nothingness

part one

Nothingness


Anybody who starts a sentence “Nothingness is…” is confused and wrong. They may be about to follow with a powerful bit of rhetoric such as “nothingness is emptier than an infinite vacuum, quieter than having no ears, darker than having no eyes…” but no ideas can describe the complete lack of any idea. It is not in fact dark, because there is no light to be missing, there is no silence because silence is the absence of sound, and there is no sound to be absent.
I’m doing it too; I’m trying to describe nothing. You can't. The only way to start the sentence is: “Nothingness isn’t”.

The reason for all this is that I too visited nothing. (This sentence for aforesaid reasons does not actually make any sense, but you get the idea.) The most disconcerting thing about visiting nothing is not the nothingness itself, because it’s nothing and therefore not to be worried about, but the act of becoming nothing is rather shocking. Here is what happened to me.

I was sitting in a sitting room, sinking into a large comfortable armchair; every breath stirred the yellow sparks of dust in front of my face into little twists in and out of the liquid sunlight. I wriggled my toes into the deep, worn carpet and shut my eyes to the richly decorated room. I braced myself for the shock to come, knowing as I did it that it was a futile gesture against the power of nothingness. Then nothing happened.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Part 2
Everything


The point of visiting nothing is that when you return to everything you notice, well everything, in the same way that when you visit a beach you notice the beach. The difference is that visiting the beach isn’t the most exciting thing ever to happen to you ever, even if you have travelled through millions of worlds, and been almost eaten/killed/injured/locked up/used as a projectile weapon/all of the above on many of them. Every sense exploded with more information than I had ever experienced, I noticed three senses which had always been their, but had never revealed themselves before, I realised that their was a faint damp smell in the room, that the TV, although switched off was emitting a slight hum, that their was a cello being played on the other side of the street just too quietly to be heard, that the light from the sun was changing angle very slowly, while gradually becoming more orange. I noticed lots of other things. I noticed subtle changes of temperature, the gentle caress of falling dust, I noticed everything.
I noticed so much that I could focus in nothing. Everything became sound and light and smell, everything became so complex that their was nothing to define anything against. Like a page with so much writing on it that it is pure black, Everything became a white Nothing.
I realised that everything was nothing and that only with the contrast between everything and nothing could anything be understood, and therefore properly exist. {I also realised that their hasn’t been anything to laugh about for at least two chapters. Unless you, like me find cellos to be rather subtly amusing due to past experiences.} {I also realised that according to this theory if their was a world containing everything then nothing would exist because nothing can exist without nothing, therefore no place could exist without nothing, meaning in short that I was about to come down and return to my normal existence between nothing and everything where most people are most of the time.