NOTHING

empty page is the void that opens for us.

It creates a space where we belong. The emptiness of the page is unoriginated, uncreated, unformed. So are we.

The deluded among us believe wholeheartedly that they are born, created and formed, that they are real. A moment’s reflection reveals we are an iridescence, a play of light in the empty air, an evanescence of dreams shimmering against the transparency of time. We are a lace of language.

And at that ultimate moment when our blood dances jubilantly to the heart and finds the chambers locked, we remember. We are nothing.

The Radix Tetrad was my attempt as a young writer to approach that nothing. I completed the series in my mid-twenties, inspired by this truth, which had obsessed me since early adolescence when thermonuclear apocalypse loomed as a daily certainty.

I first tried to release my preoccupation with nihilism years before in a short story, “The Blood’s Horizon.” That creative experience transformed me, because - paradoxically - I found meaning in what I couldn’t understand. My entry into the dream kingdom across the frontier of emptiness exposed me to a whole new dynamic: an assault on the rigid tyranny of nothing and immediate total intervention in nihilism’s collapse of values.

The process of occupying the empty page and experiencing the fantasy events that became these novels helped me realize that we ransom all the meaning in our lives from emptiness. We redeem our sanity and the only possessions we truly own - time and mindfulness - in exchange for meaning. From the irreal, from the potential, from the imagined, we carry meaning into life. We steal it from nothing.

With the Tetrad, I became a marauder of emptiness. The booty of myth, of story and meaning, comes at a steep price: to occupy the empty page, a writer abandons reality, de-realizes the present, and invades the purely potential - the world of nothing. What the writer brings back is an alternative to the present, pure fantasy, the fundamental stuff of our being and our nothingness.

“Notes on the Radix Tetrad” expresses the meaning that broke my nihilism and restored me to the freedom of the human spirit, which is nothing less than the liberty of our uncreated selves.