill days, to those uncomfortable hours at work, to those fitful dreams. But what was it? It was like a riddle, a mystery. The truth lay around him in chaotic puddles, but they were like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Only it wasn't like that at all. There is no such thing as truth, or rather truth varies according to time and space and perception. He was really not looking for that sculpture-like word; he wanted something a million times less magnificent, a million times less obtainable. He wanted to understand his world and his part in it, and from this understanding to know what to do. It was his drifting inactivity that saddened him most, those endless passive bus rides to nowhere.

  At the village he stood on the pavement and watched the bus recede like an officious duck, farting black diesel fumes as it went. He could hear it churning on through the country lanes long after it had disappeared from view. He shrugged and set off for the country, out of the village. Spring was getting itself ready for summer, growing and changing despite Man, breeding and preening and making music, or hunting and scavenging across the graphic landscape.

  The shadow of Man's progress was upon the land, making a mockery of the chasing shadows of passing clouds. The net was spread effectively across field and vale and wooded hill, geometrical like a Picasso painting, enclosing all but the inedible or untrainable. The unfortunate cows, uncomplaining, pacing the safe but bordered field. The passive crops regimented and cosseted, standing firm before the coming Harvest, the mechanical blades. He came to a small ridge of new polished grass and sat down. It was damp but warm, and a brisk but soft breeze harassed the heavy insects, still sluggish after winter's death-like sleep. Before him spread the scarred contours of Britain, scratched with roads, pocked with villages and quarries, threatened by the darkness of the distant city which every year encroached a little more upon the subdued and hated land. He lay back, seeking solace in the perfect sky, trying to forget those reports of pollution in the atmosphere, turning his gaze away from a passing jet plane in an attempt to find something untouched by selfish, grasping hands. There was no escape.

  It's insanity! This constant humanising of the entire planet. This hateful but pompously self-righteous degradation of anything non-human. Is there anywhere left untouched? They mine the sea-bed, they strew the cosmos with their egoistic metal trash, they shatter atoms to get at what's inside. It's maniacal. Not content with that they subdivide themselves into sexes and races and classes and political ideas, they torture and pose and mount each other symbolically with nuclear arms, pure terror. It's disgusting, depraved, and ultimately self-destructive. I hate them.

  He checked himself. He was referring to his species after all, he carried some blame, be it only one six billionth. He waited, held his anger back and allowed the adrenaline to diffuse itself. He closed his eyes and tried to relax, to think of the sea dancing its slow tempo rhythms. When he felt calmer he began to piece the arguments together again, hoping to discover a connecting theme.

  Progress they usually call it, a euphemism for Human egoism. We call a motorway 'an advance', the discovery and invention of nuclear missiles 'an advancement on the road to truth'. Nation-states are labelled 'politically mature' and space flight is heralded as 'a great achievement'. Yet in juxtaposition you have the absurd situation where millions upon millions of people can't dismiss the authority of the Pope, still believe he is God's representative on earth. And people like myself unwittingly invest power in megalomaniacs and over-ambitious, history-conscious leaders, thereby creating something so vast and so omnipotent that these very leaders can and do send people like myself to war, be it over religion, territory, or simply inflated pride.

  There's Eleanor fighting for feminism, blacks fighting against racialism, the working-class fighting against exploitation and snobbery, capitalists and communists fighting socialists. And me? Nothing. Like most people I just do my job of work, earn my daily bread and look around in confusion but comfort at a terrible, larger than life world.

  Yes, yes, I know, we've come a long way. We live in enlightened times, with a Welfare State and a reasonable parliamentary system, with passable justice etc. Medicine, if still one-sided insomuch as it only keeps people alive yet doesn't control births, at least not enough, but then that's due to Religion as well in a lot of cases, that or bad education or lack of cash or corrupt Swiss firms selling dud or dangerous chemicals to under-developed (what a phrase, as if 'developed equals good'), to under-developed countries to make a fast few pounds or francs or whatever. Where was I? Oh yes. Medicine of course shines out, it has staved off countless painful deaths. All in all we've certainly achieved a lot, in the first world anyway. But after what? At what cost? Two world wars, fascists and totalitarians, two atomic bombings, God knows how many dead. An expensive price for this. He looked around him. This misguided sense of 'progress', this moralising but amoral age of greed. And where does our Western wealth come from? It's based on the Industrial revolution, the machine age, leading to a consumer society, exploitation of less developed countries. And what is all this based on? On mineral wealth, on coal, iron, oil, plutonium. All exhaustible products, all false wealth, bubble economy. So we base a whole society on exhaustible goods, the population swells, the consumer goods made, sold and bought, and then what? Collapse? We are promised the new 'Technological Age', but surely that is based on the same false premise, it is a tributary of the Industrial age, supplying the same false economics, but this time without employment. No, the Industrial Age is dead; the western world is heading for a collapse. So they scrabble for oil or sea-bed mineral wealth, still ignorant of the fact that these can only be temporary measures, houses of straw. Frustration grows, recession and unemployment continue to nag, inevitably war looms closer. And war in the twentieth century is world war, world nuclear war. The bubble will burst, and the Humpty Dumpty absurdity of modern politics and economics will be shattered for good, though what will happen to our host, the earth, and its inhabitants, I couldn't say.

  Exhausted and bitter he closed his eyes. Around him were the sounds of Spring,
occasionally prodded by the sounds of cars or church bells. Before his eyes the image of the world on fire appeared, and the flames were human flesh, licking and distorting in grotesque movements, sexual, vain, painful and sad. The inferno reached its crescendo, spurting human fire balls into space, writhing and twisting until it eventually ejaculated, leaving nothing but approaching cold and a black, charred earth.

  Shaken, shaking, he stood up. He glanced guiltily around him, afraid of the censure of nature, fearing punishment. He headed back towards the village, staring at the road, not daring or desiring to look up at the trees or the light, playful clouds.

  In the pub he ordered a beer and found a quiet corner where he could escape the inquisitive gaze of the locals. He recapped what he could remember of his thoughts and saw he was left with an impossible task. He had to fight for devolution of power, a decentralising of all power bases such as government, army, police force. To put power back into the hands of the individuals 'in reality', not in theory. And ecology, that poor non-starter, the abused politico-economic theory which spelt hope and sanity. And even then could people stop destroying their world? They destroy themselves through drugs and neglect, so why should they worry about their earth? If, by some miracle, all the world agreed with me and we changed the whole system so that there was one, ecological world, would Man be content? Wouldn't he need an outlet for that restless mind, like me, something to do? Maybe there's no escaping human powers of reason.

  He felt impotent, insignificant, and a little stupid, too. It was so easy to point fingers and say 'that', but it took you nowhere. He felt no better for having listed the causes of his depression, instead he felt more hopeless than ever faced with its overwhelming totality. How does a child of the Modern Age escape that world?

  He gave it up, his head ached and he felt he was going round and round in ever decreasing circles. He drank a couple more beers to muzzle his thoughts, and took the next bus back to the city, wondering why on earth he would get up Monday morning and go to work.

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