Not Enough Emptiness...

“What you propose should be a dangerous and even difficult undertaking, if indeed you were proposing it, but no more so than us having proposed to live without asking ourselves if we had the means necessary to do so – as soon as we ask it, they are lacking –, you didn’t ask yourself if you had enough strength to see your venture, if it is one, through.” – “I did ask myself and I ask myself constantly. And the answer: I don’t have enough strength, I have enough emptiness for it.”

Blanchot, M. (1992). The Step Not Beyond

Hi.

Ahead of your party or falling behind?

There’s no party.

So you’re on your own?

No, not “on my own”. Let’s say “in solitude”. Or, seeking solitude, to be precise.

Oh God, another pseudo mystic trying to sound enlightened. Must be the altitude, it seems like no one can say a straight sentence or have a normal conversation around here.

Sorry, didn’t mean to sound that way. It’s just that the moment you asked that, I realised that “on my own” assumes the condition I’m trying to escape – twice, no three times actually, once for every word in the phrase.

“On” implies that I am onto something – that I have got somewhere, that I have some hold on a mental or physical state or a place.

“My” assumes an identity, stable and solid enough to be capable of possession.

“Own” grounds the assumption of identity by claiming possession and ownership over it.

To be “on my own” is to hold on desperately to the states which I have been attempting to walk away from for the past weeks. The fact that I can still count the weeks, or count them as weeks, again shows how desperate my hold on myself and my time, and the time that I left, and the time that I have left, remains.

I may have walked for weeks, crossed rivers and mountains and even here, in what should be the loneliest of places, I find myself. And I realise that I have been dragging “my own”, all the ownness of that self, and everything it owns, along.

But what would solitude be like? what are you actually seeking that would be lonelier and emptier than this? How would the solitude you are seeking be different from being “on your own”?

That solitude, would be empty; empty of these mountains and rivers, the infinite skies and the wind, the forests and birds. It would be the void which would make space for all of these, if ever this voice that continues to fill up my head, falls silent. When the “I” which owns this voice, and speaks it, would have lost its ownness and strength, and cleared "enough emptiness for it".

"It" being?

Exactly, being. Just being...