Nothing (12 page)

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.

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The longest I ever couldn’t sleep at once was 129 hours, through the turning of the New Year into 1999. I was living in the ex–master bedroom of my childhood home, the same room, likely, where I’d been conceived twenty years prior. The house since then had grown—six new rooms added to its dimension in my preteens, boxing in more air around. My bedroom’s only two windows faced a small work shed my father called “The Building”—for younger years I’d both feared The Building and somehow hoped to some day live inside it, in its small and gloaming light. Often, awake with nowhere else to look beyond my window, I would feel sure I’d seen someone there inside that other, parallel pale, watching from behind a glint of moonglow, there just as quickly gone.

This certain week inside that week I’d come down sick with mono. My face swelled and my body bubbled sore. Hard to drink or think or move mostly, in which case most similarly afflicted should be sleeping, and yet I, inside my room, could not turn me off. My brain, as if in cycling against the medical commandment,
Get as much rest as you can
, insisted each hour to stay cycling, drawing days on. I saw clocks even when I closed my eyes, drummed with the slow pulsating idea that any second might be the one in which my self ’s sound might finally become silent, slip to nowhere, become gone. Instead I saw colors, prisms, tunnels, smudging; the room packed full of eyes; the light sometimes from TV alone at 4 AM like a long and grossly narrow hall. I lay on the bottom half of what once had been a bunk bed, a thing I’d begged for years ago for Christmas though there was no one there to share it with, as if in the night I split into two and needed both, terrified by the way the room around me, in those hours, seemed as well to bore new holes in the walls.

Also visible from the room, via its two other glassy surfaces, were (a) the kidney-bean-shaped swimming pool where as a young child I nearly drowned, my mother having turned one moment in the light to look at something elsewhere and turned back to find me having somehow flipped facedown, and where in later years I would spend whole days of whole long summers underwater trying to hold my breath so hard I could turn hard myself inside and be thereafter able to walk beneath the nothing, breathing, in my flesh, though I clearly never did; and (b) through the small slit of window just above my bathroom’s toilet, with one small latch clasp holding it closed, a view that mostly for most years would be obscured by brush growth from the plants that grew beside the house, obstructing the backyard. Only from certain angles and by leaning could you get any bit of sky inside that frame, and, when the bushes had been trimmed back, the right side of our next-door neighbor’s house, where a very large man lived with his old mother—the two of them together inside that small, encrushed house for years with a lawn that grew up and over and would die. In that grass once I found a skateboard I rode until it made me fall and drew my blood out. I also found a black softball bat I would in some evenings hold against me when sounds inside the house and through the walls would stir, waiting for something to come out so I could crush it—something nameless—it never came.

For all those years and since then I’ve never seen an inch of the inside of the house of those nearest neighbors. I’ve seen only the mother and the man inside there come and go, mostly just the man, coming out to climb to stand inside the backyard and look at nothing, or once to get on the roof and fix the antenna to the TV. How in that time he’s shirked the cells off of his body from at least 350 pounds down to near now around 220—a shrinking of self much the way I had, years before him, just next door—as if, in the years between, we’d shared a cyst, a giving-of into a void. How now, seeing him wobble from the garage door down the drive, I cannot help but imagine his home lined with that old meat, hung on the walls, a padding against light and outside sound there, he and his mother. Some days in his thin afternoons he comes out and stares through the fence at my sister’s barking dog, staring hard and wordless into the dog as if to burst it from its center, to desist its barking sound.

Between these three exits from this bedroom there would be enough conduit-space therein that at any given hour in my night there could be something coming in or peering in into me without me knowing, and this does not include the vents, the phone lines, the eventual internet connection, the holes too small for me to see at all. These openings inside my room, without sleep defense image, seemed to stretch over all the air. By the third day of staying awake panels of color began to appear over my bed and beyond my doorway, floating scrims of ghosting color that would dissipate as I moved toward them in my flesh. Other times the color would form dots or ovals on my vision which then would bloom to globes or sink away. Space became not a system of dimensions but a kind of substance one could mold, if in the whole exhaustion feeling too far sunk in to manipulate even my eyes—thus, a twofold kind of shifting: seeing more and knowing less.

Around the house inside these changing I trudged from room to room through disparate hours of the night, crying through the hallways asking anybody, god or whoever, just to shut me down, undo my time. Standing in the kitchen on the far side of the counter from my mother in a late light and her looking at me, speaking, as if from several hundred years away. Less than the words she spoke then, I remember the sound that surrounded all the air around me and between us, the slight shake of my frame inside my frame, and of the frame of house around me, and the air around that, layers quaking, full of night. Sometimes back inside my bedroom again hours later, as if time had not passed, I’d get the feeling that all the doors inside the house, all houses, had come open, and anything then was able to go out or come in. There comes, in the carving out, a sight—a slightly buttered color and sound that makes the old rooms, from sudden angles and in their constant whorled, unfurling periphery of, an occasional translucent texture, new.

This can be, in the excess of hours, and as days flip brutally slower along in the manner of a single, quick, enormous day, a pronounced prance, an unwinding. The hours might extend to form new rooms hidden somewhere in the make of homes, deeper sofas, thicker books, wherein the earth, for all its air, seems as if extremely conscious of the presence of your
you
, as if returning, for all the ways you’ve walked and rubbed upon its surfaces, an objectless, surfaceless, hidden embrace. If anything, the slow down invites a silence, as if lying down while standing up. The brain taking the brain over. A raw relaxing. “In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.”
¹³¹
You begin to see yourself inside yourself—can almost see, as if from overhead, or in following your body down corridors, in halls, the way your shape reacts to what is set before it. You count the sounds that you give out—even if, at the same time, it becomes less possible to stop them, fix the slip of your control. The hours go on longer, but you milk less from them. There is sound. You might hear buttons getting pressed behind you, and yet, in turning, the air is there. An autopilot popping through the spine and frame meat that, in sudden heaving moments, comes back upon size—the moments others might, then, disappear into their sleep.

On the fourth day of full waking I saw inside my bedroom wall there appear the face of a small man. His forehead neon, bulged from the tan paint. His eyes empty in a gray way. His voice speaking to me in a language I sometimes still even now can hear: no words but in bloating, a kind of sound inside sound spreading out like an outdoor artificial light would in the mass sunlight of a day. This speech in my remembering, ten years later, sounds like nothing, though I can see the head, can feel the head still in my chest, and even feel the susurration of the sound waves pillowed through my chest in certain hours again awake too long in different light with longer bones—there is no word about the word at all except its speaking, saying nothing—a mode of color in woven tone.

For long hours in the colorless stretches I would stumble through the house or go on lying, cursing me and cursing god—both felt the same. My body moved still by my impulse but at the same time as if strung ahead by ghostly ropes, my brain aware and spinning but with someone else’s speaking: heads inside of head. Just as there may seem shaken doors inside the landscapes, there become shaken doors with the flesh. A sudden urge to stand and move into the next room, the air there as if someone other had just left it, or is coming in. In the night there might be near the window the sound of speaking, or of doorknobs being turned. Notes to self appear in pockets, writings in the linings of the books. Or perhaps, as in my case, writing along the arms and hands—the body’s tablet, ever-present—if coming out in syllabic strings impossible to parse from one brain to the other. These are truly separate brains—though brains encased within the same head, at some points overlapping, some remote. Someone not you pressing the buttons there between them, turning curtains, hanging new. Deletions suddenly appearing in texts you’ve written. From texts on shelves. As if living in a life full of deleted scenes, a disc cut from a room there buried deep—and at the same time not at all buried, but laid upon the light. New gaps then there appearing slowly between the uncovered stations. Time learns to pass not from A to B, but in a small series of loops. This hour might last a half of an hour, or a half of half, some fraction thereof and therein—the time expended, say, in sitting down behind the car’s wheel to begin driving and noticing the new gaps appearing on the LCD—while this other hour, lying face up on the floor beside one’s bed, the light overhead attached to some spinning ceiling fan, perhaps, light clearly disseminating from two spherical shapes hidden underneath a glassy dome, might last twelve hours. Clicking off in reams of quiet rope, bunching up inside the body in weird weak points, sudden soring.
Where have I been all night?
This kind of time continuity distortion also appears in the way of dreaming—some sleep scenes come on embedded in the head seeming to go on for a whole life, trapped inside there as if no way out, as if this is where we’ve always been, whereas other nights the light inside will seem to burn only several minutes and yet we will wake up into a new room, very dry, a whole night and then some having slipped off in disturbed duration. Relativity, in this way, is old—it is not so much a question of experience and how one feels it as an actual variation on a theme, the blink modes breaking up, becoming arpeggiated, shifting between modes—the way a record might be blipped back and forth between speeds, slurring the voice sound there, pulling the notes, making a new song out of something other, the music burned into black synthetic circles, replicated planes.

Eventually, inside of troubled sleep, the sleeping and not sleeping begin to feel the same. There is a heat—a lack of heat—about the air that seems to vibrate just around you, for the pockets of the house where you are not. The constant thought of the current moment leads to the next moment, killing whole long loops in serial blanking from door to door to door. For all those hours spent horizontal, faking, trying, I don’t seem to remember breath ever going in or coming out. Some time in the hold you might stand and look out the window at the other houses, still and silent, most extinguished, probably no other bodies moving, all seem asleep. The houses in these times seem cowering, curled down against the earth under a sky that does not blink. The black sky, where from inside cities there are rarely constellation objects but the strong ones, the arcs of trudging object bodies trolling data in an atmosphere that smothers selves, where between these blips of passive wanting, most of the hours herein feel the same, feel not there or simply pausing, no time passed, no new song.