Du Vide
Part 1 of the Du Vide Cycle
What is, never came into being, nor is anything going to come into being in the future. For if it came into being, it is not; nor if it is going to come into being in the future. Thus coming-to-be is extinguished and perishing unheard of. — Parmenides of Elea, Fragment 8
I. The Return
In the year of the consulship of Basiliscus and Armatus, when the eternal city had already begun to smell of carrion and the barbarian torches could be seen from the Palatine Hill at dusk, there lived a man named Avidius who was said to be the last of the Peripatetics, the last of the lineage that denied Neoplatonism. He did not believe this himself, for he had read too widely to think that any school of thought could truly die so long as one man retained the capacity for syllogistic reasoning. Yet he could not deny that the world around him had grown hostile to logic. The Senate had become a kennel of frightened animals. The army had melted away like snow before a flame. And the young emperor Romulus Augustulus, whose name alone ought to have been a promise of eternal empire, sat upon his throne like a child clutching a broken toy, waiting for the barbarians to take it from his hands.
Avidius served this boy-emperor as advisor, though there was little left to advise. He was a man of sixty winters, lean and angular, with the perpetually surprised expression of one who has spent his life discovering that the universe is more orderly than he expected. At his side always were his two cats: Jupiter, an orange tom of such imperial bearing that he demanded even to his brother that he owns Avidius, and Pluto, a black cat of such absolute darkness that his eyes seemed to belong instead to a serpent when he sat in shadow. These were not pets in the common sense. For they held higher rank than ordinary citizens. To some, they were even instruments of observation, barometers of the world’s hidden weather. When Jupiter hissed, the geometry of a room was wrong. When Pluto’s tail puffed and his back arched, it was because something had passed through the space that should not have passed through it.
It was on a night in late August, when the heat lay upon the city like a shroud and the Tiber ran low and thick with the refuse of a civilization too exhausted to bury its dead, that a slave was brought before Avidius in the subterranean chamber he used for study. The man was Gallic by birth, though his Latin was flawless — too flawless, the precision of one who had learned a language not from nurses and mothers but from books and solitude. He was perhaps thirty years of age, with the pale, almost translucent complexion of one who had spent years in darkness, and eyes that seemed to look not at Avidius but through him, as though the advisor were a window, a portal opening onto some distant and terrible landscape.
“It is good to see you, old friend,”; said Du Vide, the former and freed slave of Avidius.
Avidius received him well, and urged him to enter quickly. “Likewise, but your family...”
“My entire family has been put to death for impiety,” Du Vide completed the thought. “We also received damnatio memoriae; we are to be erased from history, possibly for no better reason than my name means ‘Of the Void.’”
Avidius straightened. “Nonetheless, it is dangerous for you to be here, for I alone advise the emperor.”
The arms of Du Vide widened as he said “Apologies. But rather than be crucified as well, I have a request: I would like to play a game.”
II. The Six Proofs
They met in the deepest chamber beneath the palace, a vaulted space that had once been a cistern and still smelled faintly of ancient water and the lime that had sealed its walls. A single oil lamp burned upon a stone table, casting adumbrations that seemed to move in directions that Avidius could not quite name. Jupiter settled upon his right thigh, heavy and warm, while Pluto took his left, his black fur drinking the light so completely that he seemed a hole cut in the shape of a cat.
Du Vide began without preamble. “You are a man of reason, Avidius. You believe that the universe is a syllogism — that from certain premises, certain conclusions follow necessarily. You believe in four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. You believe that nature abhors a vacuum, that the Void is merely the absence of being, and that absence cannot be supreme over presence.”
“These are not beliefs,” Avidius countered. “They are demonstrations. I can show you the proofs.”
“Then show me,” Du Vide challenged, “how you demonstrate that there are not five dimensions, but three. Show me how you prove that the Void is not the fundament of all existence. Show me how you know that entropy — what I call the decay and deterioration of all things — is not a living intelligence, the handmaiden of the Void, the torturer of the universe.”
Avidius raised high his chin, and Jupiter stirred upon his thigh, his orange tail curved to the right only at its final vertebra, twitching once, twice, then falling still. The cat’s golden eyes fixed upon Du Vide with an intensity that was almost human, as though he were evaluating the slave’s soul the way a merchant evaluates a horse’s teeth. Pluto, by contrast, had gone utterly rigid, his black body a statue of ink, his eyes two unblinking points of reflected lamplight, and beneath it all, the sharpest claws in all of Rome were produced. But Avidius did not notice; he was already constructing his first proof.
“Your conclusion follows from your premises,” Du Vide said, “but your major premise begs the question. You assume that existence requires substance, yet you have not proven that substance is the only mode of existence. Consider: darkness is the absence of light, yet we do not say that darkness does not exist. We say that it exists as the negation of light, as a condition that obtains when light is withdrawn. What if the Void is not the absence of substance, but the condition that obtains when substance is withdrawn — a condition that is, in its own way, more fundamental than the substance it negates?”
Avidius frowned. Jupiter moaned in an ever-increasing intensity, in such a way that reminded his master that something in the room’s geometry had shifted. Avidius stroked the cat’s head absently and constructed his second proof.
“Elegant,” Du Vide admitted. “But consider the counter-argument. You say the Void cannot act. Yet what is heaviness, weight, if not the curvature of emptiness? What is the vacuum of space, if not the stage upon which all motion is enacted? The Void does not act upon bodies as a hammer acts upon iron. It acts upon them as a stage acts upon a play — by providing the space in which the drama unfolds. Without the stage, there is no play. Without the Void, there is no motion, for there is nowhere to move to.”
Pluto’s ears flattened against his skull. He arose from Avidius’s left thigh, walked three steps across the stone floor, and sat next to a cithara, with his back to the conversation, his tail wrapped tightly around his feet. It was the posture of a creature who has seen something it does not wish to see, or who has heard something it does not wish to hear. Avidius noticed this time, and a faint unease stirred in his chest, like a fish moving in deeper water.
He pressed on with a third proof, his voice slightly louder than before, as though volume could compensate for doubt.
“And where is your Prime Mover?” Du Vide asked, not unkindly. “You have named him, but you have not found him. You have proven that he must exist, but you have not shown where he sits, what he thinks, whether he cares. I offer you a different Prime Mover: the Void, which moves not by will but by appetite. The Void does not create because it loves creation. It creates because it is hungry, and creation is the only food that satisfies its hunger for a time.”
For six hours they spoke, and the lamp burned lower, and the shadows grew longer, and the cats grew still as stone. Just last year, Avidius published his own nomenclature of acronyms for all Peripatetic arguments. But today, Avidius deployed nearly every weapon of that arsenal: the Barbara, the Celarent, the Darii, the Ferio, the Baroco, the Bocardo, the Disamis, the Datisi. Each argument was a fortress, and each fortress Du Vide entered not by siege but by invitation, walking through the gates as though he had built them himself.
“You prove only that the Void is not like other things,” Du Vide said. “But what if the Void is the ground against which all qualities are silhouetted? What if blackness is not the absence of color, but the presence of a color so total that it swallows all others? What if the Void is not the absence of being, but a being so absolute that it negates all lesser beings?”
“Ah,” Du Vide said, and his eyes gleamed. “Now we approach the truth. You say the Void requires bodies to fill it. But what if the reverse is true? What if bodies require the Void to contain them? What if the Void is self-sufficient precisely because it needs nothing, while bodies are dependent precisely because they need the Void? Consider: before there was time, there was the Void. The Void created time, not out of generosity, but out of boredom, as a torturer might break a child’s fingers to pass an idle afternoon. And from time came the three dimensions of the body — length, width, depth — arranged like the walls of a prison cell around a prisoner who does not know he is imprisoned.”
Avidius felt a strange sensation, as though the stone beneath his feet had tilted imperceptibly, as though the room had become a ship upon a dark and bottomless sea. Jupiter had stopped purring. The orange cat sat rigid upon Avidius’s thigh, his fur bristling along his spine, his eyes fixed upon a point in the air approximately three feet to Du Vide’s left — a point where, Avidius realized with a start, the shadows seemed to converge at an angle that was not quite ninety degrees. Pluto had not moved from his position with his back to the conversation, but his tail now lashed against the stone floor with a rhythmic, metronomic violence, as though he were counting the beats of a music only he could hear.
“This is sophistry,” Avidius said, but his voice lacked conviction.
“Is it?” Du Vide leaned forward, and his eyes were no longer looking through Avidius but into him, into the marrow of his bones, into the syllogisms that structured his soul. “You know what I speak of. You have felt it in your bones, this entropy, as I call it. You have seen it in the crumbling marble, the rusting iron, the withering vine, your wrinkling face. You have called it natural decay, the consequence of material interaction. But it is more. It is the slow, laughing consumption of all structure. Even your precious logic will be eaten. Even your Prime Mover will curl and blacken. The natural state of nature is not order, Avidius. It is rot.”
Avidius opened his mouth to reply, to construct one final syllogism that would banish this madness back into the darkness from which it had crawled. But the words would not come. Instead, he saw it — not with his eyes, but with the part of his mind that dreams, that fears, that knows without knowing how it knows. He saw the Void not as absence but as a mouth, infinitely wide, infinitely patient, consuming stars and centuries with the same indifferent hunger. He saw entropy not as a process but as a servant, a handmaiden in a gown of ash, moving through the universe with a torch in one hand and a key in the other.
“You may be right,” he whispered, and the lamp flickered, and Jupiter hissed — a sound like tearing silk — and Pluto’s back arched until he seemed twice his natural size, his black fur standing out in all directions like the spines of a sea urchin, his eyes glowing with a light that was not reflected from any source in the room. The room was suddenly cold — not the cold of winter, but the cold of a place where no sun has ever shone, where no fire has ever burned, where the concept of warmth is merely a rumor carried by madmen.
“Allow me to try,” boasted Du Vide.
Du Vide smiled and paused. “In other words, the Void is not some mystical substrate. It is a logical implication of relations. It is a reality where relation is absolute, and substance is none. Admittedly, you will find this argument requires some rearrangement and elaboration.” Avidius covered his mouth with his fist, and after several minutes of stern contemplation, he looked unto Du Vide and nodded.
Du Vide said, as he began to stand: “Then you are ready to learn of the game.”
III. What the Magi Buried
“In India,” Du Vide explained, “there is a game called Chaturanga. From it came a newer version, which men call chess; it may become the most popular game ever. But these are not the original forms. These are corruptions, deliberate alterations made by those who understood too well what the true game could do.”
He told of two Magi, Zoroastrian priests of terrible wisdom, who had played the original game in a temple of black stone somewhere in the mountains of Persia. They had used five boards, each five squares by five, stacked one above the other like the floors of a tower reaching into heaven. They had played with pieces of alabaster and amethyst, and as they played, a rift had opened in the air between them — not a door, not a window, but a wound in the fabric of existence, a place where the geometry of the world had folded upon itself like a piece of parchment crumpled by an angry god.
“The Magi built their temple around the rift,” Du Vide continued, “so that no eye could see it and no hand could touch it. And then they changed the game. They reduced the dimensions from three to two. They expanded the board to eight by eight, flattening it, draining it of its power. They made it safe. They made it the game of slaves and merchants and idle nobles. The wisdom of the Magi eliminated one dimension, and in doing so, they saved the world from itself.”
“Flat chess,” Avidius said, tasting the words. “That is what we play now, the latest game to soon grip the empire.”
“Flat chess is not magical,” Du Vide agreed. “It is for the lower classes, the slaves, the uneducated. But the original game — spatial chess — persists in whispered rumor and forbidden texts. Even to speak of it carries a death sentence, for those who remember the Magi know that the rift never truly closed. It merely waits. It waits for someone to play the game again, to speak the geometry that calls it forth.”
Avidius should have called the guards. He should have had this madman dragged away to the cells, to the cross, to whatever oblivion awaited those who trafficked in such blasphemies. Instead, he found himself saying: “What do you require?”
Du Vide told him. And Avidius, the last Peripatetic, the guardian of reason, provided everything: five boards of alternating slate and deep amethyst, each five squares by five, the dark stone drinking the lamplight while the purple stone seemed to glow with a faint inner radiance. Pieces carved from alabaster for the lower army, and from amethyst for the upper. Du Vide noted, with a satisfaction that bordered on reverence, that the protective power of the amethyst was quite intentional — the Magi had known what they were doing.
Du Vide explained the rules with the precision of a mathematician and the fervor of a priest. The Unicorn moved triagonally, leaping through dimensions that flat chess had forgotten. The notation was not algebraic but spatial, each move described in three coordinates. The original concept of checkmate was spacemate — a checkmate not upon a plane but within a volume, an attack from directions that the mind struggled to hold simultaneously.
They set up the boards. Du Vide arranged his alabaster army upon the lower levels, levels A and B, while Avidius placed his amethyst pieces upon levels D and E. Level C, the middle realm, remained empty for now — a demilitarized zone, a neutral zone, a buffer between the forces of light and darkness, or perhaps a stage upon which the drama of their collision would be enacted.
Jupiter settled upon Avidius’s right thigh, purring softly, his orange fur catching the lamplight like autumn leaves. Pluto took his left, silent and watchful, his black eyes reflecting nothing. They were not pets now. They were witnesses.
IV. In Six Moves
The game began in silence, the only sound the soft click of stone upon stone and the breathing of the two men, which seemed to synchronize despite their wills. Du Vide moved first, his alabaster bishop sliding from Ba1 to Cb1, a diagonal ascent through the empty air of the middle board. Avidius responded by mirroring him, his own amethyst bishop descending from De5 to Cd5.
Each move was a word in a language older than Rome, older than Greece, older than the first fire kindled by the first hand that was not quite a hand. Avidius felt the air grow thick as they played, as though the room were filling with water, or with something thicker than water, something that pressed against his eardrums and his eyeballs and the inside of his skull. The lamp flame burned blue, then green, then a color that had no name in any human tongue.
On the fourth move, when Du Vide developed his unicorn to Ca2, Jupiter reared his head three times in short succession, a sign of interest known to Avidius. For the rest of the game, Avidius was distracted by his desire to know the object of that interest. On the sixth move, when it was Avidius’ turn, he waved his hand slowly over the rear rows of level E, then level D. When his hand was behind his queen, Jupiter began to knead. The attention of Avidius focused fiercely upon her potentiality. A moment later, Avidius moved his amethyst queen as if she descended a great staircase from her royal home at Dc5 to attack Du Vide’s pawn upon Ac2. Jupiter’s attack brought multidimensional mate (†††), spacemate. No escape was available for the alabaster king; this concluded the game and determined the triumph of Avidius.
Du Vide took on a momentary look of horror, then slumped forward. This motion revealed a slim blackness that was increasing in size and located where his torso had just been. In the blink of an eye, this misshapen slit was bigger than Pluto. There was no sound that accompanied the beginning of the rift.
Avidius now stood on the opposite side of the game, staring through the game at the blackness before him. This blackness was strange, indescribable, yet he committed to studying it.
As it grew, it came to resemble a black asp. The shape of this rift twisted and curved unnaturally. And this fissure seemed to shift not under his gaze, but because of it. The rift tapered at each end, and the edges were ragged and irregular, not cleanly torn but frayed. Reality had not been split, but gnawed.
And that blackness, it was not the black of night, or of closed eyes. It was the black of presence, of something looking back from a place where looking was not a function of eyes, but of appetite. The air around it bent, not like heat rising from summer stone, but like reality itself was repeatedly bowing down to it as its sovereign.
It was some duration before Avidius became capable of looking away. Down he peered at the body of his fallen friend, Du Vide. Where his torso had touched the rift, there was now absence, emptiness. Something else: his corpse had not crumpled, it had not fallen, it had folded forward, bending in a direction to the floor, as it had taken the shortest possible path, but that path was not Euclidean. His attention returned to the rift. Its size appeared to have stabilized, no longer than five feet.
To erase any evidence of impropriety, Avidius fed to it the body of Du Vide, which slid into the rift with the ease of a gladius sliding into its sheath. He then returned to the other side of the table and sat down. Jupiter and Pluto resumed their positions, and Avidius pondered the game. Was the outcome caused by the arrangement of its pieces, rhyming with some accursed geometry? Was he protected by his amethyst pieces, and Du Vide doomed somehow from alabaster? Was spacemate the key instead? Avidius settled on spacemate while acknowledging that whatever happened, Du Vide did escape crucifixion.
His cats jumped down and, avoiding and ignoring the rift, they began to hunt for rodents, for dinner. Avidius did not feel hungry, but he introspected, analyzing his own feelings. He tried to describe what he had felt in that moment when he won, the rift tore open, and Du Vide died. The words would not come. After methodical articulation, after slowly and deductively refining the answer, he revealed that he felt sublime, not the sublime of a beautiful sunset or a towering mountain, but the sublime in its oldest and most terrible sense: a beauty so vast, so absolute, that it annihilates the soul that perceives it. He had looked upon the countenance of the Void, and the Void had glared back at him, and he had not been destroyed. He had been transfigured.
V. The Transfiguration
That evening, Avidius mourned Du Vide as he had never mourned any man. Not as a master mourns a slave, for he had never truly thought of Du Vide as a slave, but as a man mourns the only other person who ever spoke the truth to him, and who revealed to him the verity of the Void. He kept that game in his chamber, preserving it. Near it, the rift endured, hanging there, a darkness that was nothing but nothingness.
The news arrived on a morning of rain and smoke. The empire had fallen. Odoacer the Herulian had deposed Romulus Augustulus, had sent the purple paludamentum to Constantinople as a trophy, had ended the line of emperors that stretched back to Augustus himself. The barbarians were in the streets, looting and burning and doing all the things that barbarians do when they finally breach the walls that have kept them at bay for centuries.
Reason was not dying. It was being butchered in the streets. Civilization will disappear, and with it science, concluded Avidius. Never will the barbarians know science. This is a certainty, because to be civilized is to embrace reason, and logic — formal reason — is necessary for science. The best that can be hoped for barbarians is that they become accidentally close to reason.
An epiphany struck Avidius hard enough that he took one step back. There is beauty in the sublime experience of that rift to the Void, in Du Vide choosing his exodus, and there is beauty in Rome burning and in the end of civilization and science. I have been trained for decades to see beauty in the opposite, in civilization, life, order, science. And these remain beautiful in a sense, but that which aligns with the Void is always the greater beauty. It is wrong to have mourned for him. The Void exists before and after time, thus it is more than eternal, it is divine.
Avidius walked through the burning city with Jupiter and Pluto at his heels, his faithful felines navigating the rubble and the corpses with the indifference of creatures who have seen civilizations rise and fall before and will see them rise and fall again.
Everywhere that Avidius looked, he saw entropy. All things, no matter how orderly, have eventually been overcome by disorder. As buildings burned, the flames were beautiful in a way he had never noticed before. That colonnade half-collapsed was more interesting than when it was whole; and when it was whole, it stood temporarily and defiantly against divinity, but in disarray it embraced the one true end of everything. Nothing was the basis of everything. How many times could null fit within any integer? The answer was infinity — divinity.
A mosaic with its tesserae scattered back into gravel was closer to truth than when it depicted an emperor. Two ominous Ostrogoths in an alley, oblivious to their own agency, served the Void in ignorance, yet wholeheartedly.
Led by Avidius, the three arrived at the records office, now abandoned, its clerks fled or dead, its scrolls scattered like the leaves of autumn. By the light of a burning building, he found the registry of names and legally altered his own, striking through the patronymic that connected him to a family he no longer recognized: Comitatus. Now alone in all ways except for his cats, he debated momentarily the act of becoming Avidius Solus, but he wrote in its place the name that Du Vide had borne, the name that meant “Of the Void.”
He became Avidius Du Vide. It was not theft. It was becoming. He was the last Peripatetic, and he was now also the last vessel of the Void’s doctrine, the only man in the dying world who understood that the universe was not a syllogism but amusement for nothing. Rather than seeing the light, he had finally seen the darkness.
There may be many possible ways to be a Voidist, debated Avidius while he walked. One could seek to merge with the Void, which was probably the motivation of Du Vide. One could encourage entropy, or one could be a passive appreciator of its spectacle. As a Peripatetic, I resolve to study it, and to honor it by educating others about its nature.
VI. The Ostrogoths
Merely steps from his home, from that subterranean chamber wherein divine connection awaited and the rift remained suspended, he was beset and surrounded. Five of them, Ostrogoths or possibly Heruli, their beards matted with blood and their hands still sticky with the grease of looted meat. They wore the furs and the iron of the north, and their eyes held the blank, bovine stupidity of men who have never read a book and never will, who have never asked a question and never will, who understand power only as the ability to take what they want and kill what they cannot take. They were not evil, these men. Evil requires intent, and intent requires imagination, and imagination requires concepts.
Pluto, commanded by the xenophobia that infected his soul, vanished from the view of all strangers.
“An old man in fine clothes,” one of them said, in Latin broken and undeclensed. The words emerged slowly, as though each syllable required a separate act of will, like a child sounding out letters it does not understand. “Give us your gold, grandfather, and we may let you keep your skin.”
Avidius did not beg. He did not run. He looked at them with the calm of a man who has already died once and found the experience transcendent.
“I agree,” he said reluctantly to people stupid enough to have the words “yes” and “no” in their language, unlike in Latin and Greek. If asked if he were thirsty, a civilized person would not say “yes,” but respond “I am thirsty,” which marvelously avoids the confusion of responses to questions like “Are you not unthirsty?”.
“Are you thirsty?” he queried. “Yes” came the stupid reply. “Then come inside. You will quaff while being enriched.”
The barbarians followed Avidius into his home. Into their hands he placed goblets, and into those goblets he poured dark wine. Delicately, he brought the game out of the room that contained nothingness, and he presented a malediction as a provocation: “Before you kill me, I challenge all of you — together — to a game, a game of space chess.”
As the aging Peripatetic began to set up the pieces of alabaster and then amethyst, Jupiter stood adjacent, placing one rear paw atop Avidius’ foot so his location and loyalty were known. Pluto had climbed to the top of the wooden armarium, where the scrolls were kept, where he watched from afar as little more than a pair of piercing eyes. And the tribal group stared blankly at the set, the board, the pieces, and the old man who yet breathed. The shortest of them maintained “Gold!” But the tallest Ostrogoth, scars upon his face and gold upon his arm, murmured with consternation from beneath his beard, “I accept.”
* * *
Proceed to
Du Vide II: The Chiasm