Deep Dark Light

‘Do not imagine that,

if something is hard for you to achieve,

it is therefore impossible for any man: but rather consider anything that is humanly possible and appropriate to lie within your own reach too.’

- Marcus Aurelius (121—180)

by

Mark Sheeky

Pentangel Books

Deep Dark Light written by Mark Sheeky.

Illustrations and graphic design by Mark Sheeky.

1st edition, published in Great Britain by Pentangel Books.

www.pentangel.co.uk

Print Version ISBN 978-0-9571947-4-8

Copyright © Mark Sheeky 2018

Mark Sheeky asserts his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents act of 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, duplicated, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means without explicit written permission from the publisher. Any person who performs any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and/or additional civil claims for damages.

Formatted for e-readers using Calibre.

To Deborah, my love and light.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Dr. Kenneth Pobo

Preface

DEEP

The Beginning · Tortured · The Island

The Ineffectual Hunter · How Great Thou Art

Time · Life · Hope

Escape · Love

Imagination

The End

DARK

Darkness · Bed · Love

Dark Knowledge · Xanadu · Love

Dark Thought · Dark Sense Data

Moths · Dark Thought

Requiem For A Million Cells

Let There Be Light

Perfection · Black Hole

Dark Information · Truth

Replication

Death Is Silence · Life Is Violence

Meaning · Universe · Being

LIGHT

Darkness

Winter · Summer

Honey · Blood

Midnight · Childhood

The Lake · The City

Light

Appendix

DREAM JOURNEY INTO MARK SHEEKY’S DEEP DARK LIGHT

By Kenneth Pobo

Probably a good place to start thinking about this work is the title. Usually these words are separate, like individual ships on the water. Not here. It’s not that these three entities don’t exist—but sometimes in one is the other. He could have begun with Dark or Light, but he chose Deep—and that’s where we’re headed, a deep place, a steep place full of questions, things that form and unform at the same moment.

If you are looking for a straight-up narrative work, move along. Connections happen here—in each illustration and written piece—but these are not built from traditional forms of narrative. The words converse with the illustrations. Sometimes we clearly overhear what they say; other times we have to go strictly by impulse and intuition. In John Lennon’s song Intuition the speaker says that intuition takes him everywhere. Everywhere, nowhere, light, dark.

Sheeky says Our life. This shape is unique to us… and like the illustrations that sometimes resemble Rorschach ink blots we look for meaning, for depth, in those shapes. It isn’t the poet or illustrator’s job to create that meaning. We have work to do. We have to take the journey to find the meaning—with no guarantees that we will find it.

We might be able to find it speaking to us in a dream. Poe said that all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream: deepdarklight. Perhaps even more than the written words, the illustrations evoke a sense of being in a dreamscape. The words feel like shapes, perhaps incandescent figures our beings, as we enter the surprise of imagery that forms only to bust apart.

Time. Is it another dream? We mark our way with time. It’s like a cane everybody walks with. It’s also a way to create meaning out of our days. Everything is all about escapism, says Sheeky’s speaker. We want to escape time. We want time to be kind to us, to remember us. Time is busy passing. It can’t look back even as we scream out.

Also present are creators from earlier times. They feel as real here as we do. Their words aren’t monuments unless monuments have dreams, which maybe they do. The sky explodes infinitely. We observe and partake of it. Great creators of the past are part of that ongoing explosion. That might sound lovely, but we are reminded too that Existence is war. The exploding sky mimics war and war mimics the exploding sky as dark and light tangle with each other.

Meet George. He’s assembling a sculpture. He’s a maker. He is caught/free from being caught between dusk and dawn. In a tenuous world, he makes. Winter. Spring. Winterspring. Dreamgeorge—he steps into the delightful coolness. Yet loss comes near. Where is Lucine? Time ages too. Love is a blindfold chosen deliberately. We could choose to see. We may prefer not to see.

Birds. They appear and fly away before we can really see them well. They’re dreams. Perhaps they are moments that take shape—take flight—we remember them and wait for them to return. Without warning an ape appears. We must face it. The path feels like it fades as we go down it. The stone clock is dead, yet we feel time. Childhood comes up to us in our present life, maybe more real than our present life.

A sound of bells. George, the leaf in the brook, floating in the sunlit water. Transience. Trying to find meaning, trying to find people, when they disappear. The last poem, Light, reminds us of Ozymandias. The speaker asks him to loosen every dream. And the last two words are bright sky. Has darkness been vanquished or lessened? Or is the ending not an ending at all—but a moment, a bright sky that appears now but will not last.

THE CAVERN OF DOORS

The great bronze gates,

towering elephants on needle pin feet,

so heavy, we push.

A vast chamber beyond, circular,

polished stone floor,

like being inside a wedding-cake palace,

ring after ring,

doorway after doorway,

a thousand doors on each level, a million,

and level upon level, like a rope up and up to an infinite white point

sun, sky, star...

PREFACE

This book is in three parts, like a sonata of music, and that was my aim, to create a sonata of writing, a book driven by mood and structure at least as much as

narrative.

Parts touch upon philosophy and science; principally the philosophy of self, reason, and meaning. This book does not pretend to break any new intellectual ground in this regard, but as part of its mood-driven structure it engages in a quest for purpose as a precursor to the story that is the finalé.

Let us begin.

Mark Sheeky, 2018.