Tuesday 11 June 2013

Here comes the flood (Peter Gabriel)

If you enjoy this song, please be respectful of its creator by buying it.

Many years ago I wrote a detailed exposition of the lyrics to this song, interpreting their wonderful diaspora of concepts through the prism of the Singularity, also described as the Technorapture.

Today this song takes on a new meaning for me; in the last few months, the circumstances of my life have become progressively more difficult and unpleasant, to the extent that I have actually experienced several short episodes of genuine depression. The unrelenting accumulation of negativity, in fact, was sufficiently intense to make me question my belief system and worldview.

Thankfully, I have managed to scrape together some modicum of perspective in this cruel and unusual onslaught of misfortune: I have started to see the pattern as a gathering of forces. It reminds me of nothing so much as the drawback that often takes place before a tsunami. There is nothing mystical about that, it’s a simple matter of physics, but it is still very dramatic to behold.

There is an old aphorism about night being darkest just before the dawn. That’s bullshit, of course, the darkest time of night is when it is midday on that part of the planet exactly opposite the observer. But the metaphorical idea resonates with most people, and in my own experience, it is a useful way to describe a very valid phenomenon.

There have been several occasions in my life when I have been faced with almost unendurable bleakness -- a very short time before the levee broke (to mix analogies involving bodies of water), and the forces of light once more flooded into my world, bestowing me with bountiful triumphs of the highest order. I’m sure many people can relate to a similar rebound from rock bottom coupled with a meteoric improvement in quality of life. Even if others only claw their way slowly back to happiness, while others still, sadly, encounter even greater hardship and it kills them.

Perhaps this way of looking at things is simply a survival mechanism; if so, then I welcome it, because it’s doing its job. If my intuition is accurate, though, then there is a flood of positivity building to a crescendo, somewhere just beyond my horizon. And that is a possibility I welcome even more.

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