The Purity of Nothingness

By: Maria Victoria A. Grageda-Smith

There’s a place in me where no one goes, but I.
That I’ve kept only for myself—that not even
my husband or mother or friends know,
or that my children could drink up dry,
or small-minded people
could destroy.
In that place, I’ve stashed dreams
not even I know all by name.
Whose password always changes,
so that no one can steal them
when I’m not looking,
or when I’m asleep,
and only nightmares
visit.
Yet to me they’re always there—
in a song, a poem, a look or a smile,
in a scent or a rainbow, or a touch
that burns invisible scars to life—
throbbing, wounding all over
again, till I taste the salt of
forgiveness and settle score
with myself: “What have
you done with your life?”
And I am shamefully proud
to admit I have done nothing
worth building
monuments
for.
My footprints on this earth
are already being blown away
by the wind
as I speak.
This is the purity of nothingness.

Poet’s Notes: “But this is no longer true, is it—now that you’ve published this book?” exclaimed a woman after she read above poem in a copy of my book, Warrior Heart, Pilgrim Soul: An Immigrant’s Journey, that she spied at the home of a common friend during a party. On the one hand, she praised my poem, remarking how much she identified with the feelings expressed in it—and I appreciated that. On the other hand, I’m afraid an important point of the poem was lost to her. And I can understand why. In human society, material achievement such as publishing a book is not a thing to be sneezed at, certainly. I don’t mean to be facetious by impugning the sense of accomplishment writers may feel when they publish a book. In other words, one is not nothing if one has achieved something like that. But it was obvious to me that the reader and I were thinking of entirely different senses of “nothingness.” It has been, for as long as I can remember, impossible for me to maintain authenticity in my writing—indeed in living life itself—without attempting to explore life’s eternal questions. Who are we, and where are we going? What makes life meaningful—or does it have any meaning at all? What, for instance, compels us to continue doing what we do and not just give in to the seeming futility of everything? When science reveals that planet earth—indeed, humankind itself—is not even a tiny dot in the vast, expanding universe, we are humbled by the realization that no one’s life amounts to a hill of beans in the larger picture—to paraphrase the conflicted protagonist in the movie, Casablanca. So, with our seeming insignificance and irrelevance to the impunity of the march of life, what prevents us from just committing suicide? I suppose this is why the most gifted artists and writers have done just that—check out of this seemingly meaningless life—because when they faced the ultimate philosophical imperative, they saw nothing but nothingness. Do we survive because we are smarter than they were? I doubt it. But we do have one advantage. Even in our seeming nothingness, most of us suspect or choose to believe there must be some meaning to our existence— otherwise, why are we here? It is very difficult for most of us to accept that, ultimately, there is no over-arching design or meaning to our existence. And this, I’m sure, is rooted in mankind’s ego that refuses to believe that none of us really matter. Some of us think we are so important that we should be able to beat even death itself, that we should be able to live on forever. The ultimate vanity. And it is here where I suspect the beginnings of the theory of an eternal human soul began. Which led to theologies that invented an immortal god who had the power to save us so that we may live forever. For most of us, it is simply inconceivable to think there is nothing more to man’s life than what Thomas Hobbes described in his Leviathan as being “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” You see now how all religion is based on fear? Religion is our answer to our fear of death—which is only the other side of the coin that fears the meaningless of life itself. You may recall that in one of my poems earlier featured in this column, Contemplations, I proposed that in the end, it’s our imagination that ultimately saves us. All religions compete to invent the best deity that might defeat the others, and when they fail to appeal to reason, they wield the sword and other means to force our belief. When your eyes are opened to enable you to see human history from this perspective, doesn’t it make you cringe to realize many of us commit murder in the name of a fictitious god? Being a fiction writer gives me great insight on this—i.e., how, if you write something well enough that powerfully inspires the imagination of generations of human beings, those human beings could ultimately come to revere your writing as scripture—touted as having been written by god himself, especially by those who stand to gain by what you wrote. Belief matters—it is essential to our survival. But survival for what? In a recent talk I gave about my book of poetry, I said—okay, so what if it is true that none of us matter, after all? Life appears to be an exercise in the absurd—as we can see when bad things happen to good people. Life seems content to simply march on in random absurdity, which suggests that there is no real meaning to life, to our existence. If that were true, to me, the issue is as simple as this: So what? You still have a choice: you can either choose to see life as meaningless or choose its meaning for yourself. If you choose to see life as meaningless, you might as well kill yourself now for any form of suffering is essentially useless—and we all know that to live is to suffer, as all great sages though millennia have—eureka!—discovered. Life for life’s sake, when the quality of that life leaves much to be desired, when it is full of great and meaningless suffering—how can anyone withstand or justify that? In other words, would you rather suffer through a meaningless life, or choose to give your life some meaning that could, at least, make your experience of it enjoyable, if not tolerable? You see, there are all sorts of truths in this world. This is one other: Science has proven time and time again that the mind does have power over matter. This is where the second choice—that of choosing to give meaning to your life enters and opens up other choices, such as choosing the kind of meaning to give your life. This is how being self-aware—the very act of mindfulness is very important to how we live our lives, indeed, crucial to the creative power. `But why do we even bother if nothing that we do really matters in the larger picture? It is here, my friends, where you experience the power of now. Why worry about years, decades, and millennia from now—when none of us indeed would even be a bleep in the footnote of life—while we have here a compelling case to live in the present and to live it fully and joyfully for whatever it is, doing what is right—not out of fear of an invented hell—but for no other reason than doing what is right and the resultant happiness it brings are their own reward? For some reason, for example, we seem hard-wired for happiness when we follow the Golden Rule. It is a mystery that does not need to be solved but need only be celebrated. Thus, to me, there are certain life mysteries that do not need absolute answers. This is where, to me, the value of poetry, fiction and art in general also comes in, as stated in the Preface of my book: “To me, the ultimate value of poetry and fiction lies not in the exposition of the existential human condition but in facilitating man’s search for meaning. In this regard, Victor E. Frankl’s book, Man’s Search For Meaning, shows its lasting impression on me. At the core of the theory of logotherapy that Frankl expounds in his book is the belief that man’s primary motivational force is his search for meaning, that man can withstand anything as long as he can somehow assign some value or significance to his experience.” Who, more than Frankl—that great holocaust survivor who later became a psychiatrist and writer—know about the power of meaning to overcome the most brutal suffering? My book’s Preface adds, “The literary masterpieces I enjoy most in this regard are those of writers and poets who seem to have succeeded in decoding some aspect of the great mystery of life and left their work as maps to help us navigate a meaningful path to a way of living and being that aims far beyond mere existence.” Thus to me, the “purity of nothingness” in my poem above does not refer to the ultimate insignificance of anything that any of us are, or do. It is rather the humble acknowledgement that although each life, in the end, may indeed likely only disappear into the ether of the universe, it is at the same time a recognition that it is precisely our mortality—the fragility of human life, the essential impermanence of ourselves—that makes our life in the here and now so precious, so worthy of protecting as a treasure that “… no moth and rust could destroy or that thieves could break in and steal away,” (Matthew 6:19). To me, our very own personal treasure lies in the core of ourselves, just as my poem above describes in the beginning. One of these days, I will share what I’ve figured for myself as my answer to the ultimate usefulness—and thus, ultimate meaning—of our life in the here and now, and why it is our moral imperative to live it with passionate joy—to “rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light!” as the great poet Dylan Thomas urges us. It’s summer—slow down and smell the roses! (Copyright 2014 by Victoria G. Smith)