A discussion on morality.
"I am grey. I stand between the candle and the star. We are grey. We stand between the darkness and the light." - Sacrament of The Grey Council (Babylon 5 reference guys. If you didn't catch it, I'm sorry...for you.)
After all my lazy picture posting I thought I might as well jump right in, so here goes: there is no such thing as perfection. There is no true good, no pure evil; there isn't something mystical about the soul of man that makes it impervious to impiety. There is light and there is dark, and between the two we all may fall - though light and dark are nothing without one another, and yes, I know I'm simply stating what those who've busied themselves in the moil of defining morality for millenia have said countless times before me to the point that even long before my birth such words had lost any philosophical grandeur and pride and became a dull banality, a platitude sadly wheezed out with a voice as dry and rasping as the pages upon which they were first penned. But vapid and commonplace as that phrase has become, it is the basis for the thoughts I am about to put to you, dear readers, so please try to bear with me as I go on. As I was saying, there is no light without darkness, and no dark without light. It is the absence of one that defines the other, the presence of one that emphasizes its fellow by contrast. To describe one without the other would be to explain sight to the blind, to teach music to the deaf.
But it was in talking with a friend today that I realized something - between the two is shadow. I had always taken shadow as simply more darkness, until he pointed out to me it was not. It was the liminality of man; the twilight of our souls; the spot we fall upon this metaphorical spectrum of light and dark, where we draw a line and say ' this is us. This is who we are. What falls above this line is good, and what falls below is wicked.' It is the line, the in between, that which each of us are - neither good, nor evil; dark or light - human.
Long ago my mentor, my Chiron if you will - a sagely thoughtful man - made an analogy of man's soul with a pillar, and that as you walk around it, your view of light and dark change. With your back to the sun, it would seem completely illuminated, from the back it would be a pitch silhouette against the sun, a blackness blocking out even the brightest light. He said that man's soul was such, that those who look at their own in the light let it blind them to their flaws, while those who view it from behind saw no good in themselves. He told me I must leave myself and circle my soul sometimes, to see what really lies there - a girl neither wicked nor perfect.He said as surely as man's body casts a shadow, so too does his soul. Being a temperamental adolescent at the time I (loudly and with a few nasty expletives) disagreed, saying mine was a soul that hid in the darkness behind others, that no light might fall upon it. He simply smiled in an infuriating manner and went back to grading papers.
Now no longer a mouthy adolescent (but a needlessly verbose young adult), I do see the wisdom in his words. Perhaps I did even then though I'd never admit it, seeing as it was through honest self appraisal that I eventually gained control of myself, and a self-awareness the likes of which few can boast, though to be fair while most children were at their play or watching cartoons, I could often be found arguing morality or philosophy with my father,so i suppose I did have something of a head start in such areas. But back to my point - this friend I mentioned pointed out to me as I was saying darkness needs light that light needs shadow, that darkness and light come together to make shadow. I began to understand what he meant; I'd always simply considered shadow to be darkness - the absence of light - but he was looking at it another way. Shadow wasn't light's absence but light but the creation of darkness through light; what cannot be without both; the proof of light. If light and darkness were two sides of a coin, it was the coin. Just like two parents come together to make a child, so the two sides come together as shadow, who shares traits of both and attests to each.
I believe still that man's soul must be walked around, examined from all sides before we choose where to rest, from what angle we're most comfortable with seeing it at. I've noticed mine change much from a young age, how I view myself and where I draw my line on that field, at what angle I watch the pillar of my soul. I think watching how I see that shadow change, the angles and geometries of right and wrong wax and wane, slowly winding their ways around that fixed point, that center marks my growth and awareness in life, the way a shadow's progress around a sundial marks the passage of time. The soul, that pillar, the gnomon of our moral sundial is still, unmoving. Where ever we fall between light and dark, it is there - our sign post, our beacon. It is our origin, the zero in the middle of our quadrants, our reference point, our Polestar. No matter how far we go, no matter how lost we may become, we can always find our way back to the place, that core of what we are. It is our soul.
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