Why Shadowgnosis?

It began when Indian Shadow left the yellow house

When I adopted the moniker, Shadowgnosis, it was because nobody would ever find me under my real name. Dan Lee is a very common name, from China to Ireland. Trying to find me was like searching for a contact lens in the grass. I decided to come up with something where there was just one search result coming up. I began to think of variations on “Shadow.”

Indian Shadow

I wrote a book, Indian Shadow, and it was a very odd process. I had written a series of stories off the top of my head, so that the images were in the lead, and though I could fix spelling and grammar, I did no rewriting. I was teaching myself storytelling. I was interested in Gurdjieff, whose father was a storyteller by trade. The word he used was “ashokh.” He shared the great epic poems and ancient stories, with accompaniment on a lyre or lute. I began learning to chord a guitar.

It is easier to tell a story you know than to make one up as you go, and retelling is like rewriting. It gets more polished. But I was equally fascinated by the concept of active imagination in storytelling, where the images lead, and the ordering mind doesn’t even understand the material right away.

I wrote a series called Ash Fork. There were many different versions, some 50k words, some 30k words, some held together as a narrative, others not so much. They were spontaneous and image centric and became my daily writing meditation over a few years.

My wife asked if I had anything novel length already done, because there was a contest she thought I should send something to. I looked at my files and there was one version of my Ash Fork series that had a narrative story, and it was the right length, 60k words. I said yes, I’d polish the narrative and get it ready to send.

Imagine my surprise when I realized the word counter was counting two copies, so there were just 30k words. Instead of honing a narrative I had to rewrite quickly to expand it, but I couldn’t expand it that much. I had to write some chapters that would connect it to other Ash Fork material, from other series. This is where the mosaic began to take shape.

The original story (which I thought was novel length) sprang from an incident where I saw my shadow, or an aspect of it, after I felt a jealous anger toward another man. I would say he humiliated me but that was not true. I humiliated myself and saw him as the superior man. Superiority is the kind of thing that is hard to forgive in another, and so a good beginning for an investigation of the shadow. When a reaction is out of proportion to logical reason it’s likely because the shadow has been activated.

The shadow is unconscious, so we don’t “sort of know about it.” We can however see it indirectly by the phenomena it produces.

When I began to write this particular Ash Fork, the viewpoint character lived in a small yellow house. My house was small but not yellow. I didn’t see it at the time but yellow was the sun, and the house was the symbol of the Self, of my psyche, where the shadow was unconscious and needed to integrate.

The shadow left the house and went alone into the night. He soon fell into company with a midget con man named Lewis, just out of prison, and his sister, Paris, who owns an underground night club for little people. He had no identity until he was asked his name, and did not know. He looked at the sidewalk and saw his shadow was an Indian in full headdress. He said his name was Indian Shadow.

Lewis sits on Indian Shadow’s shoulders and directs him as they move through the city, to North Beach. He is the ego. Paris is the anima. As the story is told, Indian Shadow begins to remember himself and integrate back into his story, where his psyche was shattered.

From the middle of the book I had to write the connecting material, and then work in other material from other Ash Fork lines. I did finish it, but it read like what it was, a mosaic. Still, with all its deficiencies as a novel, there was something about it I liked very much. One of my best friends paid it the compliment that I understood best. He said after reading it he had a lot of vivid dreams. To me, it was a series of vivid dreams, of hypnotic suggestions. It wasn’t going to win a contest, but still, I had completed a nearly impossible task on deadline.

I reworked one of the chapters in the connecting part, between the Indian Shadow’s quest, and the transition from linearity to space time. I published it on Medium under the title, Funeral For a Holy Man.

Here’s something from 2016 which shows no signs of having ever been read by anybody. Interesting to see the traits Hitler and Trump share.