8. EVERYTHING DANCES WITH THE ABYSS
On the fundamental fuzziness of things
Only rarely, and usually in the summer, when a storm is rolling in over the ocean at the end of a long, hot day, or when my family starts to talk of organising for Christmas, I think about being a kid again. My childhood often appears to me as one long summer road trip, from motel to motel, beach to beach, from one lonely town to another, all of it wrapped up in an infinity of straight, sweltering roads. Sometimes, as a kind of game, I try to remember what the motel rooms looked like. Sometimes, too, I sit myself in the back seat of the car again. The vehicle is parked and the windows are lowered and the sun sizzles, molten, on the glass. While I lose myself in a book my family wanders about under a blinding white sky, seeing the sights of a one-road town that I refused to witness. I want them to return so they can turn the key in the ignition and blast the aircon, so we can drive away from this nowhere-place, but I’m also grateful to be left alone.
It’s not a perfect memory, not even an obviously happy one, but it’s a favourite nonetheless, the one I return to, over and over, feeling it holds, somewhere in its parched, sun-drenched folds, the meaning of what it is to be young. I think about it for a moment, maybe even for a minute, and then change the channel; there are other things to be thinking of—other things, certainly, to be doing with my time.
Of course, it is not common to dwell on your childhood when you have only just left it. It’s more fun to look ahead at all that’s yet to come. You fixate so thoroughly on the future that you don’t even notice as your childhood drifts away from you, and you from it. One day it is large as life and all around you, an infinite dome. You think you’ll never see the end of it. Then you wake up and realise it’s become a dream. The dome has transformed into a pocket at the back of your brain, an orb small enough to roll between your fingers when you’re bored, a snowless snow-globe with tiny trees and little featureless people who nonetheless seem to be happy. You wonder how the dome ever felt so grand. You concern yourself with other, grander things, like the heady head-first dive of your twenties, where everything seems to happen at once, where life is rushing at you so determinedly that you can hardly see anything beyond it.
It’s only later, when many of your days are behind you, that you think at last to truly turn around. The distance between you and your youth has become a ravine, infinite and impassable. You have to squint to see the thimble of light that was your childhood, floating in the dark distance. You wonder how you ever fit inside it. At the same time, you feel strongly that it was the longest and largest part of your life. You miss the endlessness of it, how spaces never felt to have any walls. You question how it left you, so swiftly, so silently. It slipped away in the same ambiguous way that people fall asleep. Consciousness is all around you. Then it leaves, or perhaps it’s you who leaves, but you can never notice or remember the passing. You blur away.
It occurs to me that most things are like that. Day bleeds into night and night into day. A sapling grows fraction by fraction, stealthily, until we notice (Aha!) that it’s a tree. Sudden change—it’s some kind of fiction. Physicists and philosophers, both, know that the division between one thing and another is not as clear-cut as we perceive it to be. Carlo Rovelli calls it a “fundamental fuzziness.” At the smallest scales of the universe, discreteness dissolves: the quantum world is colourless and dark and vague, a low-resolution soup which nonetheless composes everything. Zoom in far enough and you’ll start to realise that everything is the same. God is a lazy programmer, Žižek said. Theseus will never know for sure if the ship is his.
When I was fourteen, I became morbidly preoccupied with capturing the moment I fell asleep. I would lie awake in bed at night, my limbs slowly loosening, my head sinking bit by bit into the pillow, and think, Now? Is it now? Is this it? This? I was fascinated by my own disappearance. The self is such a large thing and it amazed me that we could lose it in the same way one loses their keys, or their socks, which vanish mysteriously in the wash. How did such a large loss happen without my noticing? How did my body recover it each morning, at almost the same time? And what if one night it didn’t? I imagined my body searching, at dawn, the quiet tides of the mind—looking about in the shallows, then diving, then dredging the entire lake—and coming up empty-handed. It must be so hard to find something so large, like searching for the universe when you’re already in it. Everyone makes a lot of fuss about needles in haystacks, but how do you find something so big that it holds everything inside itself? What would a thing like that look like?
I hated sleep. That my mind should shutdown for eight hours every evening was an abomination. I had read that factoid that says if you live for eighty years you spend twenty years sleeping and it had woken me right up. Sleep for me became a little death, my body’s way of practicing for the inevitable obliteration at the end of being. I would lie down in bed at night and feel my mortality crawling across my skin.
It occurred to me, however, that there must be something important in sleep, something fundamental to life, or else we wouldn’t have evolved to expose ourselves nightly to danger. I wondered if perhaps the self was so cumbersome that the brain had to shut it down once a day in order to fix what it broke. I wondered if the self, like a powerful computer, ate so much energy that the battery of the body wasn’t able to sustain it 24/7. Mostly, I thought about emptiness, nothingness, and the balance between the void and being. I concluded that every night we must lie down and forget ourselves, not for ourselves, but for the unthinking largeness lingering at our door. Sleep is an offering to that which we came from, an appeasement of the annihilating beast, a reminder to us that we exist less than we think.
Now that I’m older, this teenage obsession has proven quite troublesome. If I lie down to sleep at night and catch myself thinking once again of that strange, blurry boundary between sleep and wakefulness—and how it is our bodies so readily cross it—I find myself trapped in my own consciousness, exhausted but unable to leave myself behind. I will lie awake all night, pleading with myself to be abandoned.
Nonetheless, it seems to me these days that losing the self is more natural than retaining it. That we should retain it, moment to moment, day to day, strikes me as some kind of miracle. The self is not this large, full thing, but is in fact quite small and quite empty. Think of how easily, from one moment to the next, it is forgotten. How quickly we become mere machines, existing in our actions but not in our minds. We lose ourselves in the evening, yes, but also during the day. We notice some grime on the bench and suddenly there is only our hand and the cloth, cleaning it away. We pick up our phones and are consumed by the light. We slide in and out of consciousness and it is not difficult, it is no loss. To some extent, I think, we were born to not exist. The self vanishes with such ease.
That a thing can become it’s opposite so readily has haunted me for a long time. In what way is being like non-being? In what way is something like nothing? In what way is order like chaos, life like death, light like dark, knowledge like ignorance, joy like anguish? I cry myself into my darkest places and find a kind of happiness greets me. I read at great depth and for many years on a topic and find my understanding of it is degraded. I have more words to describe it, yes, but the thing itself has, year by year, book upon book, receded ever-further from my grasp: it has grown huge and nebulous; it has become a dust cloud that has worked it’s way into a million other topics, that has spread itself out, further and further, almost to the limits of the universe, and I no longer hold any hope that I will be able to pin it down.
I think, fundamentally, nothing is anything: not matter, not ideas, not even the self. At the quantum level, it is theorised that space is divided from itself, that it is an emergent property, an assemblage of discrete parts. But somehow this discreteness is itself not discrete. Somehow division in this arena adds up to a kind of unity, which is the space-time continuum. Likewise, the things we perceive as discrete at the macro level reduce to soup at smaller scales: dark and amorphous and utterly inextricable. If what is discrete is unified and what is unified is discrete, what meaning can these words have? What boundary can we draw between anything? Somehow all our words, all our ideas, are inseparable from each other; they get tangled up in their opposites as easily as the self gets tangled with the abyss.
There is no line we can draw in the sand. There is form which emerges locally, at certain scales, but it is never universal. There is meaning but only if, at a certain point, we stop asking ourselves why. There is a self but only in moments. There is joy but only if we don’t think on it. We have our childhoods. I repeat: we have our childhoods, because in some ways they are not gone from us yet, at a certain scale we have not left them and never will. This is the biggest and best revelation of all. That if nothing is anything, it can also be everything, always.
Indeed, isn't it peculiar, though, that it's this nothingness of being, this groundless self and ontological fuzziness, is the only thing that seems to matter in life? As you beautifully put it, "...if nothing is anything, it can also be everything." I think the fundamental realisation of all philosophers and artists is what the late Wittgenstein realised: it is not 'whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,' rather whereof one cannot speak of is the only thing we can ever speak of ad infinitum! So, in that regard, thank god for nothingness, or else life would be terribly dull.