ON SOMETHING AND NOTHING

I look around at others who are my age, and I know that any one of them might be able to say, “I don’t know what I want”, and truly, completely mean it; but something feels amiss in my psyche, in a way that transcends the meaning of that simple youthful utterance. I know what I don’t want, and I know how to turn any thing into exactly that, so that I might want nothing; and so it is not that I don’t know what I want, but rather it is that I want nothing, and I want one thing to exactly the same degree (or lack thereof) as another. But I find nothing itself to be, by definition, quite boring. Herein lies the dilemma: I cannot just choose, out of all the “gifts” of life, nothing. Why not? Well, due to an absolute and penetrating fear of being incorrect about something’s apparent “nothingness”. What if I were to write something off as nothing without realizing that it is, in fact, something; that it does, in fact, have some value? Can there be a thing that seems completely devoid of value and worth upon first examination, but possessing difficult-to-find qualities that, in the magnitude of their something-ness make up for the overwhelmingly nothing-like quality of the things observed upon first examination?

It seems impossible to be sure that something is entirely nothing without fully examining it, as unappealing as the prospect of examination might at first seem, due to the subject’s boring nature. However, it seems necessary, for peace of mind and for the sake of making sure that nothing in the world is neglected in this search for somethingness in the world around me. Thus, it seems that the only thing to do is to, piece by piece, look carefully at everything around me, and take care to strive to know the complete essence of every single thing, so as to not miss any scrap of somethingness that might exist therein. The question, then, has to do with the order of operations involving this examination process. Where does one begin? Does one choose to first look for somethingness in whatever thing seems most likely to possess somethingness? If so, how is this determined? Does one choose to first look for somethingness in everything at once? If so, how can this be done thoroughly?

Let us say, for the sake of discussion, that we find the one-at-a-time method of examination most useful and appropriate in this tiresome search for somethingness. But where does one begin? But which nothing is better than any other nothing? It seems my only option here is to continuously choose one nothing, try it on, hope that it might surprise me and turn itself into some kind of something, and then wear it for eternity if it does and discard it if it doesn’t. If it fails to prove to me that it is any kind of something, I will repeat the process, until death if I have to.

Amidst this cycle of hope and disappointment (the latter appearing in the disgusting form of boredom itself), there is one salvation and one solution to complete idleness and monotony: The imagination. The imagination has this amazing power of fixating on things whose beings are not entirely known, and doing two things: 1) choosing to ignore those qualities or characteristics that are displeasing and exemplary of the nothingness within the thing, 2) glorifying those qualities or characteristics that are pleasing in any way at all, even if only due to the act of following number one, and 3) imagining any number of even more glorious characteristics that might be attributed to the thing, until an awareness of the thing’s entire being is present within the imagination. This awareness is based on only a tiny percentage of truth, and the majority of it is the result of imagination, but it is a phenomenon that leads me to suspect the following: The more active and powerful the imagination, the more dissatisfied the individual will be with the reality of situations; because the individual who is able to imagine something to be glorious will be that much more let down when he finds his imaginings to be ungrounded in reality altogether.

Nothingness is not the absence of everything, but rather equal degrees of everything (and thus nothing spectacular). Nothingness is not the absence of anything interesting, but rather the absence of that which I sense is possible in individuals: the essential, vital, urgent, quality that is the only thing providing me with any hope for humanity or any desire to continue to investigate the world around me.

I search for something more than this nothingness because I sense it exists. It seems that one does not look for something that he doesn’t think exists. For example, would someone look for car keys if they never had car keys? Presumably not. Would someone look for a killer if someone is not killed? Presumably not. Similarly, would someone look for something-ness if there was not need for it, or evidence of it, or a use for it, or a necessity for it?