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Re​-​story the Dark

by Kaneng Lolang

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Re-story the Dark
by Kaneng Lolang


“These are Dark times.” the Overculture insists.
“Times of cruel and menacing Darkness.”
Beneath our display of acknowledgement of the non-binary, remains our solar-centric consciousness with its binaries of light-associated with the good and progressive, and dark-associated with the evil and regressive. The paradigm of our times is ridden with metaphors referring to Darkness as the pit of human consciousness. And how would it be any different when amid wars and genocides, the light-obsessed capitalist machine accelerates, and its value system which classifies humans based on what capitalism deems their worth, affirms itself with brazen celebration?
Within such a paradigm it is difficult to experience the truth of our being, free from our light-intoxicated modern lives, addicted to wattage and LED lit gadgetry. Fossil fuel deposits are predicted to be exhausted within the next century, which leaves us to continue designing yet more inventions to artificially light up our lives and further distance ourselves from the natural world. Like most human inventions, the cons of electricity outweigh the pros, and we are yet to fully acknowledge its effects on our planet and our souls.

Historically, the atrocities of war, genocide, colonisation, and slavery have been normalised in broad daylight, often on clear, sunny days.
That very clarity has been the ordained sentencer, and day the legitimising authority. “For God is light”, the enforcers repeat.
Not a single patriarchal religion has been able to fully conceal the fact that their campaigners - lamas, prophets, priests, rabbis, imams and gurus experienced the Divine not through asceticism or meditations aspiring for enlightenment, but in the deep night, in communion with complete Darkness. To let the population of conquered followers re-live that truth would have rendered the enlightenment-justified patriarchy powerless, obliterating their agenda and their egos, swollen since their discovery of iron smelting to produce weapons for waging wars that led to the suppression of women and their rites, to chattel slavery, the colonisation of earth-centred peoples and the present.

Before the creation of Abrahamic religions, today’s region of Palestine, then within a territory named Canaan was the land of polytheistic people who for hundreds of years suffered the invasion and eventual colonisation by the Levites- a violent patriarchal tribe who took over Canaan’s temples to impose their volcanic and solar God of metallurgy, setting the foundations of monotheism, God’s laws of morality and the concept of heaven and hell.
The thousands of years of wars to follow have been what was from the start, the struggle of the people of the Earth terrorised by the enlightenment obsessed. A struggle that has rippled on to the rest of humanity, affecting most psyches and belief systems.
Fast forward, the patriarchy arrived to the likes of Edison, and capitalism’s wattage-powered illusion of itself as separate from nature was sealed. Patriarchal man to this day deludes himself to be the self-sufficient, ever-lit ultimate protagonist in the vastness of our world.

Africa’s Bantu oral historians tell of highly technological civilisations which were destroyed by their own technologies. To avoid that ever happening again,the survivors created a system of heavy, sometimes deadly punishments for those who broke the law banning invention deemed dangerous for the Earth.
In recovering the ways of my animist ancestors, I have learnt that we once lived in polyphonic allegiance which included not just the sun and the moon, but among others, the spirit of the soil, the spirits of mycelia and rocks. As I learn how environments and ecosystems shape our belief systems, I see the inevitability of the human drama and the cultural processes of some of those modern humans whose adaptation to harsh natural environments was extremely challenging. Those humans who migrated too far away from their origins near the Equator where the equilibrium between day and night is a constant, where the life-sustaining sun did not symbolise the masculine or its battle to rule, where the sun was not scarce to be reduced to a theme of obsession. An obsession which would become a culture, and eventually a civilisation with an insatiable desire for control and production.

Rare folk evolved in the art of Love share that the truth of our being is within the Darkness. Dark- like the cosmos, like the womb we are all born from, like the original mother to whom every human’s mitochondrial DNA leads back to. Like the soil that nourishes us, like the soil we one day become.
In these times, we rarely experience the simple, all-embracing truth offered to us every night, that which is in the open expanse of total Darkness.
A Darkness free of any human-created light. A Darkness where we turn off the switch in our artificially lit minds busy with our modern anxieties,our internet-supported identities and social ambition. A Darkness where we are not merely ourselves in most raw vulnerability, but where we meet and commune with the Source.

Experiencing a starry sky is rare for the urban dweller. For most of the urban population, nighttime unlit public spaces equate to a dangerous reality. Those of us who still remember are left with having to cultivate Darkness within our personal space, and if fortunate can experience that on a rare camp in an urban woodland.
It is likely that in a hundred years a growing number of people will be living like we did a few hundred years ago. One day, global electricity blackouts will be the norm, the certainty of that is at once unsettling and comforting. It will happen, regardless of wether humans turn off the switch of our light-polluted world or not.
But what if we could re-story Darkness before that happens? Would we have begun to repair our relationship to Source, to our Ancestors, to Love?

In longing for the Dark, I offer this song. Paradoxically captured with electricity.

Wishing you a heart-opening Lunar New Year.

Be blessed in the embrace of Darkness.

credits

released February 9, 2024
Written, recorded and produced by Kaneng Lolang
Mixed by David Henry

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Kaneng Lolang London, UK

Improviser,
singer-songwriter and producer of bantu and balkan origins.

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