Are you not satisfied? You are an obsessed thing. There is no need to record any further. You have written the words, and they have the meaning. Why not let it rest?
After that fateful encounter, that warrior named Byzantine sensed at once that the Carpenter and his presence had vanished from his realm in totality; his purpose here was completed. His new mission and new salvation affirmed, one like the Heroes of Old still had a curiosity to satiate.
I am sure you recall his encounters with that Nothing – that which he used as a vehicle for his own ascension time and time again. Throughout his trials and his tribulations, I have indeed noted that the Warrior-King had found vehicles for growth beyond this Nothing, yet now he had the sense that he had not entirely exhausted its usefulness to him.
I have already spoken at length about this Nothing. Perhaps
cheekily, I denoted it as, that between ‘as’ and the comma – an
absence. Even then, I admitted that this too was an abstraction,
an imperfect form meant to communicate somewhat that evaded
communication. Nothing is not ‘not anything.’ Even using this
term, ‘Nothing’, is incorrect. You can’t reach it by negations,
or absences. Any statement:
‘Nothing is …’
‘Nothing does …’
‘Nothing has …’
etc.
would be incorrect, excepting maybe that most basic saying of
the philosopher Heidegger: ‘Nothing nothings.’
And, as I have noted before, there is something quite interesting about Nothing. It is the same for you and I, and for fictional characters. By its nature, there are no variations of it, nor any modifications that can be made, for by their nature they violate the nothing of Nothing. Even if it were possible, I would here be referring to that most fundamental (yet not, and not-not) Nothing of all. It cannot be differentiated in discussing reality or fiction.
Permit me one nonsensical framing, simply for the sake of the image: Now, at his final curiosity, the one called Nikies the Byzantine reaches out his thick, calloused hand and closes it around nothing. This time, he does not seek some form of growth-by-comparison, leaping upwards in power by redefining himself in the shadow of that Nothing. There has been enough of that. Now, something quite different occurs.
Take a walk with me for a few moments, through a brief discussion of other things. You know, language is quite an interesting thing. No one can deny its supreme utility as a tool of communication. Yet, it is not a perfect tool. As I’m sure you know by now, many philosophers have pointed out that words often fail to communicate the true meaning of some things our brains are capable of holding. So now I will discuss words, and I will discuss meaning.
Are you familiar with the thought experiment of the monkey and the typewriter? It posits that if you sat a monkey down at a typewriter and somehow ensured it typed randomly, forever, it might at some point perfectly reproduce all of the works of Shakespeare consecutively. At some point, it may write out the contents of this website, as well as a number of variations of it. Perhaps one is well-written. Yet, admittedly, there are likely some things it would fail to communicate: what the color red looks like, for example. For what I am about to say, I will ask you to forget the words, and attempt to get the meaning.
So now we imagine all the narratives that words and symbols can produce – no matter how large or small, coherent or self-contradictory, even if that dutiful monkey could never have typed them all in time – and not the words and symbols themselves, but their meaning-made-real. I am sorry to relate this, but settings more unique than you could imagine and characters that you would love and cherish beyond any you now know likely reside in there. Therein lie stories that would change your life, and some that would compel you to end it. This very page, and indeed this entire site and infinite repetitions and variations of it, lie in that vastness. Yet, we move out further. Now we behold all those meanings and narratives that can be formed, not just by words, but by body language, our senses, neural linking, and all other conceivable forms of communication. Surely now we have forgotten the words, and arrived at true meaning. But let us go further still. We arrive at those which these things cannot produce, neurons cannot process, and nothing in our reality or elsewhere can describe: a level I cannot relate to you, for being that this is a page written in words, we would have already encountered any such description in the prior levels. Even the most skilled communicator or conductor of prose to ever live, or indeed could ever live, would utterly fail to make those in this level understandable to us.
Everything in these levels shares one thing in common – they are not the Nothing I spoke of earlier. In truth, they are an unimaginably tiny fraction of all things and non-things, and everything in-between, that are not the Nothing I spoke of. Just then, as the Byzantine grasped nothing in his hand, that inverse of Nothing, that unimaginable Allthing ... that is what he now encompassed.
And, one like the Heroes of old smiles. Perhaps now, he could rest at last.