Gifts of the Dark

We asked the author of our new chapbook, Simon Bowden, to give us his thoughts on the creative process behind this inspiring collection. Here is his reply …

I’m thinking Why did I write this dark stuff?

Recovering in hospital from a major operation – I wondered What is the “I” when you have no external sensations?

I have a legacy of bad hay fever. It may come from being an over sanitised city kid – packed off to the country for random long periods. So a fear of the drowning symptoms.

Facing your mortality – after a cancer operation that may or may not have worked – how do you sign off from the world, when you don’t believe in a God?

In what form do we exist in limbo?

Are we positive or negative about that floating existence?

When we pick up the skull, like Hamlet, we are confronting something tremendous and paradoxical – like an AI machine finding its own self-terminate button.

Are Darkness, Emptiness, Nothing all bad things?

Is Darkness actually the cradle of life – what was there before the Big Bang?

Travelling through pain brings the gift of awareness. The friction helps create the strange “I” phenomenon.

Pushing through small pain barriers in Yoga channels this friction to a positive outcome.

Giving up control, letting go of possessions and expectations, can lead to greater freedom from greed, fear, loneliness. A liberation through emptiness.

We have to keep seeing and feeling the world new, or we might as well be dead already. We may need to travel through darkness, so that we can emerge and name the world again.

What is the “I” when we are asleep?

What is the “I” in the no-man’s-land between sleep and being fully awake?

We are in a world of infinite possibilities for the “I”. Each of the 8 billion or so human beings on the planet (not to mention the animals) occupies a unique and individual inner planet, a fully separate way of seeing, thinking and feeling.

When we suffer severe allergies – or a cancer where our body attacks itself - we are like a dictator facing a popular revolution. To cure ourselves we may need to undergo an inner moral struggle to try to heal the mind/body continuum.