(You Don’t) Escape From the Nullity

origami man

I was in the nullity and the nullity was shit – I mean real shit – so I had to get out of it. I had to escape. ‘Escape’ is such a commonplace word, isn’t it. Such a familiar concept – so straightforward and understandable. Who doesn’t get that. The only thing is, there’s no such thing as escape as far as the nullity is concerned. Not once you’re in it. It’s a null concept, a joke concept. You don’t escape from the nullity.

 

So anyway I was in the nullity – engulfed in it, enmeshed in it, suffused with it from head to toe, rotten to the very core with it – and it was shit. ‘Shit’ is a pretty inadequate word when it comes to explaining how bad the nullity is. The nullity is a secret horror – only it’s not secret any more when you’re well and truly stuck in it. Then it’s just a horror…

 

Escaping from the nullity isn’t an option but then again neither is staying in it. It’s too rotten to stay in – too darkly toxic. It’s too inimical. So I had to do something. I had to come up with something. Needs must, as they say. Necessity is the mother of invention. God how I hate these crappy clichéd expressions…

 

So I came up with an idea. I would start from scratch and rebuild reality. That was my project – the re-creation of reality from scratch. I had to re-invent reality working from Ground-Zero. Ground Zero being the All-Devouring Horror of the nullity. The bastarding bloody nullity. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to re-invent reality from scratch. It’s a pretty bloody tricky thing to do, I can tell you. You might think that it’s straightforward enough but it isn’t. Not by a long chalk it isn’t. No sir.

 

You see, it’s not just a matter of re-jigging stuff, or re-arranging stuff in some kind of a fancy way that can pass off as creativity. It’s not as easy as that because there’s nothing to work with. There’s no reality there to start off with so you can’t just re-jig it. You’ve got nothing to go on. And you can’t remember what reality was like and then recreate it from your memories because you can’t remember what it was like. You can’t remember reality at all. Trust me, you can’t. It’s all gone. It’s wiped completely. There’s absolutely no way at all you can remind yourself what reality was like and then recreate it. ‘Reality’ is a meaningless word when you’re stuck in the nullity. It really doesn’t mean shit…

 

Recreating reality when you don’t have the slightest remotest faintest concept of what it might be is not as straightforward an affair as you might think, therefore. No sir it isn’t. The project is something of a non-starter, to be perfectly frank. It just ain’t gonna happen!

 

But the thing was that I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter (as I have already made clear) so I came up with what you might call ‘a back-up plan’. Plan B you might say. Plan B was that I wouldn’t recreate reality but rather that I would make up my own version of it. My own take on what reality might be, so to speak. Obviously it was bound to be totally lame because I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I was taking shots in the dark. It was bound to be crap but it would do – I could make believe that it was reality and who would know the difference? I certainly wouldn’t. I would be none the wiser. I might suspect from time to time when the outright crappiness of the so-called ‘reality’ that I was making do with became particularly obvious – but I could ignore this. Blame it on something else. I’d come up with something.

 

So that’s what I did, to make a long story short. Or a short story long, whichever way around it is. I fabricated a rubbish version of reality and made out to myself that it was the genuine article, the actual proper thing. How’s that working out for you, you might ask. Sarcastically, perhaps. Well, it’s working out fine, thanks. Not so bad at all, if I say so myself…

 

 

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *