(Continues from here)
The narrator sits and stares into the darkness. The characters have stopped moving. He picks them up and looks at them as he holds them in his hand. He puts them back on the floor. They looked so alive… more alive than he himself. And yet, here he is. Alive. Sitting.
He knows there is nowhere to go. What difference would it make? A brief change of scenery, a new creation and then back, sitting here again, gazing at nothingness.
But nothingness is not nothing; it is something. It exists. It is not an absence; it is a presence. A black fog passes. Who is moving it? And, if he can see the black fog, does it mean there is light? The narrator is not agitated, he knows there is nothing he can do. He feels no fear, anguish, or frustration. He is not tired either. He simply feels this is the only action that makes sense: to sit down and look. The rest, any other activity, seems to him a deviation, a circumambulation of the centre that will inevitably collapse on this very spot. He feels no desperation. It is a simple conclusion. At the same time an end and a deduction, not logical but vital.
There are memories. He wonders if they are like his characters, if they were not alive either. He feels a certain nostalgia, a certain sadness, but he stays in his seat and looks. The world is in silence. He is surprised that he is not bored. Somehow, the mind has stopped looking for alternatives to this reality; it has realised it is pointless.
He thinks that the immensity in front of him is a sea. Then he thinks he is the sea who has finally arrived at this shore. He would say there is calmness, but there isn’t, because calmness only exists in contrast to agitation. And in this world there is no agitation. It’s not that there is nothing. There is one thing, and he looks at it.
And there is a he. Yes, there is a he. But not an individual affirmation, rather an awareness of existing. He keeps looking. There is no rush. There is nothing else. Nothing awaits him. He looks. Everything that exists is already here. Nothing is missing. He does not feel full, but neither empty. These concepts are now strange, difficult to explain. They imply an inner satiety that in turn implies a separation from the outside. The narrator does not feel that he contains anything within himself. It is simply that everything that exists is in front of him.
And he is there. He is not it. They are not one. He looks at it. If that is everything and I am not one with it, what am I then? The narrator does not know. He just knows what he is not.
Sometimes memories come, like a feather floating in the wind. But they don’t attach. It is as if the mind had lost ‘faith’ in that reality. A little pang of nostalgia, but the narrator keeps looking. It is as if nothing stuck to his mind, as if everything slipped away because it had no reality. He does not feel a particular joy. He does not need to fight any thought. They simply don’t stick; they pass. He keeps looking.
He doesn’t know if he feels alone; everything is there. Or accompanied. Those terms… make no sense any longer. The narrator thinks it is different from what he had imagined.
The Introverted Tree 