Take Away the Saints

Switch: Part 1 || Shaun Allan

A switch.

Such a simple device. On. Off. There is no in between. Unlike black and white or good and evil, a switch is absolute. It makes a choice and sticks to it.

You'd think you could say the same for life and death, wouldn't you? You're either alive or you're not. But no, that's not quite true. What about when your body is so ravaged by disease, you're clinging on to every breath and counting each heartbeat, either being held on to this mortal coil by machines and drugs or wishing you were?

Or wishing you weren't.

Is that life? Or is it death?

Or is it some grey area between where each status's definition tries to keep their identities but realises they have to merge together, muddying their perfection in the process?

A switch doesn't bother itself with such worries. Yes or no, on or off, bringing a binaric, rather than barbaric, simplicity to our lives. You'd think so, wouldn't you?

You'd be wrong.

Nothing, of course, is ever as simple as it might, at first, seem. Certainly, flicking a switch at night chases away the deepening shadows and fills a room with illumination, but the shadows are still there. They hide beneath the sofa or behind the TV. They lurk in the corners, lying in wait for the inevitable moment when you press that switch, extinguishing the light and setting them free once more.

But it's not so simple, is it? As I said. Maybe it's the light that's banished. Maybe it's the light that's extinguished while the darkness runs rampant. Except, the light has nowhere to hide. It cannot secrete itself beneath furniture or behind curtains in the hope it might be released. Wherever there is light, there is darkness waiting. Wherever there is darkness, there can be more prowling, perhaps hunting the light to make sure it is kept at bay.

So, which was I? Was I the light or the darkness? I would, of course, believe that I was the former. A nice guy. Compassionate and tolerant.

I would be right, but I would also be wrong.

Oh, how a switch can flip the world on its head and send it spinning off into the infinite universe, a place of eternal night if ever there was one.

Hitler. If you could go back in time, would you kill him? Would you change, if you had the chance, history in such an emphatic way? Would you kill him or his parents? Remove not only his later decisions but also his very existence?

If you did, what would happen? Would you be putting a stop to the atrocities committed in his name, or would you, in fact, be erasing the chance to learn the lessons taught and simply make way for someone else to take on the role - except in a much later, much more developed and so much smaller world?

Paradoxes are fun like that, ain't they? I watched a film recently - and read the original story many years ago - in which a man was his own mother and father, thanks to time travel and genetic abnormalities. I don't believe in them, however. Or didn't. Things happen or they don't. Doc Brown is not going to appear to tell you the very fabric of the universe is going to collapse and the world as we know it will implode. Or whatever it was he said to Marty McFly when our hero went back to the past before going back to the future.

Things just are. A simple as a switch. Yes or no. Time will find its own way, even if we build a dam to damn ourselves by trying to reroute it. It's not a river we can block to change its course. It's a deluge of occurrences and nothing we can do is strong or powerful enough to divert it.