It’s the void within that aches to be filled.  It’s so hungry it devours hunger, so thirsty it gulps thirst, yet remains unslaked.  No matter what we throw in, it’s never satisfied.  In fact, the more we feed it, the more it wants, the more starved it becomes. If it’s not fed, it eats itself. It’s bottomless, and this terrifies us.  So, we try different strategies: we pretend we’re not hungry.  But its want only gnaws at us more.  Like an abandoned well we’re afraid we’ll fall into, we try to fill it in.

We feed it the things we find around us, like a gravedigger fills in a grave with the heaps of earth beside a grave.  As children, we throw in the approval of our parents.  We throw in the approval of God.  We call that religion.  We feed ourselves fantasies of heaven and even of hell, believing that the hole demands sacrifice. But we know deep down that no invented afterlife will stop the emptiness from consuming us along with everything we’ve known and made and loved.

As we get older, we feed it the approval of others.  That we call ambition and the pursuit of fame.  But the hole only gets deeper, yawns wider.  We try sex, but we just want more.  We try romantic love, yet we end up trying to change our lover, or change lovers.

The hole grows larger, and its rims threaten to calve. The life we lead on its edge is threatened at every moment with extinction.  We may say fuck it all and live a life of abandon, but the high eventually wears thin.  The hole starves, so we stuff it with food, trying to fill its belly.  It growls louder.  We try to drown it out with noise. We throw things inside it—material things.  We’ll need money to buy those things, so we throw money at it, trying to bribe it, to buy our way out by buying it off.  Slowly, it dawns on us that it can’t be bribed.  So, we try other negotiations. Maybe it will take half-feedings, half-measures.  Yet it will not negotiate.  It cannot compromise.  Its hunger is absolute. It consumes on its own terms.

We try distracting ourselves.  We fill it with activity and achievement, but it consumes all motion, all deeds.  Faster and faster we move, trying to outrun it, yet no matter how fast we run, there it is, right in front of us. In our youth, we postpone it.  We make believe the void isn’t even there. We lie to ourselves.  But it will never lie back to us.  It just waits.  Its day will come.

We end up rejecting it.  We come to look upon the chasm’s hunger as a demon, as sin, as evil, as unworthy longing.  We smother it with blankets of shadow, hoping to suffocate it, hoping to starve craving.  But it won’t die.  What we thought it became as we emptied our dark wastes into it, of what we thought we made of it, terrifies us in our sleep.  Though we demonize it, it lies beyond all concepts of judgment. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is, and acts according to its own nature.

We come to regard it as our fundamental existential problem and relegate it to meaninglessness.  Yet it refuses to be sidelined.

If it won’t bow to philosophy, we’ll fix it with psychology and medicine.  Yet it won’t be cured through pharmacology or salved over with quick fixes or “There, there.” Being pure hunger, sheer instinct, it doesn’t respond to reason. It’ beyond thought itself, and thus beyond science to cure. Science can only hone its blade. Being preverbal, it doesn’t respond to words.  It has no memory, and so cannot be cured by repairing our recollections.

We throw our science at it.  We turn our physics on it, transforming it into a whir of randomness and probable dimensions.  We try to catch a glimpse, but it can’t be seen directly. Only indirectly can it be known, by the affects it has on creatures, on those who hunger. We think we’ll unravel its fundamental essence, and then it won’t terrify us so.  We’ll deconstruct it.  Having no dimensions, it’s beyond materiality.  Being nothing, it does not respond to something.  It consumes matter and energy in a swallowing darkness.  It is a puzzle that defies solution. It consumes all thought, being the emptiness that contains thought. All mystery is inextricably linked to it, and our knowing eventually slips beyond the edge of its defile.

We end up feeding it everything we think and feel and bequeath and own, even our very selves.

Standing at the edge of all demises, we finally allow ourselves the truth: that all along, in a struggle for our own existence, we’d been trying to keep our very identities apart from it.   We’ve tried every desperate measure and invention to keep ourselves from falling in, and yet every act of resistance concedes energy to its inexorable pull.  Unable to stop the slide, we finally surrender to the inexorable.  We relinquish ourselves to the void.  Without reservation, finally surrendering the futile pretext of imposing our conditions upon entropy, we give ourselves to its inevitable decay, to the unavoidable destiny of our own emptiness.

Then finally, slipping beyond its edge, after we’ve done all we know to keep our psyches from its jaws, we succumb, and allow our essence to fall in.  And when we do, giving up our sinew and spirit and the meaning we’ve created around them, then, and only then, does the hole surprise us, by pouring everything it has ever received right back into us.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just