Bleak and White

The erasing powers of binary thinking. In a defiant gesture it both gives life to all your greatest expectations and fills everything else with dread, terror, and eventually, emptiness. Yes, emptiness is a positive agent in the fundamentalist mind: it’s like the waters of an ocean surrounding an island. Emptiness is not a wasteland — on the contrary — it’s a fluid, complex world that happens to be void of meaning for the binary mind. It’s off the charts, and it only serves to map what surrounds one’s island of hope, the darkness that surrounds the light. Emptiness is the menacing, incumbent shadow of otherness, its turbulent black waters lapping on the perfectly circular shores of our island of meaningfulness.

Fundamentalism gives you all you need and takes everything else away from you. Your every action becomes a fundamental factor on a cosmic plane, your every gesture is symbolically charged. Your range of possibilities is limited to what is right and meaningful. In your eyes, the world is as big as your own beliefs, and in the end you find yourself walking into your own footsteps. Everything else is dark matter to you, like the empty space between the stars. Emptiness encircles your boundaries, foregrounds your beliefs.

Meaninglessness holds the same power as meaningfulness, two faces of the same coin. They are both a positive force that coerces you into compliance with your own beliefs. And as you grow weary of marching on and on into your own footsteps, the emptiness around you reminds you that your effort is worthwhile, and indeed, inevitable. And as you accumulate knowledge, the emptiness around you only allows you to expand in a single direction: vertically.

And you build a castle, a fortress. Higher and higher it goes, inexpugnable, impenetrable to the dread of emptiness. Inside the walls, your own voice bounces and echoes, filling with meaning the empty chamber that surrounds you. And as your fortress grows stronger and higher it becomes a monument to your isolation…