Start from a dark place, the darkest place. Scour the ground of existence down to base granite. Borrow Descartes’ example. Whittle the rational mind down past its inner xylem, into the pith, to the central core. Doubt even the solidity of this. Borrow Descartes example, but not his purpose. The purpose of this mental knife-play is not to establish a foundation for belief; the purpose is to lay bare your intimate fellowship with the void. Prior to birth was nothing. No nouns. No verbs. No past or future tense. No beginnings or endings to serve as a frame. Nothingness itself was nonexistent. No opposing principle by which to form nothingness into an object of contemplation. No contemplative being capable of granting such principles.
There is little about this state of prior nonbeing that seems personally threatening to me now. Why is that? Why am I able to calmly imagine an infinite expanse of time when I wasn’t? There is something about the present moment that renders my prior nonexistence irrelevant. I find myself in the present moment occupying a richly furnished living state of being in a universe populated with nouns and verbs and tenses—most of which I have yet to discover and many of which I will never know. Contemplating the infinity prior to birth is little more than an intellectual exercise, nothing ominous or menacing.
But despite its intimate familiarity—its intimate but ultimately unknowable familiarity—things appear quite different to me when I turn my gaze the other direction. When the universe ends for me, the same eternal absence-of-even-oblivion from which I emerged waits only to wrap me in its disintegrating, obliterating embrace. I die, but I can never be dead. Death is a feature of the living present moment. Death is a verb. There is no after-death in the first-person. In my mind I can project the universe beyond myself, but this is an illusion of objectivity. After this, there is nothing. Death leads us not just to an end of life, but to a complete annihilation of all that ever was, the universe itself, with its unfathomably infinite furnishings, never existed. Life doesn’t come to an end with death. With death, life never happened to begin with.
Yet here, now, in the present moment, it seems as if there is something worthy of my attention.
This moment now the evening sky is dim and the reflection of my face has become visible in the window, a grizzled gray beard beneath shadow-darkened eye sockets, the dog is using my outstretched foot as a chinrest, and thoughts of Spanish wine are inserting themselves between the words my fingers are slapping out on the keyboard.
