Why and When the World Ended

I.

So, imagine my surprise when I was. Surprise, slowly, stutteringly morphing into confusion, with each insight, each observation.

The yawning gap at the center of the world was nothing new. I had lived with it, near it, in it long enough to think of it as home. But a void is well-defined by its substantial surroundings; by contrast it derives its empty nature. So, as you, dear reader, may well imagine, a void surrounded by a void is, perhaps, not recognizable as a void at all! When emptiness is everywhere, it is the something that forms the backdrop for, well, anything.

Thing1 and Thing 2 were pretty much heart and mind. The former was really over-activated, at the point of expansion, collapse, transmutation or infarction. And the latter? That, dear reader, is where we are. What is in that mind?

Humans are role-players. Life is theatre. No role is comprehensive: form, by nature,is circumscribed, limited to an enclosing membrane. And yet an actor may say, "I see all!" It is a popular, a legendary, a favorite role. Certainly popular as a defense against the void, which yawns unerringly and without cease, adjacent to all things, all actors, all roles. "I see thee not!", saith the One Who Is Right. "Because I am not", saith the Wraith. The dance of existence and non-existence, of being and non-being,is a bore and a matter of indifference to such an actor. Up until the penultimate scene, of course, where it becomes the subject matter itself.

Which issue, in fact,is our subject matter: The actor awakes from her role; The actor awakes from his role; the actor awakes.

And lo: the void is the background,the context, the challenge and the question.