All Is Dark

Have you ever fallen quiet in your mind,
bored with your own thoughts, have you
ever experienced the inner eye of the storm
where nothing evokes a response from the
fluctuations in your mind, where all is dead
and quiet, and forcing yourself to continue
with routine activities is like sitting alone on
a desert island accomplishing nothing, totally
isolated, far from everything, meaning, signi-
ficance, future, past, alienated from your own
present also?

The magic lives in our own eyes and when their
light goes out and there is no external source of
life, all is dark… last night I had such fun singing
hymns in Afrikaans to modern tunes, this morning
my mind is empty, no resonance between my duty
and what I feel within – I am dead inside, not a word
or feeling, emotion or sentiment remain; I am swinging
like a pendulum between the high-tension wire of my
book, Pratchett’s Reaper Man, where Death is sharing
his life time unselfishly with a little girl to keep her alive,
tension mounting

And the routine work on my desk, without heroic meaning
only a convicted criminal claiming he is innocent after indict-
ment for rape by an apparently brain-dead woman who would
cry wolf upon nothing happening to her, why he thinks anyone
would believe him after his descrying the whole legal system as
corrupt, I cannot fathom; with the bottom falling out of my reality,
only Pratchett’s ‘Reaperman World’ shines like a light and when
looking away from the pages, I am in darkness, without
communication…


Reaper Man – Terry Pratchett, Victor Gollancz, 1991

[Psalm 42
“Soos ‘n hert in dorre streke skreeuend dors
na die genot van helder waterbeke, dors my
siel na U … ja, my siel dors na die Heer, na
die lewensbron, wanneer sal’k na swerf-
tog en benoudheid…” gesing op die wysie
van “and then I go and spoil it all by
saying something stupid like …”]