Romancing The Void
Girl gazes into the abyss, abyss stares back.
EARLIEST MEMORIES: Teal carpet, peeling paint, ragged oak trees, wind chimes in the shape of stars, dark shadowy corners that came to life at night, Demeter’s portal to the underworld disguised as a doorway, angels masquerading as cinder blocks. I'm just now realizing the first home I lived in was haunted. My 5th birthday was a goodbye party too. I had a black leotard and a hollow at the bottom of my tummy, a premature sense of losing. I went to sleep that night with hypnagogic visions of numbers in a chronological spiral, counting up to numbers so large I didn’t know their names. I could not fathom the concept of infinity or the void of space around it. Then or now.
Our universe was born in a moment when nothing and nowhere were connected. All of being sprang forth, at once, from zero. Is this not life and death in an instant? Is this not everywhere and everything colliding? Are these not the coordinates of God?
The very mystery of our creation is not that serious, I fear… The Void is not tragic.
After all, ancient stoic philosopher Chrysippus wrote On Void and later died of laughter. The last psychologist I had encouraged me to try to identify my feelings (or lack of) as they come through me. I complained of dissociation, nothingness, she asked me to acknowledge the emptiness and then keep moving. I’m almost positive CBT is some kind of capitalist conspiracy, but I am a good student if nothing else and have spent many hours over the past couple years acknowledging my moments of emptiness and thinking deeply of nothing. Of The Void. I do my homework.
Now, I have follow up question for teacher: does THEE Void give birth to THEE Thing of life?
Jacques Lacan describes The Thing (Das Ding) as the vacuum one experiences as a human being and which we try to fill with human relationships, objects and experiences, all of which are used to plug a gap in our psychic needs. Of course, any human being on the other side of an online shopping addiction, drug habit or period of reckless sexuality knows this to be an impossible endeavor. The Void resists all attempts at filling, so Lacan also considers The Thing to be a non-thing or a vacuum.
Example of Horror Vacui art. Fear of empty spaces. Wölfli created this piece while committed at the Waldau Clinic.
AND ON RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS:
“Get get get get, got got got got”
It is 2012 and the blunt wrap is always green apple. High and flying through a bright red country. The ground is vulgar and beyond fertile with milk thistle, bonnets, thorny vines and bloody Indian paintbrush.
“Abraxas, hydroplane, massive…”
The sky is red, everything below the sky is red. Now it’s green. Tornado. The day dies, but the nights are sensory too. Trash lines the backroads, we add to it as if to say, “Fuck it, we are so young that nothing could ever matter.” There's a stabbing in my gut that reminds me this is untrue or will be soon. My whole life the wasted version of myself from the future has been watching me try to live. To survive. This specter of incoming regret is especially nagging during times of attempted embodiment. Would be weightlessness. The present moment always knows we are here to kill it.
I think of these moments often for some reason. I’m a woman approaching thirty with a million experiences between then and now and I still am invaded with the smells and texture of that fall. Red days of autumn that make my stomach curl.
This is how it is: time is a mirror and a window both.
This is how it is; years will pass and only a few days will have sharp enough teeth to catch in the wheel of time and become real memories. You will sit at a funeral for someone you loved and wish for the sting of tears, to no avail. You will be fucked while thinking about your cuticles or your TollTag, you will accomplish greatness and feel only a vague fear that you will steal your own joy by focusing on some far-off point instead of the instance in front of you. You will do so much forgetting. There will be so much emptiness.
But back to theory… Lacan describes a process (sublimation) of creating something out of nothing so that the creation signifies to and is defined by its relation to the emptiness of The Thing. Take for instance, a vase. A vase in its true function only signifies the void it creates. Right? Of course, it’s natural human nature to create meaning for the vase itself and make it into an object of its own but in this exercise, I ask you to think only of the vase in its signifying function. It only relates to nothingness, to THE Thing.
First the vase, second the skull. Is the body our personal signifier of The Thing? Is our being a microcosmic example of The Void? We are not our bodies, but our corporeal forms are always in reference to the hour of our creation and eventual destruction, are they not? Subconsciously or consciously, I think we are all looking for the meaning of our lives, for the point. I myself feel like I am waiting for some power to bestow this on me and tell me how it is, how to live, what to be. Lacan says one will never access The Thing of life. He says we cannot find it, only its pleasurable associations. This seems to mirror a believers search for God.
AND LURKING SPIDERS SPIN THEIR WEBS, EMPLOYED: It’s June, the heat, the hate, another birthday. Two Tuesday’s ago, I killed a baby tarantula. In spring I was bit by a brown recluse. Currently my camera roll is full of flash videos of spiders in webs. Last fall I kept hallucinating the damn things in the corner of my vision. Sometimes I still dream them descending on me in great numbers from the ceiling.
I know, even when the coincidences of other people's lives stack up in impressive form, it is still quite boring to hear about, but I’m just telling you how it is. For a whole year straight, I have been surrounded by spiders and the debris of my own destroying.
This is how it is: You startle yourself awake one day and realize you have wasted several precious years in a trance of nothingness. Losing the eroticism of your life, forgetting your body, ignoring the certainty of any kind of future, thinking shallowly. So, you wake up and ask the universe what to do, or more, what to want.
You are given silence, financial hardship, nausea, beautiful sunsets and stars at night. Always indifferent, always spectacular…
You are shown the void within the hearts of men, this is just how it is.
You’ll write down details of the days, hoping that at some point in the future there will be a meaning to them. You will save a text “There is nothing more bizarre than the symmetry of people’s lives examined decades after the fact”, you will read this over and over.
You will get older again. You will want to be unbirthed, to crawl back into that chthonic canal of unconsciousness. To merge back into the origin of all things.
You will consume drugs, alcohol, and sweat off of skin. You will swallow guilt, spit, the very eye of night in hopes of getting far enough from the center to actually see. Hoping the Rorschach of your life will have some discernible symbol. The Void will remain silent.
This is how it is: you are living in an explosion; you are dust thinking about what that means.
Yeah, yeah, we are all dust and to cosmic dust we will return… But teacher, maybe The Void means something specifically to women, that class whose origin cannot be decided. Are we creators or destroyers? Ancient great mothers, or just ribs? You know, the whole chicken or the egg conundrum…
Modern neo-lib feminists beware (trigger warning for all the bitches who hate nuance, I’m about to spit philosophical theories about biological sex), but maybe the female form, revolving around a literal hole, represents some key to our most realized condition. A receiver. Not of men or dogma but of THE THING.... In the wake of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie there has been much discussion revolving around “The Heroine’s Journey” posited by Maureen Murdock as an amendment to Joseph Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces” trope.
In 1981, Joseph Campbell responded to Murdock’s model by saying “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological tradition, the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to”.
This sentiment has gotten me thinking about “The Thing” and “The Void” as if on a spectrum from embodiment to dissociation, and like the Hero/ine’s Journey maybe one must willingly descend into their own chaotic void to access the core of their lives. Assaulting decency and reason at all costs. Do you follow? Is the answer to just kind of ~be here now~ and stop trying to avoid The Void? I’m blending too many cliche’s, but you get the idea.
Maybe we already are The Place where The Thing can be accessed if we just stand still long enough. If we are quiet enough. If we absorb into the sublime and stop flailing in a search for meaning.
SO, I SIT AND THINK OF YOU IN THE THEATER THEY CAUGHT JFK’S KILLER IN: Stained pink suede, red velvet drawing us close,
The protagonist stares down and says his line about wanting to know something. Just one thing. There was a puddle, in my memory there is an old gravestone wiped of script by time, but still there was no answer.
After the movie I sit under the leaky skylight in our home (we end up losing it a few years later). So much space for two people. The air feels wide open, empty and clean. Expanse of white linen fabric, there a wet spot grows under my foot. And so, the vagueness of the moment is interrupted by sensation. Spring rain bore a hole in what we bought and never wanted to own. Maybe every house I’ve lived in has been haunted… Foundations crumble, ghosts erupt nightly from the veil of concept… Thankfully strangers move into your old rooms and solve your grief.
I work at a diner now. I walk a million steps a day and bring people eggs and think about, you guessed it - nothing. I experience the sunrise over the train tracks in the early morning, my customers tell me about their dead spouses and their kids that live far away and the potted plants in their houses. I feel the fullness of their lives and we connect over coffee, over this arc of being we share in. Doomed and perfect. These days I’m feeling like a vessel for the very Thing of life. (Finally feeling!) I work on sublimating the beauty into the pain, the alienation and humanity, the primal urges, the venom and the ecstasy, the hierarchical and the virtual, the finite and the endless into the core of my being, like a conduit for divine nothingness.
This is how it is: there is a void inside you and there will be no answer.