An infinite library of the unspoken
I write, as all others have done who have taken pen in hand, because there are things within me that compel release. Consigning them to paper as one commits dream to memory — or love to marrow and soul. I do this despite knowing the inadequacies of my words and that their failure is in itself ceremony.
I do this also knowing that the appearance of my words here in this vast digital void is also in itself a strangeness. However, I must argue against the assumption that voids are emptiness, filled with a vast nothing. What if these vast spaces of open darkness are not empty at all? What if they too are filled with all of the things we cannot see or have yet to see? What if, deep in the darkness, there were an infinite library of the unspoken, whose writing only appears to the accidental reader who stumbles upon the pages, not by random chance, but for reasons that have yet to reveal themselves?
There are some actions that defy any illusion of futility because what lies beneath is far greater and denser than the material most will ever witness above. For, however incomplete our cosmology, the failure is in the viewing rather than the landscape.
There are also certain things that cannot be written, or at least written as they are. The sacred remains sacred because it is held in the closest of confidences and consulted at every step — trusting that the illusion of absence most see as a void is in fact both mask and medium.
I would also be remiss in not noting that the naming of the unnamed is central to my writing compulsion. This, too, is an inadequate expression partly due to my limited comprehension of what truly is, and my many deficiencies as a writer. An extremely committed amateur in both attendance and participation.
And as is true in life as it is in the act of writing it, I am left with more questions than answers: What if writing is more than just the scrawlings of an ordinary fool writing into the void? And what if the void is more than merely a perceived vacancy of cosmos?
By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.