An allegorical blog

I have been thinking about darkness as an object. Something more than an absence of light. A creature of accumulation.

 

We vaguely call it evil, as if giving it a word explains it. But suppose it has substance. Suppose what we call evil gathers, remains, and adds to itself. Suppose it infects people and changes them.

 

This is an allegory. The Darkness is its creature, and the people who follow are figures within that telling.

 

I begin in Africa, among the developing early humans. The Darkness lives there for generations and generations. It has time. It is present when the stick becomes a club because of jealousy. Something useful has become an instrument for hurting another. The difference is held in the hand that lifts it.

 

The digging stick becomes a club for murder. Afterwards it is dropped and becomes a stick again, but the murder remains.

 

The Darkness has a quirk. It must be invited. The invitation need not look like an invitation. It could be a good lie, a lie that seems to serve a good purpose. It could be a bad thought given room to grow. It could be a bad promise. 

 

There are many doors, and the Darkness has learned how to approach them. It does not need to control everything. Much of the time it is content with a place to live and something to feed upon. 

 

It can remain within a person who has other qualities, other talents, other purposes. It need not consume the whole person to change what that person does.

 

It is not like fire, burning through everything until there is nothing left to sustain it. It can persist. It can wait.

 

But every now and then it goes berserk. The killing becomes so great that progress is delayed and populations fall dangerously. The Darkness damages the very lives through which it travels. Still, enough remains. There are survivors. There are memories.

 

The Darkness never quite gets defined. Its opposite does. Light. Goodness. Godness. We have names for what we reach toward, even while the thing that draws us away remains difficult to hold still and examine.

 

Wherever Homo Sapiens go, the Darkness travels. It goes with us out of Africa and into the rest of the world. Some of it remains in the old places, carrying ancient memories. Some of it acquires new memories elsewhere. 

 

Generations come and go. The accumulation continues. It is in the Horn of Africa.

 

An individual witnesses the murder of his father. In this telling, the Darkness enters his life through that event and takes hold. 

 

He is one among many. His suffering alone does not explain every choice that follows, but it is where this thread begins.

 

Over the years, his core becomes sadistic. He has other talents, however, and those talents propel him toward leadership. People find reasons to follow him. Eventually, he controls an army.

 

Now he can lead thousands of young men into the genocide of others. The Darkness grows. What had lived within individuals moves through commands, obedience, and participation. It accumulates in what is done and in what is left afterward.

Eventually the man dies.

 

The debris spreads.

 

There are people who have lost their families, their homes, their country as they knew it. There are people carrying memories they cannot put down. Among the scattered lives, the Darkness also remains. The death of one source has not ended what he helped spread.

 

The Darkness does not need to follow the survivors anywhere. It is already waiting in the countries of light. It left Africa with everyone else, long ago. It has had time.

One country is far from perfect. It has failures, some serious. But it keeps trying. The Darkness is patient with trying. It knows how to use what is already wrong.

It can live on the surface of the body, it can travel, it can divide, it can whisper. But to come inside it must be invited.It is invited in the old ways. A good lie. A bad thought given room. A promise no one means to keep. Sometimes the invitation is fear itself: fear of the stranger, fear of the door that compassion opened. The Darkness likes that one. It can enter through the very fear of its entering.

Some who invite it become leaders. They are elected. They are applauded.

 

Good leaders shake hands. They hear a lie that serves a purpose. They let it pass. The invitation need not be spoken. Darkness infects. Some change their opinions. The changes spread through the people they influence. Like a virus, the infection moves beyond its first contact.

 

The flaw within is reached and fed.

There is no need to manufacture every weakness. Something is already there that wants to hear the lie, accept the promise, or excuse the thought. The Darkness finds it.

 

What begins as a small permission can become a place for it to live. The accumulation is no longer somewhere in the distant past. It is no longer held safely within the story of a dead man and his army.

It has traveled through generations, through disaster and compassion, through promises and ordinary human contact.

 

It has reached the present.

Today is the edge.