I am bringing the second part of the story to you with this post. This is as far as the story goes to this point in time. Is it a short story, or the beginning of a novel of some sort? I would like to have your input before I make a decision. With that said, here is part two.
~
I leaned back in my office chair rubbing my temples in search of relief from too many hours at the keyboard with nothing to show for his efforts. At least, I hoped that it was this that gave me another blinding headache. The fact that I had written next to nothing today, with the exception of time spent perusing the tweets and Facebook posts of friends and followers, as well as playing a few games of Hearts against the computer only made me feel guilty. My headache just wouldn’t go away. I intuitively knew that the only way I was going to ease my sense of guilt as well as my headache would be to return to the story that demanded to surface from someplace deep within.
It didn’t take much for me to realise that I had tapped into something deeper than my own unconsciousness. There was an archetypal feel for roots of the images that sought to be expressed in words. And, I sensed that I had somehow accessed the central core of whatever it was that lay as a foundation for all life, both conscious and unconscious life. Perhaps it was something called God in a myriad of forms over centuries and millennia. Whatever it was, it seemed to possess me with a will that superseded my own will. Why was I resisting so much, was the uppermost question on my mind. Perhaps, it was fear. After all, becoming the human voice for this inner voice that came out of darkness meant that I would have given up control, not something so easy for me to do. With a sigh, I turned back to the computer and brought up the document I had begun yesterday, reading what I had already written down:
It was dark. Darkness was all that there was, an infinite darkness that was unbound by time and space and place. The darkness was anything but empty. All that was to be, all that would never come to be, everything was already in the darkness simply being unformed. It was dark. It had always had been dark.
Sitting still I heard the echoes of the voice which had demanded that these words be written just this way. With a sigh of resignation, I conceded and let my guard down. And then the words began to flow. Again as I listened to the voice spoke to me.
Time was unmeasured in the darkness. The dark pulsed, alive which it was in a way that defied definition. The darkness was an unconscious and unformed soup of invisible movement. The whole was alive with no parts and with nothing outside of that whole. All was simply being, not becoming, not regressing nor differentiating nor birthing nor dying. The darkness just was.
There came a moment of almost awareness for that darkness, and in that moment, an agitation began to disturb the eternal sameness and sublime nature of simply being. That moment of almost awareness gave birth to form which gave birth to matter. Yet, in spite of the creation, the whole was still as it always was.
So it came to be that the whole became a universe in which a gathering of energy had birthed galaxies, solar systems, planets, and moons, and other sterile forms with the space between them remaining a darkness that had no definable substance.
“You know,” I commented, “If I didn’t know better, I would say that this is just a complicated way of saying the first line in the book of Genesis in the Bible.”
“You’re right. I knew that you had it in you to write this. By the way, you kept your ego out of the way today, and wrote it just like I wanted it written.”
“But why bother with re-writing what already has been written. You know that it will only create a boatload of misery for me and most of the world. I will likely be terrorised and likely even murdered when, and if, this gets published,” I sighed.
“Having doubts?”
“Well, it’s not that I have any choice,” I admitted, “but no. I guess I just want to understand what I am doing and why I am doing it.”
“Well, the times have changed and fewer and fewer people have a clue of what I had written for me in the past. You know that Genesis wasn’t the only version that was recorded. I have been explaining to all animate life that was able to grasp at least a small part of the story in multiple versions suited for the time and place of those who would hear it. That time has rolled around again. Humans need new words, a new true story.”
“But why me?” I asked, puzzled and surprised with what I was hearing. I knew I was either stark-raving mad or . . . a thought I didn’t dare complete.
“Well, just think about it. You’ve had a good life, well a good life of sorts – family, a career, love, and all that you have ever needed. You have spent a lot of time exploring where not many others have dared to look. True, you got seriously lost more than a few times in the process, but here you are now doing my work.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, there is also the fact that the boundaries between yourself and me have weakened enough to allow you hear me. Your willingness to be vulnerable in search of meaning and truth, a vulnerability that shows up in your poetry, your photography and your embracing the natural body you were gifted with. Isn’t that enough?”
“Yeah,” I conceded. “I think I get the gist of what you are saying. But, something tells me I will have more to ask you as the story gets told.
And just like that, the voice went silent.