A lifetime’s rations are secured above and below deck. The anchors are secured for an indefinite passage with chains unbent, and hawse-bucklers put it. Land drifts away from the vessel; day sinks into night, and a cold wind from the North calls for the rigging and running of fore and main sails. Twinkling town lights long gone now, the sails and helm are lashed in place and the captain looks all about in awe of… nothing. No orders for piping down are issued because there is no first lieutenant to present them… because there is no crew to present them to. No course is set because no navigator is around to lay one in. This journey is deliberately without direction and without crew and the captain has vowed—to himself—never to return home until questions such as these, which have plagued his mind and spirit with doubt and despair, are answered: what is this persistent emotionless state I find myself in between bouts of recollection and desire? Does everyone experience these same encounters with nothingness? If so, is it possible that the persistence of all human life lies in the avoidance of it… in the fear of it? What vast dimensions occupy the mind of the hermit, the recluse, and the solitarily confined? Do they expand outward, streaking with memory’s colors illuminated by exploding bolts of desire, or contract inward to a bleak and inevitable collapse of sanity?
What follows are a some of the more insightful entries from his journal which was discovered untold years after his departure by a Standloper adolescent when it washed up on a south-west African shore and was nearly dismissed as kindling when a white woman, with a Ph.D. in sociology, arrived to add to the already exhaustive studies of the Standloper people, and salvaged the lengthy tome in all its obscurity—transferring what passages had not been lost to water damage and returning them to the head of the Philosophy department at Oxford, requesting only 60% of sales if they were ever to be published.
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The presence of family, friends, colleagues; their faces, voices and impressions lay patchwork flooring, of densities unique to the individual, over the abyss of the mind; this covering—its labyrinthine plumbing of steel ideals, its misshaped carpet acquaintances, and its bedrock morals all crumble and erode with a passage of time vacant enough of faces, and mute enough of voices, to plunge perception itself back into the meaningless, the irrational; the infinite.
All our efforts have always been, and will always be, spent on this layering ritual (ritual of meaning); time takes the tempo of it—time itself was created to keep the tempo of it, to make us aware of, and responsible for, this burden of meaning. Today, one must make great efforts to escape this collective ritual; because the creation of meaning has become such an integrated process, it is available to (insisted on) a person, and our survival has evolved to depend on its convenience. But punctures and fissures remain where the void rises through to instill an Existential vertigo which some, more than others, are willing to reckon with. It consumes us nightly, completely, from the depths of sleep, devouring the day’s attempts to screen it with Christmas parties, car wrecks, promotions, new pills, new pastors, suicide bombings, and spaceships fast enough for safe travel to new planets where it will become our mission to address old problems of meaning in a new neck of the cosmos with the black vacuum of space still always looming.
“If I had to choose between the world and me, I would reject the world, its lights and laws, unafraid to glide alone in absolute nothingness.”
-Cioran
If life’s chief occupation lies in the covering over of nothingness, what sorts of absurd individuals embrace it with a spirit of exploration similar to those early pioneers of the Poles? Thinkers, undoubtedly—all genuine philosophical thought springs forth from an acknowledgment of nothingness—from the artic winds of that tabula rasa common to us all—but one thinker stands above the rest in his efforts not simply to build elaborate philosophical systems up from and over nothingness, but rather to traverse its icy waters with map and compass pointed nowhere, and no clear objective other than better understanding the climate and topography, and portraying it in a way that continues to evoke sympathy amongst readers who have found themselves adrift on the same black waters. When Emil Cioran peered into these waters, he saw his reflection engulfed by an infinity devoid of meaning, reporting back to the world above and beyond: “the world has no meaning; irrational at its core, it is, moreover, infinite. Meaning is conceivable only in a finite world… Infinity leads to nothing for it is totally provisional. “Everything” is too little when compared to infinity.” The terror of the Infinite—the depths of nothingness—strikes such fear into some that they would rather throw themselves overboard into it, blotting out their existence, than bare its proximity—its sea barren of meaning—for another day… another hour.
Then there are those who are cast into it unwillingly—the solitarily confined. I pass them bobbing along in eight-by-twelve-foot rowboats without oars or sails, mostly on their backs, forcing every minute of sleep they can squeeze from the day; screaming obscenities into the wind; pissing and shitting all over the boat’s interior while still perfectly capable of sending it overboard. The seas that they hopelessly traverse are not of those calm, at times lifeless, Epicurean waters, but instead are troubled by maddening cross-currents and rip-tides capable of dissociating a mind from a body, and rogue waves of despair that strike half an hour into a much needed sleep, tearing a soul from that deepest depth of nothingness—the only promise of relief and respite from the tortuous reality of that waking abyss that awaits back on the surface. As months turn to years on their forced voyage, the thought of that irreversible plunge becomes increasingly appealing, but a cage erected around the boat’s exterior prevent so many from taking it. This is the ultimate confrontation with nothingness: abrupt, inescapable, severe. The mind enters sound enough, but with the passage of time, loss of sleep, and deprivation of human interaction, it steadily approaches dissolution and dissociation. Held under nothingness, “their minds, their morals, and their mannerisms get bent badly, ending far off center. Right becomes whatever and wrong no longer exists.” Upon my journey thus far, I have counted some 80,000 such poor souls—men, women, and children alike—adrift for lengths of time undisclosed to them. This barbaric form of punishment presents us with invaluable insight into the quality of nothingness, and, thereby, the human condition. The experiences of such individuals mark an important aspect of nothingness: its inextricable link to death and the necessity of meaning creation in life. Nothingness is not something to be wholly embraced, it is something from which we must derive a greater respect and understanding of life.
Whether facing nothingness by force or by will, it is important to recall that investigation of the void does not necessarily translate to a denial of life, or a will to death. Contrarily, the courageous thinker who persists to explore nothingness simultaneously invites the infinite possibilities of meaning, of life. However, it is important to distinguish the exploration of nothingness, as a means, from the belief in nothingness, as an end. The former may provide an individual with a greater appreciation for the horizonless freedom life provides in terms of the creation of meaning, in terms of a will to meaning, while the latter draws the curtains upon this will, upon all desire extending beyond the denial of oneself, and shuts one up in a room marked by the stench of “ascetic ideal” where the neglected and disconnected spirit mistakes the pitch black for infinity and finds themselves constantly running into cold walls of reason which can never be fully overlooked. Infinity is only to be found in the possibility of life; it is the life-affirming departure from a universal nothingness which is stripped of all color and light; by studying its depths we may achieve new heights in life.
Cold day… hard to say if it’s especially colder than any other I’ve seen out on these waters. I can no longer recall the date… the year. The seasons are all at once bleak and, for some time now, miserable. I sense I have found sufficient answers to the questions upon which I embarked, but find myself now confronted with a series of much more concerning questions, chiefly: where on god’s earth am I? My fingers have blackened and when I tried to remove a boot some days ago, two toes were nearly ripped from the bone. This must be a particularly inhabitable part of the globe for I have ceased to pass even the most solitarily confined… The black sea is now swarming with patches of white—ice floes closing in from all directions… The floes have surrounded my vessel with more of a gentle embrace than the violent crashing and crushing I had anticipated… Now such a beautiful sight a lonesome fool such as I could see: the incredible merging of all floes as far as the eye can see, no more water so black it would like to consume my very likeness and with it the very recognition of myself. No more wind so cold and roaring it would like to rush out the sound of thoughts I have known my entire life from my ears. Without map, I must trust in this great sheet of ice and wherever it might take me. Equally so, I must trust those black waters beneath, I must come to believe in the fate of their currents.
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