Searching for something to think can be an exercise in extreme frustration. No matter where one looks—even in hidden creases and beyond promising bends in the psyche—only emptiness can be found. Emptiness saturates the past, present, and future, as if everything worth thinking has been stolen or burned into ashes or purified into nothingness. Even the edges of the container in which emptiness is found present themselves as perpetual distance, unreachable except by thought—which has disappeared into a moment of time which cannot be experienced, except in shattered fragments. Broken pieces of thought, unrecognizable and impossible to understand, may not have any real form; they simply may be expressions of empty nothingness caught briefly in an imaginary wave of artificial energy. Time, a sheet of non-matter with no form and no substance, trickles by…a new disruptive layer that pretends to be related to experience. But in the absence of something to fill the emptiness or add substance to the nothingness, time has nothing to disrupt—so it slides by without giving any warnings as to its presence.
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The opposite of emptiness is a complex, invisible near-solid gel consisting of tiny broken bits of everything so closely bound together that the smallest atoms cannot fit in the interstitial spaces between them. Thinking through that clutter of heartbreak and hatred is akin to breathing…in an environment consisting of pure liquid mercury. No one who has not experienced that environment is capable of explaining it more clearly. Given its inherent hostility and raw anger, only the most morally corrupt creatures have the capacity to describe it…and they are perpetually busy deconstructing human social webs and familial affiliations.
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Why, I wonder, do I find myself at a loss for words…and at a loss for thoughts…on a day when the skies are blue and a sentence of silence has not been imposed on me? A Norwegian fisherman, Kolbjørn Landvik knows what I am going through. He and Calypso Kneeblood and I—all three of us in our early 70s—have been through the ferocious winters in northern Canada, where we learned we are no longer young and strong and hearty. Søren Kierkegaard wrote, and I quoted him about two years ago: “I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations— one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.” But Søren did not take into account that one of the situations might involve taking one’s own life or dying in some other way. My opinion is that regret does not follow one into death, so Kierkegaard’s advice was faulty. Unless, of course, he knows more about death that I know. That could be the case, inasmuch as he has died and I have not. We can never know…unless he was right and I might one day learn that regret does, indeed, follow one into death. That would make death a rather unpleasant, and awfully eternal, experience. Until proven otherwise, I’m going with my first hunch on this matter.
