NOTHING

he 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 made up mostly of emptiness. Our bodies are composed of atoms, powers of mass so imponderably small that even photons cannot illuminate them. Physically, we are an iridescence of electrostatic forces in the void. Psychologically, we are an evanescence of dreams shimmering against the transparency of time.

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, and afterward felt less gripped by the desolation of mortal existence. The process of creative writing, of occupying the empty page with fantasies, changed me.

If we can invest with real emotion fictional experiences we know are entirely imaginary, how much more powerful are the narratives we believe true? I realized then, we ransom all the meaning in our lives from stories. We redeem our very sanity with fantasies that justify our woundward journey.

At venture in an absurd universe, we exchange the only possessions we truly own - time and mindfulness - for stories, for meaning, to inform our felt lives. From the imagined, we make something from nothing.

The fabrication of myth, of story and meaning, comes at a steep price: to occupy the empty page, writers and readers abandon external reality, de-realize the present, and invade the purely potential - the world of nothing.

What writer and reader bring back is an alternative to the present: pure fantasy, the fundamental stuff and nothingness of our being.