On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

Echolocation

 

1.

For a certain state of mind, the accurate word is “emptiness.”  But it’s an ill-fitting word, a busyness of bumptious syllables, the opposite of onomatopoeic. For sound mapped to meaning, try the French la vide. Vide begins with a lip-biting consonant and then goes on to a lengthy eeeee, like the cry of someone pitching over and ever into an abyss. A similarly drawn-out vowel with an even more eerie echo stretches the German word: die Leere. By the way, why is emptiness masculine in French and feminine in German? Wars can turn on a single word.

Empty = hollow = void = stripped of content = loss. One loss begets another, as any gambler will tell you.

Warfare is what a relationship turns into when the Significant Other goes from being an object of adoration, or at least a comforting companion, to an unscrupulous, blood-sucking, moral bankrupt. (Think France versus Germany, for centuries. The War Between the States. Hollywood divorces.)

You can tell when a man intends to leave his once-beloved by his ingenuity in finding fault, his upwardly ratcheting short fuse. This is field practice, a way of steeling himself for the final break, for the look in the Other’s eyes, not to mention the desert, a.k.a. emptiness, that waits on the other side. Can a small dose of hell today lessen the full shock of hell tomorrow?

You know when a woman is serious about leaving by her unusual tolerance, even indulgence, before she eases the door shut for the last time, takes the train or bus or plane, after announcing she’s off to the laundromat. Her forbearance isn’t rooted in kindness, or fear, or a need to appear saintly in her own eyes before the last lie. It’s a conscious caricature of all previous surrenders to the Other. It’s a rehearsal of indifference toward the emptiness to come … Or maybe not to come? Because there’s always a chance one of you will get away scot-free. After all, breaking up can be literally life-saving. You don’t know who you’ll be until you get there.

Girls can be boys and boys can be girls, of course. Choose your own gender adventure. What matters is that whoever initiates the breakup will suffer the greatest loss.

Losing a partner or a friend, a child, an animal or an idol — so many doorways to emptiness. Early injustice, incarceration, pestilence and mass death, or simply the hard rain of repeated personal failure, can leave what was once a living self as scorched and barren as Verdun’s fields after 1916.

Emptiness also haunts exile, the serial dislocations that hack the GPS of identity on this convulsing planet. Emptiness can bloom slowly, or stun like an explosion felt before it’s heard. Squeeze the memories all you want: there’s not a drop of juice left.

To stave off emptiness after the violent, inexplicable death of her son, a friend famous for her parties and aid to her neighbors now spends her days and nights cataloguing his possessions. He traveled far and traveled light, and didn’t leave much gear behind.

 

2.

Once empty, you will find yourself unable to think a single honest thought of your own. Instead the brain, abhorring a vacuum, will play scraps of earworms you once detested and vowed to forget. Or you might hear your parents arguing, insane titans who break off to nag the child you were — for not giving the right answer, for refusing to speak at all with your paralyzed tongue. Or else your unhushable motor-brain replays tv sitcoms, or struggles to reconstruct the events in War and Peace, and comes up only with the hiss of runners on snow, Natasha’s sleigh ride. Was there a sleigh ride? These are all busy devices to shove time forward, as if emptiness, like an ocean or a plain without sun or stars, might be traversed, as if there were a far side, shimmering green like the coast you left behind. A place impossible to reconstruct, unlike the insurance jingle buzzing now in your head.

Relatives crowded around the table of emptiness include despair, boredom, melancholy, anomie, loneliness, lethargy, ennui, resignation, vacancy, Dante’s ninth circle of hell (with Judas throned at its icy nadir). None of these can be mistaken for emptiness, for they each have a flavor, a feature. Nuclear winter might come closest.

Absolute emptiness is ephemeral. Just before a suicide there is –– trust me — a split-second stripped of tormenting voices and mocking tunes and whatever injury or guilt, rage or despair led to this enormous silence. Not that emptiness itself is likely to lead to suicide. On the contrary, emptiness protects you like a straitjacket worn in a padded room, immobilizing any twitches of dangerous ideation, any dream of self-harm. There’s no “there there” to destroy.

 

3.

Making art, however artless and imperfect, was always the irrational consoler, the act unshackled from purpose, the gut reaction to despair and destruction. Look at any artist who has formed, informed you. See? The greater the despair, the more ferocious the defense. It’s the life-force. Inspiration = breath, right? But no breath of your own stirs in emptiness.

 

4.

So, what now? The same old same old. There’s still this you, a biped that eats, pees, shops for microwavable meals, passes its annual physical (emptiness leaves no trace in the blood panel) goes to the office or to classes or parliament or the parade-ground or Zoom. Or, if you are doing time, into solitary where, as the song says, the weather suits your clothes. Sorry, another pop trope. But you get the idea. There’s no lack of things a body can do. The orbitofrontal cortex welcomes a fresh-shucked oyster, a shot of whiskey, sex too as long as you don’t have to initiate. But sometimes walking is all that’s left. There’s a man in town who has walked the streets and woods under sun and moon in all four seasons for decades. His face is a wind-snarled rope of beard with eyes that stare past all objects. I would hate to see his poor gnarled feet. If you pass close to him, he, without a glance sideways, will snatch for your hand.

To drown out the idiotic jingles and golden oldies ricocheting in your head day and night, you can try to stifle emptiness with the voices found in books and stories. Thank god for literacy. Listening to pure music, say Miles or Johann Sebastian, can also work. The distraction doesn’t last long, but for a brief time the novel notes of a passionate composer or writer, another self’s thoughts and feelings enter the thoughtless space. They sizzle and explode like firecrackers; they fan up to crayon the night sky, the black interstices of the universe. A first-class fireworks is the perfect illusion. Oooh ahh. Bang!

 

5.

Emptiness cannot be anticipated or apprehended. It comes as a shock whether fast or slow. “Comes,” but from where? How?

Could die Leere be as simple as loss of ego? An ego-dectomy? Lo, as usual, Wikipedia appears to have an answer: there’s an entry on “Ego-Death.” But despite its spooky title, this crowd-sourced message is joyful, dashing from Carl Jung to Yoga to Timothy Leary, its recurrent themes being ‘”transcendence … liberation … enlightenment.” Nothing about the prison of the sweat-drenched night, the random pattern of auditory grease-prints on the mind’s windowpane. Maybe the ego is not vanquished in emptiness but merely paralyzed. Reduced to a tiny rattling token.

If you can’t restore the innocence of ego, and the power of stories keeps dwindling, you could try embracing emptiness. Too late for Rilke’s stern injunction; but if you can’t change your life, why not change someone else’s? Do good. Adopt a pit bull. Train as an EMT, take in a refugee family, dig latrines, pick up a gun in Mariupol. Isn’t it said that she who saves someone’s life owes them continued protection forever? How many such contracts would make a dent in the emptiness? Even if it’s still lurking, maybe between bedpans and mass meals you won’t have time to notice. Is this the secret of Mother Teresa?

Or since the stories and music of others can temporarily colonize die Leere, maybe loneliness was the root after all? Ur-loneliness, I mean. Consider a kid who from the beginning “reads too much.” Nonsense, you say, god blessed my flashlight under the quilt, you say — but to grow up solely in the company of heroines and heroes of heightened perception and sensibility is not good preparation for real life, or RL as it is called today by the VR (virtual reality) gang. We could go explore VR, apropos emptiness, and in time may have no choice. But for now RL still holds its wobbly place.

Certainly emptiness is lack of thought, of ratiocination, re-action let alone action — but there is a nameless feeling, like a faint, omnipresent background noise. An anguish without object. Call it longing. Call it a constant call without echo.

As adults, book-fed children search the RL for intense and luminous lovers and friends. “Three-dimensional characters.” Good luck with that. Over time you suspect that the writers themselves have lost faith. Dead stories help emptiness expand its reach.

Another clue pointing to loneliness as the pre-condition for emptiness takes us back to the catalyst. Loss. Disappearance, abandonment, transformation. Death of the Other who dazzled and protected you, who inspired your protection, whose hands blindfolded you to the tightrope we all walk, the loose strand wavering in moonlight. Just don’t look down … until you have lost a sibling, a child, an animal whose moods mirror yours, a lover, a god, a tyrant, an Abelard, a Nora. Your Reciprocal. Take that away, and the Remainder is …?

 

6.

I don’t have an answer. Meanwhile we drift in the aftermath, or else temporary dip, of a no longer “novel” plague in what may be many species’ (h. sapiens included) final century. Over six million Covid deaths and two years of radically reduced RL reveal the hyped “connection” through social media, Zoom, etc. as the literally sickening illusion it is. Exhausting. Boring. In time, as an escape from the treadmill of memes, influencers, and a last fossil-fuel powered gush of Product, emptiness may start to look like freedom.

For now, fellow losers, fellow lost ones, let’s just scrunch closer together, all eight billion of us, and sing along to Kander and Ebb’s rousing earworm:

Happy to see you
Bleibe, reste, stay
Willkommen! And bienvenue! Welcome!
Im cabaret
Au cabaret
To cabaret!

 

Hear that echoing chorus? You are not alone.