I have nothing to say

not a thought, not a concept or an idea. Not even a mild conjecture on the state of the world, just a vast echoing nothing that sits in the center of my living room twiddling its thumbs and singing if I am nothing why is there an I around? And there's the problem. Descartes says "I think, therefore I am" so if I do not think does that erase me altogether? Do I vanish and leave nothing in the world for all those thoughtless moments? Does the world vanish leaving me suspended in some alternate reality that is nothing and thus not real?And how do I know I think? Is the voice in my head my thoughts? My mother says she thinks in ticker tapes of words streaming from a typewriter; I hear voices, see pictures, smell scents or see jags of lightening stutter through the blackness of my sleep but I am not at all sure I think. So I am not sure I exist. I am, in fact, sure of nothing. So nothing exists and in the sheer weight of its existence creates the Universe.


A friend suggested the other day that I could write about anything and make it interesting. I chose, instead, to write of nothing. I sit zazen and once as the group chanted, each of us reading phonetic Japanese we did not understand in a monotone, all the voices wove together into a wordless chord of harmony that resonated with such beauty that I knew for once that I was part of something so far removed from the boundary of my skin that all I thought important was just echoes of nothing important. Nothing is important. Three words that say so little and so much.