Art imitating life…or perhaps it’s more like life imitating art? The old question often posed; so much so that perhaps it’s been rendered cliché by now in 2024. For me, the question came to me—and not for the first time—when suddenly I looked out my window to see not a society of people, but rather a society of the mass possessed, zombies or demons enacting the desires of a force, a force much too strong for them to fend off, and for me that was much too familiar, for I had visited those shores before…right in the pages of a story that I wrote years ago: Beneath The White Darkness (2017).
-Image Via: Domenic Marinelli
Sounds like the stuff of a Hollywood movie, right? I wish it was. Crazy, but these days it also sounds like a random occurrence, like a social media post intended to make you laugh and maybe inspire you to leave a ‘like’ as you scroll through all the posts and noise out there:
“That moment when you realize you wrote something that would actually happen no matter how crazy it seemed at the time.”
But in the end, and when you really think about it, there’s really nothing to laugh about in all of this…nothing to laugh about at all.
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How many times have you heard the phrase: The world has gone nuts? I’ve heard it and heck, as I approached my 40th birthday I started uttering it to myself quite a few times over. I mean all you’ve got to do is turn on the news or scroll down your favorite social media wall and see something absolutely insane…
Go for a walk even, or try going to the mall. Look at footage online of malls in the early nineties or even the mid-eighties and you’ll see a very different story unfolding before your very eyes than the one you see as you try to do some window shopping these days.
I mean in America, the occurrences of January 6th, 2021, the attack on the capitol, was something that many never imagined would have happened, and so many other occurrences—before and after—have left the world with mouths agape and deep-rooted pains on their collective hearts.
-Image via: (Free Stock Photo)
Recent administrations in both Canada and the US (as well as the rest of the world), have left many disappointed and disputing publicly and amongst themselves, with a worry—a legitimate worry at that—about a future that at one time might have looked bright and promising but now looks only like a murky skyline in the distance.
And that apocalyptic future horizon is not as ‘distant’ as it once may have seemed. These are times of uncertainty for sure. These days, people are more concerned with what will happen tomorrow than a few years down the line and that’s okay in this world right now…
Wars, poverty, endangered species of animals, cruelty to said animals, disseverment of families, governments and systems…politicians and leaders in power for personal gain and not for the betterment of society…. It’s all real dear readers. It’s real.
But it goes beyond politics and world events… All you need to do is immerse yourself in a wee bit of people watching to see that things have indeed gone awry in society, and really this has been the case for decades. The past world events that occurred over the last century were insane enough, and now things seem to be going form absolutely terrible to God knows where else….
And to be clear, all this doom and gloom has absolutely nothing to do with sexual orientation, political party affiliation and the freedom to do what makes one happy and at peace with oneself. As long as it doesn’t hurt another living thing or the environment, as far as I’m concerned, it has nothing to do with the problem at hand. So continue being you and be happy, dear readers. We all deserve that. But it seems that true happiness for the world as a whole is harder to attain than it used to be.
This disclaimer of a sort is all stated because of a sensitivity present in society today—an oversensitivity, many would say—as in the past writers such as myself would shoot from the hip to get a valid point across and not cater to this oversensitive portion of society that looks into everything said and/or written twice, three times, and tries to locate ill intent where there isn’t any at all.
To this point as well, I find it necessary to add that we all have our personal issues and we are all dealing with them in our own ways, and despite the severity of some of those issues, most deal with them with a contrite and even repentant heart, even with differences in faiths and religions practiced all around.
Alcohol, sex, drugs, food, anger issues…and that list goes on. But working on these issues and facing them head-on proves that not even these are the issues I’m speaking of here, go figure.
Lack of empathy, lack of caring and an inability to take accountability for one’s wrongs and actions is far worse than any vice, and it is this that is prevalent in people in positions of power and in those sitting idly by, watching the world slowly burn to cinders, the screams of the dying not influencing any regret or action in them in the slightest. This is far worse than any addiction I’m afraid—especially if the addict in question is trying to get better.
Intent. It’s all about intent in the end, and there seems to be none of this in those that can truly make a difference out there.
And these thoughts are what have led me to make the connection between something that had started as a fictitious story I had written and published years ago, to something that I was seeing outside my very own window, and it was actually starting to seem real and tangible out there in our society—a crazy theory if ever there was one—but the concept of a mass possession never seemed more possible to me.
Where do they come from…that look in the eyes of politicians when they give their speeches, that look in the eyes of those watching and saying, ‘Hey, it’s not that bad,’ as people are dying and suffering, that look that is empty and void of all feeling and thought…that look, to be biblical about it, seems soulless…empty vessels all around.
“It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realize that the only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality. The first step therefore is to make the black man come to himself; to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth.”
-Steven Biko (South-African activist)
Biko’s quote rings true for one and all these days. I cannot at all speak on behalf of the strong and gallant people of South Africa who he worked at fighting Apartheid for, but I can say that today, we as a society have forgotten our worth and have allowed those in power to misuse us, and we seem to have collectively started to enjoy the lies we have been fed, falling to a lazy acceptance of those lies and what they’ve bred.
In fact, it was the craziness of the Covid-19 pandemic that had me thinking about the places people would stoop to: The whole toilet paper fiasco (people scrapping it out in stores for the last package of toilet paper), the ensuing social awkwardness that the pandemic also bred, and of course the arguments and violence that ensued because of the whole vaccine debate. To me it only added to what was already going wrong and what was still to come in the following months like the attack on the capitol.
And so yeah, it all got me thinking of that novel of mine, a horror novel—how appropriate?—the aforementioned Beneath The White Darkness.
In the book, I propose the horrific concept of a mass demonic possession as opposed to a single possessed individual a priest needs to exorcise like we’ve seen before. “The spirit of Christ compels you…” Powerful words indeed, and ones I wish I could have uttered to many I came across during the pandemic and since.
-Image: Goya painting of St. Francis
So essentially I started to wonder…and yeah my imagination has landed me the gig I currently have, writing, but I started to wonder if people out there weren’t all possessed, and all at once, just like in my book?
This of course isn’t something I can prove and present to you with facts and documentation. This isn’t that type of essay. As a journalist I know what it means to present facts to the reader, but here all I have is conjecture (yet another tool used by journalists at times), but in general, this is a wonderment, a kind of ‘What the heck is going on, folks?’
How many bad news reports do we have to sit through before we all wake up?
In the end, perhaps this too is just more of the same old song and dance…the same old story: ‘Forty-year-old man unhappy at where the world is going. He looks around, sees something that worries him greatly in the eyes of the younger folks sprouting up like flowers in a field all around him.’ And so begins our tale.
An old story for sure, because when I was young I heard it from the aging guard around me that I encountered in my own field. Difference was, I was a tad more inclined to listen to that soothsayer looking on at that dark horizon with that look in his own eyes. I trusted the fear and the knowing deep in those gray/blue windows to his old soul.
And so now I wonder about the future. I truly do…
There are great people out there, and great young people out there. I’ve met them. But it is the collective I’m far more concerned about…. After all, it is the collective issues that surround any one body that can bring down even the strongest of foundations.
We can say, ‘Hey, it’s not that bad. Today was a good day. And if the day does turn dark, we can always hope for change, for awareness, for a miracle.’
Well, that miracle has not come for so many that are and have suffered at the hands of war, poverty, neglect, torture and the perils of a horrible, classless and comically ridiculous government.
Maybe you had a good day, though. Good for you. I know of a million people who didn’t.
In the end, it is action and change that is needed. Words are cheap for those that can and should take action. We need action, and now more than ever.
For those of us who have only words to load our weapons with, well, it seems like we’ve been singing a similar song from generation to generation, over and over again—soothsayers in some long lost field, shadowed over by the pale light of a tumultuous and overcast sky, and no one is listening. It’s time that they do.
It’s time that they do.
“People are crazy and times are strange / I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range / I used to care, but things have changed”
-Bob Dylan “Things Have Changed” (2000)
All Rights Reserved © Domenic Marinelli
Domenic Marinelli is a writer, journalist and poet. He is the author of multiple books which include Beneath The White Darkness, An Open Letter To Arthur Pond, Across a Dark River in Palermo, Generic V, Miles In The Dark, The Mannaro Motel, Ancient Credos In Sanskrit Moderna, and many others. Some of his work has appeared at Park Extension News, Steel Notes Magazine, Thirsty For News, the MTL Times, Guilty Eats, Slam Wrestling, CFL News Hub, Lombardi Ave, and at other print and online publications. He lives in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
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