Nihilistic Paradox

Known. Some. Call. Is. Air. Am.

I think I understand. The tragedy of pretending we can translate. They're phonetics, of course. For the Latin. Non sum qualis eram. "In the spirit of the dark; in the spirit of the staircase [...] Which is to say -" I am not what I used to be.

And even once we recognise that the phonetics echo Latin? What then? We're left with a dead language. Sank into the margins of a tongue's motion, an ear's incline. Several layers of meaning, several depths to sink through. And incoherent. The tragedy of pretending we can translate, when we are circling - perhaps spiralling, drawing closer to that inevitable Point of singularity, or the reverse, unravelling and twisting out and out into eternity or the great abrupt plummet, each their own horror - on the scratched surface of something we name truth.

As if meaning could be gleaned from the mind of another solipsist.

When one code is uncovered, another replaces it. So many meanings - a cascade, drop after shard after drop of discollected ephemera. The deepest level of meaning is merely a shadow (yours) cast over the slash of a deeper abyss. Because to accept that non sum qualis eram is to accept that your knowledge returns to that old Near Hill. That what you knew is not what you know is not what you will learn is not what you will die thinking you know.

And the irony, the paradox. That the statement itself is an approximation, representation, attempt to depict a lack. An absence. How can you describe something as unexperienced, unknown, un-canny as nothing? As death? How can a simulacrimarum exist of emptiness, a likeness of that which in its hollow ways cannot even define itself? Except, perhaps, in its contrast with its opposite. But even the opposite is the thin wavering line of a half-imagined phosphene spluttering out in the intoxication of two great unencompassing wings of darkness. Shadow on the abyss. The meaning of the code is its lack of meaning, of all lack of meaning, of my lack of meaning. Yours. (My words, after all, mean as little to you as any others'. As they mean to me. The derivative incoherency of a thousand half-heard conversations, a lifetime of dappled light shimmering over the translucent inward-facing mirrors of my eyelids.) The one constant of our own unending change. We are never what we are. We are not. "Noli me-". And I'm telling you the meaning of this now. "Love of love written by the broken hearted, love of life written by the dead." Irony. That Maginot Line written by the already condemned, you remember. And I'm all ready condemned to or for that same pit. The long hallway of blank walls. Here at last flinging back the distorted echoes of what allways has been my own voice and nothing more than an impossible description of emptiness.