This is Part 2 of a two-part story. Read the previous part here.

I have told you that this story is an interstate through the desert. But, this isn’t really a story. It’s something else. A poem maybe. Several stories. Whatever it is, you say it’s got to be about something. Well, what if it’s not? What if it’s about nothing? Not like Seinfeld about nothing, since that really was about something, about narcissistic friends and soup and white people problems. No, I mean, what if this is all about nothing? The same kind of nothing from the desert. The void, the big empty, that which the universe expands into ever since its debut, its Big Bang, which was also the end of the previous universe. Not the nothing in between planets, that’s a vacuum. No, I mean the nothing that’s past the edge of the universe, the abyss that stares back, the middle of the ensō, the nothing of the desert. 

Let me lay my cards on the table. Yes, I am aware that I just used a gambling metaphor in a thing about the desert. No, I am not trying to make you think about Reno or Las Vegas, but I am aware that I just made you think about them. I am thinking about nihilism, about the scary Schopenhauer version of existential dread and the meaninglessness of all things. I think of nihilism as a response to materialism. Maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it, but bathed in the lights of the Vegas strip, it all seems, well, kinda empty. You get sucked up in a vacuousness that says if you just have one more, then maybe that will be enough. One more dollar, one more hit, one more like. Yeah well, how’s that working out for you? 

But then again, that’s materialistic, not materialism. Materialism says there is nothing in the universe but stuff. Stuff made of matter. Which is all fine and good for water and rocks and gravity, but the materialists say that even thoughts, even the thought that thoughts are not made of stuff is made of stuff. Everything in the universe is the result of a material interaction. Light, that’s just the sparkles thrown off by collisions of stuff. Gravity, that’s just stuff trying to get it on with other stuff. Consciousness, that’s just stuff thinking about itself. And nihilists say none of that matter matters. 

Back to my cards and the table, I don’t see how anyone can be a nihilist of the second sort. Maybe you can get away with stepping back from the materialistic sort, the consumerism of our time. Maybe you can reject the material girl and the rhinestone cowboy. But glitter never was, not really, something to believe in. It’s just a show. Just an emptiness. We believe in nothing, Nothing Lebowski, in thick German accented English. But, of course, they do. They believe in extorting Jeffrey Lebowski for personal profit. That’s pretty materialistic. They have the wrong Lebowski and the wrong nihilism. 

Nihilists claim they do not care about anything, since caring about something is knowing something has value. But, they cannot know anything, since nothing matters more than anything else. So, they cannot admit that they cannot know anything since admitting that they cannot know anything is admitting something and they want to admit nothing. Real nihilists would keep their mouths shut and just burn everything down. See my cards? I cannot get behind nihilism. Here, finally, is what I learned. Nothing matters too much to be a nihilist. 

Nothing in the desert is the hole in the hub of a bicycle wheel. Nothing in the desert is the place inside your favorite coffee mug, the place where the coffee goes on Sunday morning. Nothing in the desert is the empty space inside your eye, behind the lens, where the light gets itself together after making it through the pupil but before it lands on the retina or the macula. Before it gets interpreted by the optic nerve and the occipital lobe and the thought that that looks like rain. Keiji Nishitani says an eye is an eye because it does not see itself. An eye is an eye for its not-seeing as much as it is for seeing. Here’s the radical idea – maybe nothing is neither a noun nor an adjective, but a verb. Maybe nothing is what you do when you empty yourself of vanity. Maybe a desert is a desert for being what a forest is not. Maybe landscape is what the desert does, it makes a scene. Maybe nothing is a necessary absence, an absence without which there would be no meaning. Śūnyatā. 

Here, finally, is what I want to tell you, that nothing matters. And it’s not just the desert. It’s the ocean too. Robinson Jeffers with his tor and clouds at evening and hawks floating on the wind rushing around the cliffs at Point Lobos. Nothing matters in Jeffers’ poems. Waves crashing in the fog finish their journey across the ocean where Una and Robinson can hear them from the tor he built from granite and cedar and poetry. The same waves that started out near the Sōtō monasteries of Japan and carried nothing across the Pacific to Carmel. Robinson had no choice but to hear the waves emptying themselves of energy on the rocks. The roar of nothing is deafening. He emptied himself of the sound by writing it down. 

But I said I would not leave you at the end. I said this would not be a story with an end, so I want to leave you with something. Something to think about, namely a new kind of nothing. The eye, the cup, the wheel, the waves. Nothing has a lot in common with the humble circle. They have no beginning and so no end. If nothing is in the desert and in the ocean, then nothing stops you from turning around and looking back at how you got here. It may have gotten dark and you may not be able to see any lights, but there is nothing there, I promise. And you may be one of those people who say promises mean nothing. I told you, I did not understand it when I was your age either. But the road always connects to another road, the desert meets the ocean, and you can always turn around and keep going.

You can read the previous part of this story here.