Whilst you might be on the edge of your seat awaiting the latest news of Margaret Beckett, Geoff Hoon or Lembit Opik, whilst Hazel Blears' latest missal or news of Jonathan Ross and Jade Goody might fill the gap in your day, it would seem it does not take centre stage in the minds of maybe a few million people across the UK.
These are the ones hanging over an abyss or who've already fallen into it. These are the ones about to be redundant or the unemployed, the drug addict on the street moving slowly downwards to that feral state I've seen before in a former life [not me but I was closeby], the bin pickers and corridor finders at night, the fallen - those who once occupied positions of trust and respect and who somehow lost all, those who've lost what they thought only other people lose.
These are the people needing some sort of break, some sort of hope but instead see signs on buses telling them there is no G-d and to abandon all hope.
Why so dark today? These are the days where the ship has left the spaceport and finds itself out there once again hovering over the abyss, where one systems glitch will see it spiralling down but this time without a safety net. This is reality TV.
Confession time - yes, I've been watching this series from the early 2000s called
Andromeda, not the greatest series ever but sufficiently concerned with universal themes to make it morish. In researching it, its characters and actors, the same questions were asked by many - if it's not all that great as a show, then why am I still watching episode after episode?
Off topic for a moment, how could I be watching this if I have a house to shift, job interviews to attend? The answer is that if you don't take breaks, you go mad.
Back on topic. The abyss was a good name for the force of darkness from a parallel universe, a force which sucked you down a black hole which you could see no end to, a force the afficianados said [and backed up by the words of JC in the gospels] that you shouldn't mess with or even mention by name.
In the series, it was a force which was all watchful, which found its way in through little fissures in relations between people, which explored cracks in the fabric of life systems and always stressed the gloomy side, rather than the hopeful. It was concerned with death and destruction and somehow labelled this noble and romantic, as if the despair and sadness were a fine thing to inure you against hope. Black was white and white was black.
Hope was its enemy.
It got into the commonwealth and corrupted the politicians so that they even turned on their former heroes, incarcerated and tortured them. It turned people's minds so that former allies were now enemies, consumed by personal ambition and indifference to others. Whatever had been built up, whatever had been achieved after long struggle, it was perverted and corrupted and it always sought people in key positions to do that to.
You could excise it from the brain of a subject [exorcise?] but it would find another host to occupy. Where, in earlier series of the show, it was referred to obliquely, now the gloves were off and it was referred to openly as possession and the struggle, which had previously been between different worlds, different peoples, good and bad, where it had once been a secular, temporal matter, now the chaos was revealed to have had a guiding hand deep in the soul of people, on a one to one basis and the greatest joke was that people knew and yet didn't know they were even possessed.
Immediately I think here, in today's world, of the millions who are slaves to their credit cards.
The abyss seeks to kill or neutralize the whistleblowers; the naive and not so naive seekers of truth are welcomed by pretty faces, with smiles, who appear to be onside at first but who slowly reveal another agenda and in whom the paucity of good values and strange responses to mini-crises should be a warning sign for the perceptive but the perceptive can't get anyone to listen to them.
Through the series, two people on opposite sides of the galaxy might be following different agendas - one a tyrant consolidating power, another a girl who had fallen to the unforgiving street of feral once-humans but eventually, it's seen that the same force had permeated its way into their brains. Security forces who seem to be targetting the wrong people - ditto.
In the second last episode I saw, the starship captain was trapped on a derelict craft, headed towards a black hole and with him is a religious man who's now lost the way. The latter is full of doom and gloom and asks the captain what his greatest fears are, to which the captain snaps: "Those are negative thoughts. they're not going to help us out of this hole."
He gets out and others who were looking for him find him, [neither could have done it alone] ... but in the very next episode, one of the crew is infected by the abyss and nearly costs everyone's life.
And so it goes on and on ... into the starry blackness of the future. There is hope, despite appearances, but it depends whom you trust.
Off topic - I'm moving today and have an interview tomorrow and thus will be temporarily offline. Have a successful couple of days.
Try this post.
