I’m in one of those moods again (remember that song?). Which maybe has to do with being locked in and trapped coronavirus-wise. Or maybe it doesn’t, and has more to do with the time of year, or regular bio-rhythms, or astrology, or simply the rise and fall of psychic energy, I don’t know. But I’m in one. Where life seems stupid and futile and everything I do or read seems the same. Not worth the time it takes to think of it. All our attempts at saving the moment or the day or the year, at getting ourselves out of the messes we’re all in (and god knows we’re in a lot of them), don’t seem to matter in the least. What is the good? We’re all heading to the same place anyway, sooner or later, and nothing we can ever do can change that in the least. What is the good of even writing these words? Few will read them and even fewer will care or think about them and so it’s just another jumble of ‘words, words, words,’ as Hamlet I think it was, said in a similar mood.
And yet, here I am writing again, pressing rather clumsily on my keyboard and making more mistakes than usual since my stroke took out much of the functioning of my right side, and hoping not only that my right fingers will get more skilled each day, but that something useful or at least proportional or balanced or coherent will come out of this pressing of keys that I hope results in something. And what supports that hope? What can possibly convince me that even if I do manage to come up with something—that is, if my brain, now acclimating to the rhythmic motions of my fingers on a keyboard, can generate something out of the nothing I’m feeling, the nothing that I’m doing, the nothing that is—it will mean something? I don’t know, obviously. Which is one of the magical things about this whole endeavor. Writing, I mean. That sometimes, even when one has no idea what to write, something gets written. It’s the going-through-the-motions ploy. Just start to do it, go through the motions, fake it till you make it, and something will come. And though often it doesn’t, mirabile, it often enough does. Just look. I’ve already got a couple of paragraphs. True, I haven’t said a fucking thing yet, but there are two whole paragraphs of nothing in the completed column already. That means something, no?
No. It means nothing. Nothing means nothing. And we are all, whether we like it or not or know it or not, meaning junkies. We demand that things mean something, especially ourselves (some would say that finding meaning is not only what we do, but what we are as conscious beings). And even though I’m already weary of this piece and this line of thought, I keep going on with it in the hope that something, anything, will come out of it. Something meaningful. And I don’t know where it even comes from, this foolish optimism that lulls, that gulls us into hoping for meaning, into going on when we can’t go on. Pace, Beckett.
Alright. Enough of this au-ful digressing on this hopeless state. What was I going to say? I was going to say, I think, that some of us, many of us, are getting tired of this hiatus. Imposed from without by this little shit virus. Or rather from our fear that this little shit virus could end us. Could sneak up on us unannounced and unnoticed and slip into our cells and start hijacking them until we can’t breathe, and die. That’s really what we’re afraid of, why we’re all hunkering down in our little cells. Dying meaninglessly and ignominiously beneath an array of mechanical hospital equipment, attended to by people in masks and face helmets as if we had been captured by aliens, only to gasp our last away from anything meaningful or anyone meaningful in our lives the way people now do. Meaningless death via this little shit virus.
Trouble is, we’re leading meaningless lives precisely because of trying to escape from this meaningless death. All corona has done is dramatized for us how meaningless our lives are, even normally. And that’s something. Maybe even something meaningful (and look how it creeps in no matter what!) Even writing about meaninglessness provides an opportunity for the little shit to slip in meaning. It does. I haven’t even listed my meaningless activities yet, and already I’m back to finding meaning, or at least desperately seeking one: ‘Sure; that’s what we can do, that’s a direction to head in, a discourse about how even meaningless activity can throw a life vest to /for meaning. So don’t despair, little ones’; and we don’t. Anything, goes the old nostrum, can give us meaning; even meaninglessness. Ah yes. Never give up because at some point the meaningless itself turns into meaning, and we can, we will, we must salvage this piece of nothing and turn it into something.
So there it is. You see? The mystery. We start with nothing, and we end with something. This is the way the world goes, after all. Something comes from nothing. Even though the song says, ‘nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could,’ in reality, nothing—the vacuum—actually produces something. Produces everything. That’s the current view, it seems. That from the great void, the great vacuum of space, with a little quantum fluctuation or quantum foam, came everything we now see, and touch, though it may be only with our instruments. Yes, the quantum void (is that even a term?) produces the vast multiplicity of everything there is in the universe. And it all started from nothing; or what appears to be nothing. From emptiness. Which means the Buddhists are right. All is empty, you and I are empty if we plumb deeply enough, and from that amazingly potent emptiness springs all of us and everything else we can see or think of or imagine.
So don’t despair. You see in this very piece how it works. From nothing came something. And it seems that it always and regularly does. Even from this shit, not-even-properly-alive coronavirus will eventually emerge something, is already emerging something. And we can look back on it and write about it and marvel once again at the great and impossible empty fecundity of which we are a part. Which we are. And which we will dissolve back into as soon as the shining, which we also are—like flowers, like the petals of flowers that are all descending now at the end of Spring, petals littering the ground and seeds futilely dropping onto concrete but no matter, they don’t seem to mind being wasted, they are living fecundity after all—will likewise drop seemingly wasted, seemingly useless.
But are they? Are we? Perhaps not.
Lawrence DiStasi
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