The Narrator (III/III)

(continues from here; begins here)

To come here in the mornings to sit before this Rothkian void. A filled void that contains everything. The narrator wonders, do I care? But there is nothing to care about or not, there is nothing to feel. That seems to belong to another reality. Here is everything that is. He cannot say if it is infinitely light or dark, those concepts are only defined by opposition to one another. They no longer make sense.

Sitting before the immensity, the narrator needs nothing. He feels neither joy nor sadness. If he had to define it, he would say it is flat. There are no opposites, it is difficult to use adjectives. It is such his conviction that this is the only thing that exists – or rather everything that exists – that his mind abandons any attempt to suggest an alternative, to fight for another reality, one of those that used to exist. He had imagined there would be a greater sense of joy, but now that he sees it from here, why would there be? Why joy and not sadness or anger? No, there is nothing, which is much more logical. Or rather, there is everything and all the emotions add up to a kind of sum zero.

There is no music. It would be so useless and so… biased. Some notes and not others. Some melodies and not others. A message, a reaction. Here are all the messages that were and could be. Why would any of them stand out over the other? He understands that the human mind would be repelled by the description of a place like this, without small joys, without hopes. But this place contains everything. Everything he ever wished for and everything he didn’t. What he knew and what he didn’t. That’s why thoughts slip through his mind. They flow, but they don’t engage; they are superfluous.

Intelligence is redundant. It does not disappear, but it has nothing to engage with. There are no plans to achieve an aim. Everything is already here. There are no more objectives; everything has been completed.

The narrator comes here to describe with words that which contains all words and every silence. It is, above all, a silence. Not a space in which light and sound can express themselves, not a void to fill, but a silence that is everything. Not an absence, but a presence.

The narrator arrives at this conclusion and wonders why his mind is still vaguely active, why he has not fused with the whole. Nothing remains to be done. Everything is already here. Why then is his mind still differentiated from the whole? Do I exist, the narrator asks himself, am I real?