Nothingness - April 26 2025

 

Nothingness

… for in this sleep of death, what dreams may come.*

April 26 2025

It’s as if my first 3 years

never happened at all.

I have a bad memory,

but a total blank?

Like full amnesia

from a blow to the head,

or blacking out for 3 whole years

from a monumental bender.

A terrible loss

when it seems life only begins

with remembering.

The most wonder-filled years

lost

as the brain

must have been preoccupied

rewiring itself,

synapses sparking like fireflies

and axons feeling their way.

The mind

too distracted

to bother keeping track,

too overwhelmed by novelty

to pause and savour it.

Which is too bad,

because 70 years later

and a jaded old man

with a shrunken brain and brittle veins.

I could use a jolt of wonder

curiosity

astonishment,

can only envy

a fluid mind

and open eyes

absorbent as a sponge.

What was I like, back then;

was I a blank slate

ready to be written,

or was the man I’d become

already apparent?

And with all that sleeping

did I also dream?

And if so, of what?

That first flood of colour,

the barrage of sound?

Floating weightless

in the womb’s warm embrace?

Past lives

unspooling like old movies

salvaged from the fire?

But all I have is oblivion.

And the closest I can come to understanding it

is the deep sleep

on those dreamless nights

when I cease to exist.

And if it’s true

that all we’re really constructed of

is memory,

is this what death is like?

Our lives, a fleeting sliver

briefly glimpsed

between the eons of darkness before

and the nothingness ever after.

*Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the small death of sleep

This nothingness, this utter absence, is one of those impossible concepts, as unimaginable as infinity or the speed of light. Yet if this is why you fear death, you’ve already been there: the billions of years before you were born, when everything happened without you. If you want to know how nothingness feels, that’s it; and it will be the same after your brief flash of consciousness. (Or at least how it will be for us atheists!) As for me, I don’t fear death as much as dying: so not so much the fact of death as what happens leading up to it.

This 3 or so years of so-called “infantile amnesia” makes sense. The brain is growing, reforming, and pruning itself at a furious rate. In an unpredictable world that’s constantly changing, opening up, and revealing itself, the brain can’t afford to let things get fixed. It must remain malleable. I visualize a butterfly in its metamorphic phase: what was a caterpillar has turned to protoplasmic goo in order to totally reorganize and remake itself. (Yet — in continuing this theme of memory — it should be noted that memories formed as a caterpillar are somehow retained in the butterfly. So my analogy isn’t entirely accurate!)