OBSESSED WITH A SHADOW
(Obsession: An idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person’s mind; a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling. The OED 2013)
You sit at the wooden table in the top half of the house. The house is austere; the house has no shadows but your shadow is in it somewhere. There it is, a shadow as you walk under the light bulb, the only one that shines, it is a dim light and casts an insignificant glow across the cement floor, but not so insignificant as to be unimportant for as you walk underneath it there is a shadow; as you walk passed the mirror in the bathroom there is a dart, the sauntering reflection of some or other figure who you do not know, and yet you do know this personage, you will always know this shadowy somebody.
“Come close, walk next to me.”
And even when you do not acquiesce, you walk in another direction only glancing quickly, sidelong, at your image in the echo, this shadow, this it, this genderless shape will walk next to you. In the daylight, in the nightlight, sometimes in front of you, sometimes behind you, always there, always moving somewhere close, never hiding, always hidden.
“Go away,” you call, “you are like the clouds in a blue sky, opacous, and I hate the idea of impending rain.”
Sometimes you want to hide away, hide away from this shadow that gloats in your pain. But it never speaks words, imagined thoughts are its pastime, it always looks at you, into you, cajoling, pleading, “be me, be me, be me ……..” it always calls, “be me, be me.”
You often wonder who is expressing these words. Are they your words spoken out loud, spoken softly, coaxing you to think like them, those that are outside, or does the shadow speak the words that are not words?
Is it me or you, she or he, I, is it I?
“Are we the same person, do we live in the same skin, share the same heart?” you ask. “Why are there the words, the imagined images, pictures of this pain. Why do you want this other person to be me?”
There is the vacant stare, the smile that is impeachable, denouncing, a slight shift in the corners of the mouth, yet the teeth are yellow, lupine. And there are the hands, the shadowy hands that hold your heart.
“I will rob you of your thoughts, hold a knife to your slim swan neck, and give you me, always me. I will not give up this fight, I will not give in to your free thoughts, I will not liberate you from my bonds, my ropes are strong, they are made of rules, rules that rule you, you cannot escape, you will not escape. ”
You turn, “but I gave you everything, everything that is important, I gave you my heart. I thought you knew it well, I wanted you to know it, you are always with me so how can you not know it, yet you do not, will not, do not want to. I cried, I sobbed, I screamed but still you did not know what to do with my heart, so you broke it, broke it like a well-worn vase, in two, in two and a half, you could not even throw it away so it could live, scrawl back together as a word, a witty word that contains no flowers but a self, a self-container.”
There is passion in your words, this sentiment is never far away; you hate this shadow that stalks you, always walks near to you. But the shadow that passes you in the passageway moves quietly, never there and always there. You shout quietly, there is no need for the undisturbed as there is no-one here, no-one there, no-one but a shade, your only shade in the hot world of sun.
“Why,” you say, “why do you think like this, why does pain and tears run in your veins, why do you cut my throat so that the blood crawls out? I am afraid; the rats of my fear run wildly, in rotten columns.”
The shadow slouches towards you, turning and turning in the widening gyre.
“Are you that rough beast, your hour come round at last? Why do you slouch towards my Bethlehem to be born, have you not been born already?”
“This is how emotion works, it trickles, it sprawls, and all extremes of feeling are allied with madness. Ha, I am mad, yet not so mad that I cannot control you. I am not Don Quixote who loves a maid who is not there. I love you, I love you so much, I love your skin and your lithe spirit. I must make you think, think like me.”
“Never, never, never,” you scream into the vacuum, and yet it sucks, sucks you into its cavernous maw.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
“I am not the hero of the same. I will never be the troubadour of an age old epic. I will never be the sign that is legible, readable. I will never be the me of you.”
You have no expectation, but the shadow, your shadow that always walks passed you, who stares from the window glass, a reflection in the sunlight, the silvery stellated sterling mirror, this shadow has hope.
“Emotion is for others,” you say. “My emotion is that of someone else.”
A book lies on the floor. It is unopened.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
“You will never be blameless, allowed to be free, your language is impotent, it does not thrust through this world as you know few words. Do you think that I am not of you, that you can only imagine me?”
The reflection that stares at you from inside the mirror is mocking, vile; the silver hair is always out of place. You look into the mirror and the mirror looks at you, a shadow looks, yourself, a self-reflexive pronoun, how self-reflecting is a mirror, a mirror is instinctive, the shadow is a picture of the real you, a portrait of the self, a portrait of the artist as a young man, the desert of the real, a repetition, a plagiarism, a doppelganger. You look at the shadow, a city that never dreams, the shadow face; there are two holes, pools of brown water, a fresh water lake, a slime dam, a non-chlorinated swimming pool. You bite your lips, first the top lip and then the bottom one, your lips are covered in flecks of blood, nourishing chlorinated white blood cells, but you are not immune, the shadow is still there, looking. You bite at the mirror, bite at the shadow that is there, ducks swim on the exploded glass and then they die, poisoned by the shards.
“I can only imagine you for you are less, less than me,” you shout, “it is you that follows the men in the world, wants to understand them, make them hold your hand. It is you that believes in truth.”
The book is in sunlight now, behind a barrage of light.
“ ….. the Milky Way whips my sperm to the sky star ship textbook for today warm blood snake thrust pure salt visibility excellent on what fantastic world in the desert distances are not far not a whisper of a tent plague above the city and the weapons of war are perished. Fuck. Good luck.”
You reach for the blurred pages, the dam, a dyke impenetrable, you cannot grasp it. You fire a fusillade of words, they are not the same words, they are indifferent to your desperation, “a writer is a reader who is written about in a hidden hideout, around the hideout there is a snare, catch me.”
Surely the Second Coming is at hand, why, the Second Coming, when will it come?
You can feel breath, the shadow of a breath; it hisses on your skin, leans forward towards your nose, fetid, your breath, its breath? Your hands sweat, as you reaches out to touch it, to touch the delicate skin on its neck, creased, a page of a book, paper trees, but as your fingers reach out they do not find the touch of skin, they reach out into space, the page is not there, there is only glass that shimmers, the shadow mirror, an known space, hidden, the space that you occupy in all your thoughts.
“Why do the best, the best that can be, me? Why do the best lack all conviction, while the worst are always full of passionate intensity?”
Why can you not name it? You will not name, a name is a confession, a shame, you cannot name it for then the shadow will control you, make you part of its desires, it attaches itself to your thinking, almost every minute, for when you do not think about it you think about yourself. The shadow passes again, the sun has moved a little to the west, it is winter and the sun sinks early in the day, but when it is day the sun is bright, the shadow is only there, only really there when the sun sinks low and the dark hides the spiders that play in the corners of the cement room. Surely in the light some revelation is at hand, can be grasped and held? But no, even in the light the shadow enters in quick bursts, as you move across an open doorway, pass the broken mirror in the bathroom, it is there, lurking, a revelation, as you stare at the mountain the shadow breathes short breaths into your hair, you cannot see it, but your mind makes a picture of it, there, as surely as when the tree falls in the forest, but what if, what if? What if no-one is there to hear the falling tree? How can you loosen anarchy upon a closed and civilised world? How can you lose the shadow?
Ghosts have no shadows.
Hardly are those words out when a vast image made out of an image troubles your sight: somewhere in the trees, the green trees built in sand, a shape with a lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel the shadows of the vexed, the indignant.
There is a musing in your mind, “I hate you; you that is always there,” you shout, you scream; but always there it is, sometimes definite, sometimes blurred, the shadow of your unrepeatable memory; you can never say the words where are you for you know where it is, it will die when you die. And it will go on living without ever having the need to understand your words, your romance, your written wordy life. The darkness drops again; but now I know words are immortal, but will you die in the drought of the seasons made by man?
And now it goes, the shadow moves in the distance, it is far away, so far away that you are unable to see it, you see the figure that walks, runs, it is always hasty, always in a hurry, there is no time for thought, there is no time for more.
“I have found sloth, I have found the slow,” you call to it as it moves away, “I have let you go, I have pushed you away.”
You feel relieved, and yet lost, the shadow, it follows you always, you cannot find peace, it is always there, you cannot be safe, it is always there, a reminder, a remainder. “I want you back, I want you gone,” you call into the light, “I want the perspiration in my hair, the fine grains of sand on my nose, I am afraid.”
“You want the velveteen rabbit, the toy becomes the real, alive and breathing. I know that this is what you want, your thoughts show such extremes, clarity and opacity, I am clearly opaque, I am the shadow. You want the real; there is no other but the real and the real is me.”
“I want to be there, but I want to be here,” you whisper for no-one must hear this confession, this distortion, this strange humiliation.
“You are not here, you are there, only I am here, I am the reflection in the window at night, the shape that looks at you. I am your obsession for you always think of me, and I will think of him or her, or them, you cannot be but in a category, enclosed in a box.”
You take your fingers, one by one and draw them down your cheek, draw blood with the sharp pointed edge of the steel knife.
“Where are you shadow,” you say and hold your hands out to touch it, “where are you here in the void and far away?”
“Here, where you cannot catch me for I am part of that world that you do not want to be a part of, I evade you as you push me away, I will stay here until you call me back. Tell me why you want me, I want to conquer you, and if I cannot master you I will discard you.”
You look towards the stars, the flames are bright, lost and dead, “I do not want to die, I want to touch you, I do not want you to disappear, it is not safe, touch me, touch me again” you say, as you reach out your left hand to touch the skin that is not there, “touch me.”
“Write a story of obsession, how you are obsessed with me, the real me, the shadow of the shadow, write about how you breathe deeply when you are so afraid, when you are afraid that I will go. Come, approach me gently now, say the words I am ashamed, for you have rejected me and now you want my return, say hello, you stuck up low down cat.”
You cannot speak; your voice is in a vice, a rat trap, a snare, poached from your throat.
“Dirty rat, ratatatat; you can yell and spit and hate but that’s where I am at, where they are at.”
“But I want to be the cosmonaut of inner thought,” you say, “I want you to go and I want to be free. I want you to stay and I want to be a slave.”
“I am in the vacant lot, I will always walk to somewhere, so get on track, get back to the story, for only then can I forgive you for you venom.”
Twenty centuries of stony sleep are vexed into nightmare, by a rocking cradle, no?
You turn left, and then right; you turn right to right the wrong. You reverse left and right, you unlearn the difference, there is no difference, it is your fault. You must turn right and then turn left; you must unlearn the wrong and right the difference.