Imagine Nothing

Imagine Nothing

Samuel Bird

I felt something. More than that, I felt something beautiful when music was playing. It wasn’t just the beauty of the music, but what it augmented about my experience that made my world’s darkness seem poetic and brutality bright. I wasn’t simply rejected and unloved, but I was a refused lover who’s love wasn’t substantiated. The moments too sheer to feel alone, were bearable and then framable when accompanied by the right sequencing of notes. I then naturally sought to create some myself. Learning to write music was impeded by lack of natural talent and replaced by a fiery passion as would be emblematic of all my future pursuits. I learned simple chording on the guitar at the age of fourteen. I played a D major chord which consisted of the root note, major third, and fifth. I strummed it over and over on my old dusty guitar. I had learned that goodness could come from following the laws taught, but greatness came by the making of new laws. I broke all the basic music theory I knew as the next chord continued the D root, but added a minor sixth and a ninth. The first chord was beautiful enough to inspire, but the second chord was dissonant and tragic enough to seem real. In contrast they pulled me in as I was pulled away somewhere in playing each of the chords back and forth. This process of making sounds that made sense of my thoughts was now beginning to happen outside of wishes for it. However, I would now need lyrics to go with such a song. I sat the guitar down and picked up my blue spiral notebook and hoped inspiration would come. I thought about something as poignant and exquisite as my simple two-chord composition. Just then, a thought came to my mind, or rather the experience of not having one. I recalled the times that I had attempted to pull into my mind, nothing. If it is easier to imagine simple things over complex, this would be the easiest as there was even one less thing that nothing. However, I found that I could not do it. I meditated on it as best as a frenzied mind could, and found myself not even to conceptualize the starting of such. I recall no other lyrics than than the title that I scribbled in that book other than: “No pain or happiness, just pure abyss.”

Why can the mind’s eye pull in anything that its larger imagination can suppose than the supposition of non-being? We can think of space, but that is something. We can think of nothing, in terms of it being next to something. We can think of sensory deprivation as in the color black or silence. However, I can’t think of a state of being that has no ears or eyes to sense. Perhaps for this reason and our fear of mystery, death carries a conceptual weight on top of a failing of the organism’s aim. This raises a question, can there be nothing. To start with something, it was a universal instantiation used to refer to any given thing. The same sort of idea as using words like “thing” or “stuff.” This allowed a gesturing without having the proper word for a given phenomenon. As we had negation to give contrast between phenomenom, perhaps we just applied this tilda or negation to a this universal instantiation. So then, is nothing more than linguistic? Let’s say that you ask what I did today. I could say nothing, but that is not true. There was an act of being and some doing, I am just saying that there is nothing of import. Let’s say that you come to my house and I am a terrible guest and don’t feed you. I didn’t necessarily feed you nothing, there was just no feeding. So then, does nothing exist, or is it a conceptual assumption without instance in the synthesized world and mental world? While it could simply be nothing more than the negation of a given instant, is there anything more to it?

Let’s say that in all the spheres of possibility in metaphysics, that there was nothingness. Even if it were the case, it would make sense we could not comprehend it as it pertains nothing to us as conscious and valuing beings. I prescribe more to the psychology of evolution than I do sociality, and I must ask what good a program for imagining nothing would do for our primitive ancestors. Although, this only goes so far as there are many things about our mind that are not necessary, but happen to be such as a crippling degree of self-awareness. However, I am not saying it would be impossible for us to have been endowed to imagine this assumed nothingness, just that if it was, we do not have the faculties to do so. Now God can keep His mystery and the dance of the ages is not wasted. This gets to a possible truth that flies in the face of people’s scaffolded surety. Our minds are not designed to comprehend the world as it is. So then, how can we know if there is a negation to being? Can we suppose this and that thing in our mind's eye, see that they are not, and assume they are instead in non-being? Or rather, is it a property only of the mind of where they reside? What makes something real and to what degree? Can something in the mind have reality? If so, that wouldn’t help that we can neither find nothing in the world, nor in our mind. However, that is just it, perhaps you can’t find nothing. But then, you would find something, which is nothing of what you wanted. 

You may notice that I am having fun with this one. The question of nothingness keeps up western philosophers and awakens eastern philosophers. It does neither for me. I don't know its value as far as I am concerned, however, I know my relationship and familiarity gained from spending so much time with it. It doesn’t scare me anymore as I know it as well as I can know nothing. Again, there are two places this nothing could be. It could be in the mind, but certainly isn’t yet, and it could be in the world, but it is so far inaccessible to know. I have then been able to do around nothing in eliminating the possibility of identifying the potential. However, let’s assume that I am not just a mental failure and that no mind will ever truly imagine nothing. What does this say about the assumptions that the mind is under? This is where I first began to chip away at Esse Maxim. There were thoughts that undergirded thoughts that were foundational to everything else. If there is a whole swath of being, the lack of it thereof, that we can’t fathom, we have to abandon the pursuit to have a god’s eye view of the world, or at least pretend at moments we possess that. We are not the object viewing itself. We are the subject, clear and distinct, viewing the object from the singularity we can be at a given point. Humbling, horrific, or humorous, you decide how you find it, but find it inevitable. I am too lazy to think of a quality segway, but next I want to talk about the mind’s engagement with the world. Like the ideas of John Berkeley and the biocentric propositions of some practitioners of quantum physics, I wonder if the mind didn’t in fact precede the world. I wonder to what degree its perception gives being. My eyes both take in light, and then which view I also shine perception like a torch bringing all into being. A lit candle can’t know a dark room and perhaps us as conscious being makers can’t see the the opposite of the creation of perception and time we carry with us. More than just a happenstance creation from the material, perhaps it is consciousness that is privileged, or at least if it wasn’t, there would be no one around to know. My perception then never turns off, though a string of chemicals can limit my capacity to turn those perceptions into memory. Even in my sleep, dreams take me of to a world of pre-linguistic representation. I never stop perception and time varies in its role thusly. If this perception can’t stop while we have living tongues to say it, how can we know that it never resumes after we are dettached from the ability to tell the living? I didn’t prove immortality, but I proved the surety of the contrary is fraught. In this world of contingencies we know have room for faith as belief and faith as conviction. And still, I go back to dreams. There is something about them that I am trying to identify, but what I do know is dreams along with the problem of consciousness, will be what tears down the overly confident academic age I live in. When it collapses, I hope the soul has room to exist, no matter whether or not it does. 

We don’t have sufficient reason to know either that nothing can exist in the world as imagination our out of the world as sensory proof. However, it was not the proving that interested me, but what the impossibility to do so could illustrate. For similar reasons, the death of the material man is a horror as the only thing that can percieve and be aware of so, is confronted by its ceasation. What bitter cruelty this is. However, whether Socrates’s dreamless sleep or a return with friends, we stare at that abyss and are left with the same thought I wrote a dozen years ago. There is not necessarily pain or bliss in the abyss, in fact, we are not sure that the black curtain is only so, or if it leads to a consoling from a divine Director. Here, the physical structures we possess cry for life, but even our bodies know when they have come to their end. A spark of energy and joy leads the creature away from its tribe to pass in dignity and unburdening its people. And now I ask, what reason do we have to believe in nothing? Very little. How then can we go to that place that we don’t have reason to believe is? This is not to say we do know that we will continue to be, or that it will resemble anything to what you know. This infinite contingency has led me in moments of joy or despair to consider taking my own life for no other reason than the curiousity. What would be the next thing I experienced? Would it be nothing, because, well I can’t imagine that. Perhaps black or white, or silence, or buzzing, or perhaps something that neither language nor the plane I am familiar with can elude to. I make no deductive cases, but an abduction or at least inference that we as beings who’s perception makes being, could never be. I have chosen to never identify my particular Esse Maxim. I do not think all possible are created equal and of course at this time think this base assumption and bridge between inner and outer worlds is most paramount. However, I will say what it is by what it does. I look at that abyss that I can’t imagine. I feel the day must come that I pass through it or return to it. What I do feel is that my Esse Maxim towers over me in splendor and knowing. I feel myself as a child led by a wiser mind than mine between sights and sounds I don’t understand toward something better. Closer to that ceasation I go with each day a day closer to death. My previous life in scope and valued as I lived it, but it all comes to an end now. With faith I take the last step I ever will into that last night with no dreams and then... Well, I would tell you, but I can’t imagine nothing.