I like the idea of a competing tension between the nothingness of Being and material fullness as corporeal dysmorphia.

At the heart of Being there is nothing but the emotional drive to acquire a cultural identity. That identity gives name to that inner emptiness from which it is born, and provides it with a carapace that thickens over time, shrouding a vast hollow scape in a shell.

And thus consciousness arises, conscious of itself in thoughts, those Wittgensteinian language processes: the growing sense of self, the I am voice (or voices) endlessly providing the emptiness echo chamber of our collective inner world with noise (occasionally music), seemingly tangible, but really for the most part, a collection of reducted scripts, and cultural conditioning, like a colourful striped beachball bouncing against the backdrop of an otherwise forgettable 4D lanscape.

But it is the very silence, the unanswered prayer, the yawning void within, that gives meaning to this demanding emptiness. Abetted by a carousel of emotions, wooed and smoothed by mind, endless shifts are animated around this dull unresponsive void-like quality, the death zone, the disquieting nothingness, as dark as a black hole, and in so being, is the numb quality of nothingness brought to life. The tense dynamic, the dullness personified through animated lust, at last spawns a tangible, hopeful, dysmorphia.

At last, the dysmorphic creation that results from the time spent in the pursuit of escape from one’s nothingness, one’s embraced neurosis, into an even greater nothing, while on the way, convincing, tricking, cajoling, soliciting, others to join in more and more non-activity in social interaction because nothing begets as effectively nothing as nothing itself.

Capitalism, for instance where the pursuit of value for its own sake, has become an end in itself. Nothing is more pleasing to the merchant than selling air in pop corn or in mint chocolate for a value it cannot by its very nothingness possess. That is the absolute end, to create something of material value from nothing: the supreme achievement of the inner dysmorphic neurosis.

And if this makes no sense, then it has indeed failed to turn nothing into something, but then, as it begun as such, nothing, so it can hardly have lost that which it did not have, and so, in nothingness there’s a transformative potential which is its only inherent value, its skill at attracting to itself more of its own nothingness. The grand ability to create an anxious buzz that is intense enough to draw to it so much more than the actual silence emanating from it.

And finally anything is better, isn’t it, than one’s own inner silence? That bottomless well from which all loneliness springs and all society eventually must return.