That I am writing these sentences in the same bedroom where this dream came for me seems only fitting — that old bedroom now converted in my parents’ house to a makeshift office where I come most days to be around to help my mother care for my father in his dementia — a constantly degrading state in which he less and less can recognize his surroundings or himself and how to move within it as he had — though no matter how hard I try, the ceiling of the room here now is just short and flat and white. There is nothing visibly disrupted in it. The nightglow stars have been removed. The walls, having been painted over purple and populated with my mother’s things, are different enough that the room itself seems not that room from back then here at all — though in the air, the presence, I can feel it, I’d rather not let it know I do.
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Once an awareness of the silent terror of selves in sleeping rooms and rooms inside of sleep is activated, it can be tricky to turn off. The fear of sleeplessness breeds more sleeplessness, and the locks begin to change around the keys, the mind turning activated inside a tired body, full of no distinct direction. The air of what wants out or on inside the head in growing tired and staying tired makes days seem brighter, thicker. The house around the self might seem to grow. Walls of rooms that might have been in spots before for so long might seem shifted slightly to the left, or of another color, gone. As well, in context with the body, the skull might seem thicker made around the eyes, or softing. The pupils set just deeper in the head now, new fat black edges around the seen. One might feel degrees warmer inside one’s self, though the skin itself is as any day, as if cooking too deep beneath the outer surface to be detected. The head may seem sunken in itself, unseen layers laid over layers, like a helmet or a gown. Early on, especially, it can be difficult to decipher the unslept person from the other as there is little visible physical effect but in the face or around the eyes, and who, these days, does not look worn out? We need not to have not slept to seem some way destroyed, as there is enough air to be packed in or at or against any body to cause the body to decay. We know.
What do we know? As here, in speaking, too, the voice feels deeper set within one, heavy, rubbed with charcoal, not quite mine. This speech is often stuttered, skewed with burps of repetition or false replications of familiar sound. Suddenly, the light of words that had sat forever in their pattern, without question — one’s name, for instance, or the numbers directed to dial through phones into one’s house — begin, as with relentless repetition, to seem arbitrary, blank — sound carved out of nothing, hieroglyphic, shells. The voice from deep within one’s self, set lodged there, of an other, toned out through the lengthy corridors of skin. The speech, particularly in passing into others, might not come out as you’d meant, or even at all, in the range or urge of your intention for standing in a room. Contact with bodies is someone else’s. Machines learn to trick you. Lights are loud — and the night, its saddened trick like someone placing a blanket over the cage in which for all these years you’ve been, inside yourself, corralled — room to room to room forever, mazes in a map, inside a video game made of air and buildings, no beginning and no end.
The default thought in light of all this, again, is to try to think of nothing. We are told, in sleep trouble studies, to try to clear our mind, to feel the stress and ideas pouring down out of our body. Silence. You’re supposed to let everything go. The idea of thinking of nothing then quickly becomes the thought of trying to think of nothing, and the thought of that, and that. So begins the landslide, as to think of nothing is to think of everything at all. White space screams, “Complete me.” Silence waits for how it will be filled. The very expectation of this nowhere coming on in definition works harder than any particular thing itself, filling around the want of blank with a hot vacuum, magnetizing mind.
In “Nothing: A Preliminary Account,” Donald Barthelme approaches nothing’s endless explanation by presenting a list of things nothing is not. “It’s not the yellow curtains. Nor curtain rings. Nor is it bran in a bucket, not bran. ..” The list goes on in loops of undefinition, hurrying itself forward to pack in more and more of nothing in the short remainder of our time, until soon, pages later, at all points failing to complete the list, it finds itself speaking of itself: “But if we cannot finish, we can at least begin. If what exists is in each case the totality of the series of appearances which manifests it, then nothing must be characterized in terms of its non-appearances, no-shows, incorrigible tardiness. Nothing is what keeps us waiting (forever).” The elucidation ends, again, opening unto identity via blank, here made ominous in the knowledge that before any kind of such expectation could be completed, the duration of our lives here must end, which Barthelme again negates in his final iteration, “Nothing is not a nail.” So here again is endless branching, reaching unto nothing and finding exactly that over and again where it is not, and again we feel exhausted and have gone nowhere, though perhaps in the meantime we have bumped up against some light.
John Cage reckons this silent, destructive expanse of nothing one step further in his “Lecture On Nothing,” which opens with its own collapse:
I am here , and there is nothing to say
This sort of nothing, though, has definition, structure, interior lattice, flow:
there are silences and the
words make help make the
silences.
This space of time is organized
.
Cage’s simultaneous acknowledgement of the nothing’s presence, and, within that presence, a nameless architecture that both makes the utterance futile and gives it shape, lend to the entire program a kind of noiseless pressure, an expectation both of the nothing itself and where the nothing seems to lean toward a break. The lecture continues in this strange progression, asking questions with no answers that then turn the frame onto itself, acknowledging the circular, independent, vexing, self-destructing mirror-hole of time. Each confrontation of the silence and its hidden, underlying structure evoke in the wandering field that is created a kind of insistence of the necessity of this blanking for the self’s manifestation in the face of void: a pattern in the arbitrary that perpetuates because it is. The question begets another question not in hope for clarity, but to construct: an eternal definitionless field amassing around what is not there. To try to define such space would only there negate it further, to bend it deeper there where it is not.
In the third unit of the four-part talk, Cage’s text enters into its own sort of repetitive blanking in and out, circling its self-aware and therein hybrid empty center, repeating interweaving variations of small phrases, punched into the pattern of a frameless, blank collage: “More and more / we have the feeling / that I am getting / nowhere,” he says, again and again. But also: “That is a pleasure / which will continue.” The nothing moment, then, is fed into the self as the self itself, and it is a joyful being rather than some guidebooked idea we are forced to press against. The effect acts to rather defuse what could be immortal terror in the way when one is told they must relax when they clearly can’t relax, unto a resignation to the futility of self, which once invoked, allows a kind of interior freedom, functionally useless but existing nowhere else but in the self — the same way that in resigning the control of ego to the unconscious we are rested and forced against the things we otherwise might never wear: the rolling boulder, the room’s awakening, the memory of people we’d forgotten, or who exist only in the dreamholds of the head. The sleepless mind allows at last, away from waking onslaught, some brainless shape to bloat inside of, blanking out against such daily sinking into the want of warmth and light, rubbed and rubbing around no center. One is left at last, without sharp signal, endlessly upon some nameless cusp evoking both strange pleasure in its presence and terror in its refusal to come on.