On Nothingness

“Buy Nothing Day” is once a year, but we can celebrate “Be Nothing Day” every day

Today, I have nothing to say. 

I suppose I could leave it at that, but I feel compelled, on various levels, to dive in a bit deeper and explore that “nothing” — to go into the ambience of it, the relinquishing or surrendering implied by it, the void of it. 

Partly as a result of this newsletter, I have taken upon myself the goal of ongoing production — the production of words, digital blips on the screen, flowing from my mind to yours. I have taken on the role — employing myself, since nobody else wanted to do so — of newsletter writer, essayist, free-thinker, who scries the events of the day, week, year, and century, seeking to find a personal “take,” some nugget dredged up from the Pinchbeckian thought-mine that I find worth sharing with you, a.ka. “the world.” 

My hidden, slightly shameful secret (shameful, yet there is also a tiny bit of pride attached to it) is that I always find it easy to collapse back to this felt sense of utter nothingness: Abnegation, surrender, vacancy. This used to bother me. But these days I take solace from this deep well of nothingness, voidness, which lies underneath everything and seems ready to utterly engulf the spectacle of this often oddly thin, oddly flat, “reality” at any moment. There is a kind of security, safety, and detachment to my close, intimate awareness of this nothingness as phantasmal anti-presence. 

Many times in my life I have felt a tremendous passionate enthusiasm — a yearning to make it happen: avant-garde art, revolution, a new magazine, sexual liberation — and even now, as I linger in the boundary-less emptiness or vacancy, I know this passion is still there. I just don’t feel it at the moment. Perhaps — it is possible — I never will again. That would be okay.

Maintaining an active relationship to the interior core of nothingness, emptiness, or the void is, perhaps, a great luxury or a kind of good luck. Many people have a collapsed or failed relationship to it. They don’t draw on nothingness as a source of strength or personal power: They collapse into it. They smash against it and shatter, rather than confronting and integrating it. 

I think, for instance, of all the people who sit at home consumed by the  images flickering on their television screen; all those who suffer from the quasi-authoritarian sports mania; all who try to escape their personal quanta of emptiness by attacking or hurting the people closest to them, generally their family members. Most people prefer any kind of drama or kerfuffle rather than face their internal void. The last thing they want to do is hold space for unadulterated nothingness that threatens to seep over everything, like thick, never-ending fog. 

As an act of imagination, to plunge fully into this nothingness, this voidness or dark matter, is to go through insanity — the schism of a self, soul, or subject rejecting itself, in flight from itself — and come out the other side of it, into a kind of terrifying, exhilarating, totally meaningless, wonderfully peaceful spaciousness. 

As I write these words, I can feel that, almost against my will, I am filling up the nothingness yet again — or perhaps “filling up” isn’t the right term. It is more like I am constructing some newfangled thought-structure that starts to carry me away from it, like a hot-air balloon lifting me off the ground. I’m not quite ready to make my escape yet. 

Nothingness is a bit like humility, which also vanishes as soon as you become aware of it. 

To be in love with nothingness — to stop resisting it — is to be happy, in some sense. Life would be interminable, unbearable, without it.