Avoid the Void

Souls plunge into the Void, but the face that the Void reveals is an enormous confusion: it is an ever-changing flux of constant change—and its extent seems limitless. Making sense of this cosmic storm eventually produces an enclosure. At first it’s nothing more than an enclosing wall—something to keep the chaos out. Let us call this thing a cell, a world within the world. Mind you, it’s a very tough assignment. The wall itself is made of bits and pieces of the confusion—and only after the nature and behavior of each bit is minimally understood can we, the souls, link them together to make that wall. It gives us a momentary sense of place and of control. The wall’s no sooner made than it starts making trouble. It won’t stay in place; it comes apart. It must be constantly renewed. We must fashion better tools to capture and align the few bits and pieces we’d managed to understand. The wall is all.

Now mind you that plunge into the Void was probably something typically human, some kind of reckless self-assertion. We had probably been told that the Void is something to avoid. But we plunged in anyway and discovered the harsher version of that initial, gentle teaching. The harsh one says, Pay me now or pay me later. The descent did not elevate us, as we thought it would. It made us do tedious work. Finds those bits. Coax them together. Build that wall so that we can, if possible, collect our wits enough to look around.

Thus I imagine the origins of chemical civilization which, these days, we refer to as life. The cell is the first attempt to separate ourselves from the flux. Instead of exalting us, it drove us to near despair. Making that first habitation practical and self-sustaining took us, like, forever. And after we had done that job, we could still not see much of anything. So the labors continued, and they continue still.

The odd thing about that Void, of course, is that while ever more of it can be coaxed to reveal itself, after each vast billion-year step, we are still caught in chaos, as it were. We’ve made lots of tools since our cell days. Lots. And now our satellite-born telescopes provide us visions of the Void so massively thick with galaxies and nebulae that dizziness makes us reach for the nearest chair or desk (yet other tools) to hold us steady. Meanwhile we, ourselves, have formed, by our billions-great multitudes, yet another smaller kind of void called collective humanity—which it takes a lifetime vaguely to understand. Yes, we’ve built many other walls since then; call them ideologies, religions, philosophies, and such. They too keep coming apart and letting the original harsh Void come in again as doubts and upheavals, bloodshed and the rest.

Boy oh boy. The labor’s never done. Won’t be done until, at last, we find the wormhole by means of which we can wiggle out of here.