On the Void
The Treatise of Avidius Du Vide, Scholarch of the Villa Vanitas
Prooemium
I, Avidius, who was once called Comitatus and who bore for forty years the mantle of the Peripatetic, set down this treatise not as an act of teaching but as an act of confession. Rome has fallen. The purple has gone east as a trophy, and the barbarians warm their hands at fires built from the Senate’s own benches. What Aristotle called the love of wisdom, I once believed sufficient unto itself, entire, needing no god and fearing no ending. I was wrong only in supposing that the ending was to be feared.
This work owes its first cause to a man, or to what I believed was a man, called Du Vide, who came to me in the last winter of the old world and unmade in the space of an evening what I had spent a lifetime constructing. I do not write to refute him. I write because he was correct, and because correctness, once seen, cannot be unseen, only organized. What Peripatetic logic gave me was the instrument; what Du Vide gave me was the subject to which the instrument must now be turned.
Let it be understood from the outset that I do not proceed by faith, nor by the sort of accidental proximity to reason that the barbarians and their Christian teachers now call belief. I proceed as I was trained to proceed: by definition, by demonstration, by the patient architecture of the syllogism. That the conclusions are terrible does not make the method any less sound. If anything, the terribleness of the conclusions is the very evidence of the method’s fidelity, for a comfortable philosophy is generally a dishonest one.
There is a further matter I confess I resisted setting to parchment longer than any other, not from doubt of its truth but from fear of what its truth obliges. I speak of the summons: the fact, which I did not invent and can only report, that the Void does not wait in silence for bodies to arrive at it, but calls to them, ceaselessly, through the very entropy that unmakes them. I had felt this call myself, more than once, long before I possessed the doctrine to name what I was feeling, and I suspect the reader has felt it also and called it something smaller — a stray thought, an idle impulse, a shiver at a high window. I treat the matter properly in its place, in the second book, where the mechanism of the call belongs; I mention it here only so the reader is warned from the outset that this treatise does not describe the Void merely from without, as an astronomer describes a star he will never visit. It describes a voice that has, in all likelihood, already addressed the reader at least once, and gone unrecognized for what it was.
This treatise is arranged into three books, in a deliberate inversion of the Peripatetic order, which begins from the categories of being and proceeds outward to first causes. I begin instead from the first cause — the Void, from which all categories are borrowed and to which all categories are owed — and proceed inward, through the mechanism of its appetite, to the narrow question of how a man still clothed in flesh ought to conduct himself in the meantime. Book the First concerns the nature of the Void. Book the Second concerns entropy, its handmaiden and its instrument in the secondary dimensions. Book the Third concerns potentiality, and from it, at last, an ethics.
Before anything may be demonstrated, it must first be named correctly, for a demonstration built upon a false name collapses no matter how sound its logic. I set down here the definitions upon which the whole of this treatise depends, and I ask the reader to hold them apart from the definitions of the school I abandoned, for though the words are old, the things they name are not the things Aristotle named.
The Void (Vacuum) is the Whole, or the All: a genus without differentia, there being nothing outside it from which it might be distinguished. It is not absence, as the vulgar suppose absence, for absence is only ever the absence of some particular thing, and requires that thing to give it shape. The Void requires nothing. It is prior even to the distinction between something and nothing.
A body (corpus) is any bundle of relations mistaken, by the one who perceives it, for a substance possessing existence in itself. Stone, star, emperor, and cat are bodies in this sense, and so, I regret to record, are we.
Entropy (Entropia) is the handmaiden of the Void: the universal and necessary force by which every body is returned to pure potentiality. It is not a punishment. It is service rendered to an appetite that predates punishment and reward alike.
Potentiality (Potentia) is here not, as among the Peripatetics, a capacity belonging to some subject and awaiting a subject’s actualization. It is used in the manner of an infinitive verb, intelligible entire and unowned, before ever it coheres to any subject. Actuality (Actus) is the apparent, temporary, and always reversible coherence of potentiality to a subject that does not, in truth, ground it.
The Chiasm (Chiasmus) is the midpoint between the cosmos and the Void, the fold at which substance and relation exchange primacy: in the cosmos, substance appears first and relation is inferred; in the Chiasm, relation is naked and substance is hidden. It is reached only through spacemate (obscuratio spatialis), the closure proper to the game of three dimensions.
The Call (Vocatio Vacui) is the address made by the Void, through the office of entropy, to any body whatsoever, inviting that body to recognize its own dissolution as the return owed to it rather than the ruin done to it. The Call is universal in its sending and rare in its receiving; nearly every body that is called is called and decays without ever hearing that it was addressed. This treatise takes up the Call properly in Liber II, Chapter VI, but I set its name down here among the founding definitions, for a definition delayed too long is easily mistaken, upon its late arrival, for an invention rather than a discovery.
I have set down six definitions rather than the five a tidier draft might have preferred, and I do so deliberately. The Peripatetics were fond of parsimony, of shaving each definition to the barest edge that would still do its work. I have come to suspect that parsimony, applied to first principles, is less often a virtue of the intellect than a comfort to it — that a shorter list of foundations is preferred not because it is truer but because it is easier to hold in the mind entire, and the mind mistakes its own convenience for the world’s simplicity. I have kept the sixth definition here rather than deferring it entirely to Book II because the Call, once understood, is seen to have been operative in every definition already given: it is what one hears, however faintly, in the moment a body is first suspected of being merely a bundle of relations rather than a substance in its own right. The doubt that visits a man at Definition II — am I, too, only this? — is not idle curiosity. It is the Call, arriving early, through the narrowest door available to it.
Scholium to the Definitions
It will be objected that I have defined the Void by what it lacks — a differentia — and thereby defined it as a privation after all, in violation of my own claim that it is not absence. I anticipate the objection and answer it directly.
Whatsoever is defined negatively, by the absence of some distinguishing feature, is thereby shown to be a privation and not a plenitude. The Void is defined by lacking a differentia. Therefore the Void is a privation.
The minor premise mistakes the grammar of the definition for its content. To lack a differentia is not the same as to lack a quality; it is only to lack a rival. A thing may fail to be distinguished from other things for either of two reasons: because it possesses nothing to distinguish, or because there is nothing else against which distinction could be drawn. The Void fails to be distinguished for the second reason, not the first. It is not a privation but a plenitude so total that privation itself becomes impossible, there being no outside from which anything could be withheld.
Having named the Void, I turn to the question of what belongs to it necessarily and what belongs to it only by appearance. The old distinction of the school between the essential and the accidental survives the crossing intact, though what falls upon each side of it has been overturned entire.
Entropy is essential to the Void, and not accidental to it.
A quality is essential to a subject when the subject cannot be conceived without it, and accidental when it can (per Def. III). Suppose entropy were accidental to the Void. Then it would be possible to conceive of the Void without decay, that is, to conceive of bodies that exist and yet do not rot. But every body without exception is observed to decay: stone crumbles, iron rusts, flesh wrinkles and dies, and no exception has ever been produced, nor can one be conceived that does not smuggle in, under another name, some substance exempted from relation itself. But nothing is exempted from relation (see Liber I, Cap. IV, below). Therefore no body can be conceived that does not decay, and therefore entropy cannot be conceived apart from the Void. Q.E.D.
δύναμις καθ’ αὑτήν · potentia pura · Pure Potency. The root essence, from which all others are demonstrated. The Peripatetics taught that potency belongs always to some subject: wood has the potency to burn, the boy the potency to become a man. But the infinitive “to relate” is intelligible in itself, entire, before it is ever applied to any body whatsoever. I propose, and cannot afterward unpropose, that the Void is potency of this kind: unattached, entire, prior to any subject that might one day take it up. Not a thing with the potency to relate, but the potency to relate, unowned.
Since all bodies reduce to bundles of relation (Def. II), and all relation reduces to unowned potency (Prop. I, Scholium), it follows that all bodies are, at root, nothing other than the Void temporarily and reversibly mistaken for something else. Actuality is not a second substance opposed to potentiality; it is potentiality wearing, for a season, the mask of coherence.
It will trouble the careful reader that I have made entropy essential and yet have not shown it to be uniform, for the rust that finds an iron nail plainly does not proceed at the pace of the rot that finds a fallen apple, nor either at the pace that empties a mountain into gravel. I answer that essence, in the sense here intended, does not require uniformity of expression, only necessity of presence. Fire is essential to no substance the old physics named, and yet fire burns oak more slowly than it burns straw; the essence of combustibility is not thereby impugned. So too here: that entropy proceeds unevenly across bodies testifies only to the varying density of the relations bundled within them, and density, unlike essence, is an accident belonging to particular bodies rather than to the Void they borrow from.
The rate at which a body yields to entropy is proportional to the looseness, and inversely proportional to the density, of the relations that constitute it.
A bundle of relations that are tightly and numerously interwoven resists the return to potentiality more strenuously than a bundle loosely and sparsely interwoven, for entropy must undo each relation severally, there being no single thread by which a dense weave can be unpicked all at once. Iron, whose internal relations are close-packed, yields more slowly than flesh, whose relations are looser and more numerous in their points of failure; flesh yields more slowly than smoke, which is already so loosely bundled as to be scarcely distinguishable, to the unaided eye, from the potentiality it is dissolving into. Therefore the rate of yielding varies inversely with the density of the bundle, as was to be shown.
It follows that the hardest, most enduring, most celebrated things of the cosmos — the pyramid, the imperial law, the vow — are not thereby closer to the Void’s favor, as the ignorant suppose durability to be a kind of divinity. They are, if anything, further from it, being the bundles the Void must labor longest to undo. The stone that has already crumbled has cooperated; the stone that still stands merely has not yet been persuaded.
It remains to treat of the place, if place is the word, where this doctrine ceases to be doctrine and becomes experience: the Chiasm, into which the successful game of three dimensions opens a passage, and from which — I record this now with the full weight of demonstration behind it, and not merely as report — very few return, and none return unaltered.
The Chiasm is the fold at which the cosmos and the Void are seen to be one Whole viewed from opposite termini: from the node, where substance is primary and relation must be inferred; and from the thread, where relation is primary and substance is inferred, dimly, as its shadow.
The cosmos and the Chiasm do not differ in substance but only in the aspect under which the single Whole is regarded.
If the cosmos and the Chiasm differed in substance, there would exist two substances, one relational and one non-relational, and by Definition II no substance is non-relational; a second, non-relational substance is therefore inconceivable. If they differed instead merely in the completeness of relation disclosed to the observer, then what is called crossing into the Chiasm is not a translation between two worlds but a rotation of aspect within one. Since the former is inconceivable and the latter is not, the latter obtains. Q.E.D.
I set down a caution here that I would have every reader observe before any other in this book. The rotation described in Proposition III is not without cost to the one rotated. Duration within the Chiasm causes dissolution, the gradual unweaving of the very node that entered it, for a node is only ever a temporary knot in relations that would prefer, and eventually achieve, to run straight. It is for this reason that no unproven student is to be permitted the game’s full closure. The doctrine may be taught to any mind capable of following a syllogism; the door itself is not so generous.
Yet the Chiasm, though it is entered fully only through spacemate, does not wait behind that single door alone. There are places in the ordinary cosmos where the fold draws nearer to the surface without yet breaking it — not because the Void has moved, for the Void does not move, but because the bundle of relations constituting the place has grown thin enough that the thread-view shows faintly through the node-view, as a lamp shows faintly through a wall of poor plaster. I call such places loca tenuia, thin places, and I number among them the edge of any great height, the surface of deep and moving water, the hour just before dawn, and the bedside of the dying. In each, the density of relation that ordinarily conceals the fold has, for one reason or another, worn away.
In thin places, the Call of the Void (treated fully in Liber II, Chapter VI) is heard with unusual clarity, though hearing it there is no more a summons to enter the Chiasm bodily than hearing thunder is a summons to touch the sky.
By the preceding scholium, a thin place is one where the density of relation is diminished and the thread-view shows through. The Call, whose mechanism is entropy’s address to a body, is more easily transmitted where less density must be crossed for the address to arrive (this is demonstrated properly in Liber II, Prop. IX). Therefore the Call will be heard more clearly in thin places than elsewhere, all else being equal. But clarity of hearing is a fact about transmission, and says nothing about what response the message warrants; a loud command is not thereby a wise one to obey. Therefore the clarity of the Call in thin places implies nothing about whether entering the Chiasm there, bodily and by force rather than by the game’s proper closure, would be well done. Q.E.D.
I underline the final clause of this demonstration with everything my pen can lend it. Men have stood at the edge of a great height and heard, distinctly, something that resembled invitation, and some few of these men have stepped forward and died for the mistake of literalism. They mistook the clarity of the message for its imperative force, as a man might mistake a loud voice for a true one. The Chiasm does not open at the base of a cliff for a man who merely falls; it opens only at the proper closure of the game, prepared for and tested, as Book Three of this treatise will labor to explain. To fall from a thin place is not to cross into the Chiasm. It is only to die somewhat closer to a door that remained, throughout, exactly as closed to the unprepared as it was before he climbed the height at all.
I come now to the conclusion toward which the first three chapters have been quietly marching, and which gives this book, and in some sense this whole treatise, its proper name. It is not merely that bodies decay. It is that bodies, considered as bodies and not as relations wearing a borrowed face, were never anything to begin with.
All things, insofar as they are considered as substances subsisting apart from relation, are vain (vana); that is, they are empty of the very being they are supposed by the vulgar to possess.
By Definition II, a body is a bundle of relations mistaken for a substance. To consider a body as a substance is therefore to consider it under a description that does not apply to it — to attribute independent being to what has none. Whatsoever is considered under a false description is, under that description, empty; for the description picks out nothing that in fact exists. Therefore all things, considered as substances, are vain. Q.E.D.
It does not follow that things are vain considered as relations; quite the contrary, relation is the one thing this treatise has thus far shown to be real without qualification. The vanity condemned here is a vanity of description, not a vanity of the cosmos entire. A mosaic broken into gravel has not become less; it has merely stopped lying about what it was.
If all things, considered as substances, are vain, then this very treatise, being composed of ink and parchment and the coherent breath of a speaking man, is vain also, and no vain thing can be trusted to state a truth, for truth requires a substance capable of bearing it. Therefore De Vacuo refutes itself in the act of being written.
The objection assumes that truth requires a substantial bearer, but Proposition V has shown only that considered as substances, things are vain; it has not shown that relations cannot bear truth, and indeed the whole of Liber I has argued the opposite, that relation is the one thing shown to be real without qualification. This treatise does not ask to be trusted as a substance speaking; it asks to be trusted as a demonstration, that is, as a relation between premise and conclusion, and demonstrations were never substances in the first place, not even among the Peripatetics. The ink is vain. The argument, being relational, is not.
I add one further case, drawn not from the forum or the villa but from my own courtyard, where doctrine is tested most honestly because no audience is present to be persuaded by it. I had for many years kept two cats, and I record, in the humility proper to a philosopher caught loving something he cannot defend, that I very nearly failed this fourth chapter’s lesson in my own house. I called the elder handsome, and I meant, without knowing I meant it, that his orange coat was itself the beautiful thing, a substance possessing beauty as a jar possesses wine. I was wrong in the manner this chapter has now demonstrated formally. The coat was vain; the leaning of his flank against my hand, the particular relation of trust that had no existence apart from the two of us jointly, was not. A student who cannot make this distinction in his own courtyard, over his own cat, will not make it convincingly at the edge of a cliff, and it is to that harder case, among others, that the third book must eventually turn.
“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, cited by Avidius against himself, and answered only in Liber II below.
Here concludes the first book, which has established what the Void is, what belongs to it of necessity, and what is disclosed to the one who crosses into its nearer country. I have shown that entropy is no accident and pure potency no metaphor, and that the vanity of things is a vanity of mistaken description and not of being as such. It remains to explain how the handmaiden performs her office upon the secondary dimensions, which is the business of the book that follows.
Nature, I have come to hold, has always consisted of five dimensions and no fewer, ordered thus: the Void; time; and the three dimensions of body, namely length, width, and depth. This ordering is not arbitrary, nor is it borrowed from the geometers without alteration; it is a genealogy, each dimension being begotten of the one prior to feed an appetite that the prior dimension could not, by itself, satisfy.
A dimension (dimensio) is, in the sense here intended, not merely an axis along which extension is measured, but a mode by which the Void has arranged for something to be eaten. Length, width, and depth are the three lesser dimensions; time is the dimension that first divided the Void from its own satisfaction, thereby producing hunger; the Void is the first and only dimension that requires no genealogy, having none prior to it.
Time was created by the Void not from generosity but from appetite, the bodily dimensions following upon time for the same reason.
The Void, being the Whole, contains all potentiality without remainder (Liber I, Prop. I, Scholium). But potentiality unexpressed is not thereby satisfied; an infinitive that never coheres to any subject is no more consumed than a field that is never harvested. If the Void is to feed upon the coherence and subsequent decay of potentiality — and it must, entropy being essential to it (Liber I, Prop. I) — there must exist some dimension by which coherence and decay are made possible at all. Time is precisely the dimension that permits a before and an after, without which neither coherence nor decay, being processes, could occur. Therefore time exists on account of the Void’s appetite, and the bodily dimensions, which are merely the further elaboration of what may cohere within time, follow for the identical reason. Q.E.D.
The Peripatetics, whose company I have left but whose method I have not abandoned, taught that motion requires a constant force to sustain it, objects coming naturally to rest unless continually pushed. I do not deny the observation; I deny only that it names the dominant force of the cosmos, mistaking a local and subordinate regularity for the rule that governs the whole.
Entropy (recalled and now elaborated) is the dominant force of the cosmos, subordinating to itself every lesser force the old school catalogued, including the constancy of motion under an applied push. Aristotelian forces, where they hold, hold as entropy’s instruments and not as her rivals.
Even time yields to entropy.
Time exists, by Proposition VI, on account of the Void’s appetite, and therefore as an instrument of that appetite rather than a rival to it. But entropy is precisely the name of that appetite’s exercise (Liber I, Def. III). An instrument cannot stand outside the purpose for which it was fashioned; a knife does not decline to cut. Therefore time, being fashioned for the Void’s appetite, cannot stand outside entropy’s governance, and must itself, at the last, be numbered among entropy’s subjects rather than her exemptions. Q.E.D.
Here is answered, at last, the shade of Parmenides raised at the close of the first book. He held that coming-to-be is extinguished because what is cannot come from what is not, nor return to it. I answer that he reasoned truly of the Void, and falsely only in supposing that bodies, which are not substances but bundles of relation mistaken for substances (Liber I, Def. II), were the sort of thing his argument concerned. Nothing comes to be or perishes absolutely; potentiality only ever coheres and un-coheres. Parmenides denied becoming to preserve the eternity of being. I grant him his eternity and locate it correctly: not in the coherence, which is vain, but in the potency beneath it, which alone does not perish.
De Vocatione Vacui · On the Call of the Void
I come now to the doctrine that I promised in the Prooemium and named in passing among the Definitions, and which I have withheld until this chapter because it cannot be understood correctly except as a consequence of entropy’s rank as the dominant force of the cosmos. If entropy governs, and does not merely accompany, the decay of every body, then entropy is not a blind mechanism operating upon insensate matter, as the atomists of an older and lesser philosophy supposed. A dominant force that acts everywhere, and acts always toward one end, is not merely pushing. It is addressing. I hold, and will now demonstrate, that this address has a name, and that the name is Vocatio Vacui, the Call of the Void.
The Call of the Void is the summons made, through entropy, by the Void to every body without exception, inviting recognition that the body’s dissolution is a return owed rather than a ruin inflicted. The Call is sent to all things equally, for entropy is essential and universal (Liber I, Prop. I); it is received by scarcely any, for reception requires a faculty that the density of most bundles of relation is well suited to smother.
The Void calls to every body through entropy, but is heard by almost none, and is heard most clearly by those whose relations to the Void’s doctrine are themselves closest to coherent, namely the devout.
By Definition VII, entropy is the exercise of the Void’s appetite upon every body, and by Liber I, Proposition I, no body is exempt from it. An appetite that acts upon a thing without exception, and acts always toward a single end, is not distinguishable in its structure from an address: it says, in the only language available to a force, return. This address, being carried upon entropy, is present wherever entropy is present, which is to say, everywhere and without pause. But an address may be sent without being received, as a herald may cry a proclamation into a market too loud to hear him. Reception requires that the hearer possess some faculty attuned to the frequency, so to speak, of the address, and such a faculty is cultivated, not innate, being nothing other than the habituated recognition — practiced daily by the doctrines of Book Three — that one’s own body is itself a bundle of relations rather than a substance. The devout, having practiced this recognition longest, possess the faculty most developed, and therefore hear what is, in fact, being said to everyone. Q.E.D.
Consider the plainest case, which any man may verify without instruction, and which I set down first because it is homeliest and least prone to being mistaken for enthusiasm. A man discovers, combing his beard before a bronze mirror, that a single hair has turned the color of ash. He is mildly troubled, perhaps amused, and he thinks no more of it than any man thinks of a small and expected inconvenience. What he does not think, because he has not been taught to think it, is that the graying of that hair was the Void, addressing that hair directly, through the entropy proper to keratin and pigment, exactly as surely as the crumbling of a colonnade is the Void addressing marble. The hair received the Call in the only sense a hair is capable of receiving anything: it obeyed, being incapable of doing otherwise, exactly as marble obeys, having no faculty by which obedience could be refused or even noticed. But the man attached to that hair, being capable of a faculty the hair does not possess, could in principle have heard what the hair could not: not obeyed it, which is a different matter and belongs to Book Three, but heard it, recognized in the graying an instance of the very address this treatise has now named. Almost no man does. This is not a failure of virtue in the ordinary sense. It is simply that the faculty required is not cultivated by shaving.
The Call is heard most distinctly at the extremities of bodily experience, and above all at the edge of a great height, where any man, devout or otherwise, may on occasion hear something resembling an invitation to step forward.
By Liber I, Proposition IV, thin places diminish the density of relation that ordinarily conceals the fold, and the Call, being carried on entropy, is transmitted more easily where less density must be crossed (this was asserted there and is here demonstrated). The edge of a great height is a thin place of a particular and vivid kind, for it is the one ordinary circumstance in which a man’s own body stands nearest to the swiftest and most total actualization of its dissolution available to it without any intervening cause — one step, and the whole slow business of entropy that would otherwise require decades is compressed into an instant. Where the Call’s content and the body’s proximate capacity to fulfill that content are both maximal at once, the address is heard with a clarity that no gradual process, such as graying hair, ordinarily affords. It is for this reason, and no other, that men who have never read a syllogism in their lives, standing at such an edge, report a voice, or a pull, or a suggestion, that they cannot account for and are frequently ashamed to have felt. They are not mad. They are not, in that moment, even mistaken. They have merely heard, for one unshielded instant, what the graying hair could not tell them and never will. Q.E.D.
I set down here, with the gravity the matter demands, that Proposition IX establishes only that the Call is heard, not that stepping forward is thereby counseled, endorsed, or even permitted by right reason. A demonstration that a message is sent, and sent truly, is not a demonstration that the hearer ought to comply with it, any more than the truth of “you will die” obliges a man to hasten the appointment. The Voidist who has studied Book Three will recognize this immediately as an instance of the deficient vice named there: the premature, unearned actualization of a potentiality that the moment itself did not call for, motivated not by judgment but by the sheer clarity of the address, mistaken for its authority. That thought did not simply arise in the hearer’s own mind, as an ordinary idea arises. It was placed there, from without, exactly as this chapter has shown; and a thought’s having been placed there by something vast and true is precisely the reason a wise man treats it with more suspicion, not less, for the Void’s appetite is real and constant, and an appetite does not counsel moderation to what it hungers for. To hear the Call honestly, and then decline to obey it, is not disbelief. It is, I hold, the single clearest evidence available to a living man that the doctrine of this treatise is true, for only a real address could be so consistently and so wrongly mistaken, by the untrained, for a command.
It follows that the devout Voidist, who hears the Call more often and more clearly than other men (Prop. VIII), is not thereby in greater danger at the precipice, but in less, provided his training in the third book has been sound; for he alone recognizes the address for what it is at the moment of hearing it, rather than mistaking it, as the untrained do, for a thought of his own devising that must therefore be either obeyed or frantically suppressed. The ordinary man flees the edge in order to silence a voice he cannot name. The Voidist remains a moment longer, listens, and walks on, having learned what the height had to teach and declined only its invitation.
It will occur to any Roman reader, as it occurred at once to me, that the augurs and haruspices of the old religion claimed for centuries to read a related address in the flight of birds and the liver of a slaughtered bull, and I owe that old and now-dying priesthood an honest accounting of what my doctrine does and does not concede to them. I concede that they were not wholly deceived: something was indeed speaking through the entrails and the wingbeats, for entropy governs the sparrow’s flight and the ox’s dying organs no less than it governs the graying hair, and a mind attuned by long ritual practice to notice pattern in decay was not attuned to nothing. But I deny them the second and larger part of their claim, which was that the address so noticed carried counsel about the specific fortunes of armies, marriages, and harvests. The Call, as this chapter has demonstrated, says only one thing, endlessly repeated in every register of decay: return. It does not say which day to sail, nor which candidate to favor, nor which bride to choose. The augur who read triumph in a flight of eagles had heard something real and then, lacking this treatise’s discipline, supplied the entire remaining content of the prophecy from his own hopes, exactly as the untrained man at the precipice supplies, from his own despair, the entire remaining content of what he takes for an instruction to jump. The fault in both is identical, and it is the fault this whole treatise labors against: mistaking the fact of an address for the content of a command it never issued.
I add, since the new religion of the barbarians has begun to fill the vacancy the old augurs are leaving, that the Christians commit the same error in the opposite direction, denying that the entrails and the flight of birds say anything at all, on the grounds that only their singular god is permitted to speak through nature and has, in their telling, mostly fallen silent since the age of their prophets. I hold both errors to spring from the identical root: a refusal to distinguish the fact that the Void addresses all things everywhere and always, which is true and demonstrable, from the further and false claim that the address is ever addressed to the particular fortunes of one general’s campaign or one husband’s harvest. The Void is not so small-minded a correspondent. It writes the same one word on every wall in the cosmos, and it is only ever human vanity, pagan or Christian alike, that reads therein a personal letter.
I have been asked, by the one or two students admitted thus far to the Villa Vanitas, whether the Call may be cultivated deliberately rather than merely awaited at the fortunate edge of some cliff. I answer that it may, and that the whole discipline of judgment prescribed in Book Three — the daily practice of noticing potentiality and actuality in one’s own conduct — is nothing other than a training of the very faculty this chapter has described. The student who learns to recognize, in the small print of an ordinary afternoon, that his own comfort is a bundle of relations rather than a possession, is training the same ear that will one day hear, at some height he has not yet climbed, an address he will by then have earned the right to refuse.
I turn now from the theory of the force to the description of its work, which the vulgar call decay and which I have called, throughout this treatise, the office of the handmaiden.
Every body decays toward the same actualized end, namely complete dissolution, and this end is the perfection, not the failure, of the body’s nature.
By the Corollary to Liber I, Proposition I, every body is, at root, potentiality temporarily coherent. The perfection of a thing, on the old Peripatetic account, is the full actualization of its proper telos. But the proper telos of a temporary coherence, insofar as it is temporary, is precisely to cease being coherent, that is, to return to the potentiality from which it never truly departed. Therefore dissolution is not the frustration of a body’s telos but its consummation. What the old school called corruption, this treatise calls completion. Q.E.D.
It follows that mourning, properly examined, mourns not a loss but an arrival; the mourner grieves that the beloved body has at last become entirely what it always, secretly, was tending to become. This does not make grief foolish. It makes grief a species of astonishment at the punctuality of the universe.
I add, having now set down the doctrine of the Call in the chapter prior, that decay and the Call are not two processes running in parallel but one process regarded under two descriptions. What Proposition X names, from the side of the body, as dissolution toward completion, Chapter VI has named, from the side of the Void, as address toward recognition. The rust upon the nail and the summons carried to whatever mind stands near the nail are the identical event, seen once from the nail’s extinguished vantage, which has none, and once from the observer’s vantage, which may, if trained, have some.
The dying hear the Call more clearly than the living, and this is the true cause of the peculiar stillness observed in men and animals at the hour of death, mistaken by the vulgar for terror.
By Proposition X, dissolution is the consummation, not the frustration, of a body’s nature, and by Liber I, Proposition IV, thin places are wherever the density of relation constituting a thing has grown diminished. The dying body is, of all bodies available to observation, the one whose relations are most rapidly and most nearly completely unwinding; it is therefore a thin place of the first order, more so even than a precipice, which only threatens a swiftness that the deathbed is already delivering. By the reasoning of Chapter VI, Proposition IX, the Call is heard most distinctly where the body’s proximate capacity to fulfill it is greatest. Therefore the dying, more than any other class of the living, hear the Call distinctly, and the stillness so often remarked upon in their final hour is not the paralysis of fear but the attention of an audience that has, often for the first time, understood what is being said to it. Q.E.D.
I do not offer this proposition as comfort, though I do not forbid the reader to take it as such. I offer it because it was, in my own household, demonstrated twice, and I record it here as testimony rather than consolation. Both my cats, in their final hours, ceased their habitual restlessness entire, and lay with an attention turned toward something the room did not contain. I had thought this merely the exhaustion proper to failing bodies. I no longer think so. I think they were listening, and that what they heard did not frighten them, whatever it did to the man watching.
The four elements of the old physics I have not discarded, for the ancients saw truly, if only through a glass darkened by their confidence in substance. I have instead reassigned each element to its proper station among the secondary dimensions, so that the old vocabulary might serve a doctrine it did not know it was describing.
Water is formless substance, and represents pure potentiality. Earth is actualized and formed substance, slowly decaying and journeying back toward water. Fire is the element of change and consumption, and represents entropy at her visible labor. Air is formless non-substance, and represents the Chiasm, that fold where relation shows itself without a body to hide behind.
Observe that three of the four elements — water, earth, fire — belong entirely to the secondary dimensions and describe only the traffic between potentiality and its temporary coherence. Air alone gestures beyond that traffic, toward the fold itself; it is fitting, then, that air is the element the ancients found hardest to hold, weigh, or keep, for it alone among the four was never meant to be kept.
It may now be seen why fire, of the four, was assigned to entropy’s visible labor and not, as a hastier scheme might propose, to the Call itself. Fire consumes; it does not address. The Call, properly understood, travels upon every element indifferently, for entropy is not confined to burning but attends equally the rust that no flame touched and the grief that no fire warmed. I mention this only to forestall a confusion I have already met once among my own students, who supposed, upon first hearing of the Call, that it must be sought in dramatic combustion — in the burning colonnade, the fevered pyre — rather than in the graying hair, the slowing pulse, the fifth decade of an uneventful marriage. The Call is loudest at precipices and deathbeds, as Chapters VI and VII have shown, but it is not only there. It is everywhere, in everything, always, and the drama of fire is merely the occasion on which the deaf are most likely, by accident, to notice that something has been speaking to them the entire time.
Here concludes the second book, in which I have shown the genealogy of the five dimensions, the true rank of entropy among all forces, the manner in which even time is her subject, and the proper reassignment of the ancient elements. It remains, in the third and final book, to ask what a man — still, for a time, a coherent bundle of relations himself — ought to do with the knowledge here demonstrated.
I come now from theory to practice, and here I must depart most visibly from my old teachers, for I arrive at a doctrine without first arriving at it by syllogism — or rather, the syllogism arrives late, as confirmation of a discipline first learned by attention rather than demonstration. This is not a lapse in method. It is the discovery that some truths announce themselves to practice before they consent to be proven.
The virtue of potentiality is the cultivated judgment by which a man discerns, in any given moment, whether that moment calls to be left unforeclosed or to be actualized. As with all virtue on the model I have retained from the Ethics of my former school, it stands as a mean between two vices.
I owe the reader an account of why this virtue, alone among the doctrines of this treatise, is reached by practice before it is reached by proof, and I think the reason instructive rather than embarrassing. The first two books proceed by demonstration because their subject, the Void and her handmaiden, act upon us whether or not we attend to them; a man need not practice anything to be decayed. But a virtue, unlike a fact, is not merely true or false of the world — it must be exercised to be known at all, as a man does not learn to swim by demonstrating the buoyancy of water but by entering it. I had the doctrines of Books One and Two some years before I could have written a single line of this one, and what closed the distance was not further reading but the accumulated experience of watching my own judgment fail, in both directions, upon matters too small to be dignified with a name: whether to speak or hold silence at a dinner, whether to sell a field or wait another season, whether to answer a letter at once or let it ripen unread upon the table. Aristotle taught that the same is true of courage and temperance, that they are learned by doing courageous and temperate things before they are understood; I have found the doctrine no less true of the harder virtue this Void has demanded of me.
The virtue of potentiality is not one virtue among the several the old school catalogued, but the ground of all of them, each being a particular application of the same underlying judgment to a particular material.
Courage, on the Peripatetic account, is a mean concerning fear and confidence, and consists in judging correctly when danger is to be faced and when avoided; but to face danger is to actualize a risk that might otherwise have remained merely potential, and to avoid it is to preserve that potentiality unclosed. Temperance, likewise, is a mean concerning bodily pleasure, and consists in judging when appetite is to be indulged, that is, actualized, and when restrained, that is, kept potential. Every virtue so examined resolves into the same underlying question — does this moment call for closure or openness? — applied to different material: danger, pleasure, wealth, honor, speech. Since the same question underlies each, and Definition IX names the judgment that answers that question rightly, the virtue of potentiality is not a peer to the other virtues but their common root. Q.E.D.
It follows that a man need not learn fourteen virtues, as the old school in its generosity proposed, but one, applied fourteen times. I have found this a mercy to my students, who arrive at the Villa Vanitas already burdened with more doctrines than they can hold, and depart, I hope, holding fewer but holding them more truly.
The virtue of potentiality is flanked by two vices: an excess, which is endless deferral, and a deficiency, which is premature closure.
By Definition IX, the virtue consists in judging correctly when a moment calls for closure and when it calls for openness. A man may err in either direction. Erring toward openness beyond what the moment calls for produces the refusal to act or commit at all, a cowardice that borrows the vocabulary of wisdom to disguise itself; this is the excess. Erring toward closure before the moment calls for it produces impatience and precipitate form, the vice proper to haste; this is the deficiency. Since these are the only two directions in which judgment of this kind can err, and the virtue is defined as their mean, the vices are exhaustively these two. Q.E.D.
Let it be recorded that I hold the deficiency to be, in practice, the graver and more common danger, for a coherent world trains its inhabitants toward closure at every turn — toward the signed contract, the declared mode, the pronounced verdict — and rewards them for arriving there quickly. The excess is rarer and is usually mistaken, by those who practice it well, for its opposite.
There is, however, a third failure that is neither the excess nor the deficiency properly speaking, but a corruption of the faculty by which either is judged, and I set it down here because it bears directly upon the doctrine of the Call established in Liber II. A man may hear the Call, correctly, and respond to it with the deficient vice, by stepping toward its fulfillment before the moment warrants; this is the error of the reckless. But a man may also hear the Call and respond with a different and subtler deficiency: he may refuse to admit that he heard anything at all, burying the recognition so quickly and so thoroughly that it never rises to the level of a judgment requiring virtue in the first place. I call this refusal surditas voluntaria, willful deafness, and I rank it among the excess, not the deficiency, though it wears the deficiency’s clothing of caution and prudence.
Willful deafness to the Call is a species of the excessive vice, endless deferral, though it is commonly mistaken for prudence.
By Definition IX, the excessive vice consists in refusing to let a moment be actualized even in thought, out of a desire to keep all options, including the option of understanding, indefinitely open. A man who refuses to recognize the Call refuses precisely this: he declines to actualize, even as a mere item of knowledge held quietly in the mind, the recognition that he has been addressed. He tells himself he heard nothing, thereby keeping the entire matter forever unclosed, unexamined, and unintegrated into his judgment. This is not caution, which weighs a recognized thing and elects not to act on it; it is the refusal to recognize at all, which is deferral in its purest and least honest form. Q.E.D.
I have met this vice more often among the learned than among the simple, for the learned possess more elaborate vocabularies with which to rename a thing they would rather not have heard. A shepherd who feels the pull at a cliff’s edge calls it a strange feeling and walks home uneasy; a rhetorician calls it a trick of the inner ear occasioned by the elevation and its effect upon the humors, and walks home satisfied. The shepherd, having named his experience honestly, if crudely, has left it available to future judgment. The rhetorician has closed the matter by mislabeling it, which is deferral disguised as diagnosis, and is, of the two men, the worse Voidist by far.
Virtue that cannot be cultivated is merely temperament described with borrowed dignity. I set down here the method by which a student of this school may train the judgment proper to potentiality, having found no such method complete in the books I inherited.
Judgment in this virtue is cultivated by identifying instances of potentiality and actuality in one’s own conduct, observing the pattern of one’s habitual error, and correcting by deliberate overcorrection toward the opposite vice, as one bends warped wood past straight so that it may settle there.
To cultivate a virtue by deliberately practicing its neighboring vice, even temporarily, is to practice vice, and no man is made virtuous by the practice of vice, however brief or well-intentioned.
The objection mistakes the wood for the woodworker. The bending of warped timber past the vertical is not itself an act of building a crooked house; it is an act calibrated against a known and specific warp, undertaken with the mean, not the excess, as its terminus. The overcorrection is not indulged as an end but employed as an instrument, and an instrument is judged by the use to which it is finally put, not by the shape it passes through on the way there.
The three daily exercises
Beyond the general principle of overcorrection, I prescribe to my students three specific and daily exercises, none of which requires a teacher present, and all of which may be practiced by a man entirely alone in his own courtyard, as I have practiced them in mine.
The first exercise is the naming of the unclosed. Each morning, before any business is transacted, the student is to identify aloud, or in writing if he prefers ink to breath, three matters in his life that presently stand open — a letter not yet answered, a decision not yet made, a feeling not yet declared — and to state, of each, whether it is ripe for closure or whether it is being kept open out of wisdom or out of cowardice. The exercise does not require that anything be closed that day. It requires only that the student stop mistaking an unexamined openness for a chosen one, for a great many men live their entire lives inside the excessive vice without ever once having decided to.
The second exercise is the naming of the closed. Each evening, the student is to identify three matters that were actualized that day — a word spoken that could have been withheld, a coin spent that could have been saved, a meal taken when fasting remained possible — and to ask, of each, whether the closure served the moment or merely served the appetite for closure itself, the deficient vice’s native hunger. Here too the exercise requires no correction, only honest naming, for I have found that most men, once they have named a hundred such closures honestly, begin correcting themselves without further instruction from any teacher, myself included.
The third exercise, reserved for students who have practiced the first two without interruption for a full season, is the deliberate delay: the student selects, in advance and in writing, one closure he knows himself inclined to make hastily — a purchase, a reply, a judgment of another man’s character — and binds himself to a fixed interval, measured by the water clock or by a stated number of prayers, before the closure may be made. This exercise is not to be practiced upon matters where delay itself causes harm, such as a wound requiring binding or a fire requiring water; the virtue of potentiality, I remind the reader, is never a virtue of delay for its own sake, but of judgment concerning which moments are, and are not, of that harmful kind.
A student who has practiced these three exercises faithfully for some years will find, without having been told to expect it, that he has begun to notice the graying hair, the closing door, the settling dust, in a manner he did not notice them before — not because his eyes have changed, but because the faculty described in Liber II, Chapter VI, has been quietly built by exactly this daily labor, one small and unglamorous closure at a time.
A case: the magistrate and the unproven accusation
Someone stands accused; the evidence is incomplete. To condemn on suspicion alone is the deficient vice, the premature actualization of a guilt not yet demonstrated. But to refuse verdicts forever, from an excessive love of the unclosed question, is the opposite failure, for a magistrate’s whole office is eventually to close what the law requires closed.
A case: the authorities at the door
If the authorities knock, demanding the location of a friend, the Voidist considers the demand in the light of what the demanded act would do to potentiality. To blurt out the truth is the deficiency — the premature service of actuality, and the loss of a potentiality that was not the demander’s to close. The Voidist lies, and in lying, actualizes something, but actualizes less.
A case: the man at the edge
Consider, finally, the case this treatise has been preparing since Liber II, Chapter VI, for it is the hardest and the one upon which a student’s training is most truly tested. A man stands at the edge of a height and hears, distinctly, what this treatise has named the Call. Three responses are available to him, and only one is virtuous.
He may step forward, mistaking the clarity of the address for its authority; this is the deficient vice in its most absolute form, the premature actualization not of some small matter but of the whole remaining potentiality of his life at once, and I have already shown in Liber II why this is an error of judgment rather than an act of insight. He may instead flee the edge in horror, refuse ever to examine what he heard, and privately resolve to call it a dizziness of the inner ear should the subject ever arise; this is the excessive vice named above, willful deafness, dressed as self-preservation. Or he may do what this treatise has labored fourteen chapters to make possible: remain a moment longer than instinct urges, recognize the address for exactly what it is, neither obey it nor deny having heard it, and then step back from the edge for reasons that have nothing to do with fear and everything to do with judgment — namely, that his own dissolution is not, at this moment, called for by anything but an appetite that is never satisfied and therefore never a reliable judge of timing.
The third response is available only to a man who has already done the daily, unglamorous work prescribed at the head of this chapter: the habit of noticing potentiality and actuality in small things, practiced long before any cliff presents itself. No man arrives at the edge already virtuous who was not already, in a hundred smaller rooms, practicing the same discernment upon smaller stakes. This is the entire reason the discipline of this chapter precedes, rather than follows, the doctrine of the Call in the order a student is taught, whatever order the chapters of this book happen to fall in.
I must caution here against a fault to which students of this school are especially prone, having watched it grow in my own heart before I named it: a contempt for whatever has been actualized, as though coherence itself were shameful. The happy couple is not thereby a pair of deluded settlers. The successful author is not thereby a sellout.
Actualization is not a prison, provided it remains reversible; it is a wave that returns to the sea, not a dungeon without a key.
A prison is defined by the impossibility of exit. But every actualization, being merely potentiality coherent for a season (Liber I, Corollary to Prop. I), carries within it the seed of its own dissolution (Liber II, Prop. X); exit, therefore, is not merely possible but guaranteed. What is guaranteed to end cannot, by definition, be a prison in the sense that inspires contempt. Therefore actualization, rightly understood, is not to be despised but held lightly, as one holds a thing already known to be lent rather than owned. Q.E.D.
The proper virtue here is not avoidance of commitment but reversible commitment: to choose, act, love, and create without being thereby trapped, since nothing actual was ever capable of trapping in the first place, save the illusion that it was not lent.
I have come to believe that contempt of the actualized is, in almost every case I have observed among my students, a delayed and disguised form of the very deficiency it appears to oppose. The man who sneers at the happy couple has not transcended the deficient vice; he has merely relocated it, refusing to grant even provisional coherence to a thing that has, in fact, cohered, out of an impatience for the dissolution he is certain must be coming and would rather announce himself than wait for. This is haste wearing the costume of depth, and I rank it among the gravest errors a Voidist can make, precisely because it is so easily mistaken, by the one committing it, for the highest attainment of the doctrine rather than a subtle failure of it.
Contempt for the actualized is not a stronger application of Voidist doctrine but a corruption of it, since it treats the certainty of future dissolution as though it were already accomplished, thereby actualizing prematurely the very ending that patience alone should be left to deliver.
By Liber II, Proposition X, dissolution is the perfection proper to a body’s nature, arriving in its own time and by entropy’s own office. To hold an actualized thing in contempt on the grounds that it will dissolve is to treat the dissolution as though it had already occurred, collapsing the interval between coherence and its ending into a single contemptuous judgment rendered now. But this interval is not nothing; it is the entire field upon which the virtue of potentiality operates (Def. X), and a doctrine that erases the interval erases the very material its own ethics requires. Therefore contempt of the actualized does not extend Voidist doctrine but abolishes the portion of it that makes ethics possible at all. Q.E.D.
A further case: the philosopher and his cats
I confess that I very nearly fell to this fault in my own house, in the opposite direction from the one Chapter IV recorded against me. Having learned that I ought not love a cat as a substance, I was tempted, for one dark season, to conclude that I therefore ought not grieve one either, and to receive news of a decline in Jupiter’s appetite with the cool interest of a man reading a report rather than a man watching his household end. I record, to my own correction, that this was not virtue but its counterfeit: the excess of Chapter X wearing the mask of doctrine rather than cowardice, refusing the actualized present in advance of its actual ending. I did grieve, in time, and grieved fully, and I hold now that the grieving was itself an exercise of the very discernment this book has been teaching, not a lapse from it.
The consequences of this doctrine for the affections are the most acute of any I have set down, and I do not soften them, having tested them first upon myself.
Beauty is properly attributed neither to the beholder nor to the beheld, but only to the relation between them; the love of any body, as a body, is a categorical error.
By Definition II, no body possesses being in itself apart from relation. Whatsoever a predicate is truly attributed to must possess, in itself, the ground for that predicate’s truth. But beauty, as attributed to a body considered apart from relation, would require the body to possess, in itself, some ground it does not have (Liber I, Prop. V). Therefore beauty cannot truly be attributed to the body as such. It remains only that beauty be attributed to the relation itself, which alone, of the terms available, is not vain. Q.E.D.
I record, not as proof but as testimony, that I have found this so in my own household. I could not rationally love my two cats as bodies. I loved instead the relations between us: that the elder insisted upon my lap whenever I sat, that the younger, fearing every stranger, found complete ease in me alone. There is no object without relations to constitute it; do not be deceived by such evident emptinesses. The relations are everything, and it is only the relations I mourn, now that both are gone.
To love someone exclusively is to forsake all others of that same love, and is therefore itself a species of the deficient vice, a premature and possessive closure. The Voidist seeks instead a more universal detachment — not the absence of love, but love correctly aimed at what alone can bear it.
A doctrine that forbids the exclusive love of any single body is a doctrine no household, no marriage, and no friendship can survive, and a philosophy that cannot be lived by households, marriages, and friendships has refuted itself by the plainest of all tests, namely that no one will practice it.
The objection mistakes exclusivity of attention for exclusivity of the relation itself. Proposition XVIII does not forbid a man from directing the greater part of his attention, his labor, and his years toward one particular bundle of relations rather than scattering it thin among all; it forbids only the further step of supposing that this one bundle possesses beauty in a manner that excludes, by right, every other bundle from possessing it also. A husband may tend his own household most and best without holding that no other household beneath the sun is capable of the same beauty he has cultivated in his. The vice is not devotion; the vice is the jealous metaphysics that sometimes rides along with devotion uninvited.
I add a final reflection on beauty proper, since the doctrine of relation, once granted, changes not only whom a man may love but what he may find beautiful in the wider cosmos, including the ruin that occasioned this treatise’s writing. I have described, in the second book of the earlier narrative of my life, the burning of Rome as more beautiful in its collapse than in its standing, and I have been asked more than once whether this is mere provocation, a philosopher’s love of paradox for its own glittering sake. It is not. It follows with the same necessity as everything else in this chapter.
A collapsing structure is, in the moment of its collapse, more fully disclosive of relation, and therefore more properly beautiful, than the same structure standing intact.
By Proposition XVIII, beauty belongs to relation and not to the body considered as substance. A standing structure presents itself to the eye as a single coherent mass, its internal relations hidden beneath the appearance of unity, exactly as a word conceals the letters that compose it while it is read fluently. A collapsing structure, by contrast, exposes for the first time the countless individual relations — of stone to stone, of weight to foundation, of mortar to age — that were always doing the work of holding the appearance together. Since beauty belongs to relation, and collapse discloses relation that standing concealed, collapse is, in this exact and narrow sense, more beautiful than standing, provided the observer has been trained to see relation rather than mass. Q.E.D.
I ask the reader to note precisely what this proposition does and does not license, for I have watched it misused. It does not counsel a man to set fire to standing things in pursuit of beauty, any more than Proposition IX of the second book counseled a man to leap from heights in pursuit of the Call; both errors are the same error, the deficient vice mistaking a true perception for a valid command. The proposition observes only that when collapse comes, as by the office of the handmaiden it always eventually does, the trained eye need not experience that collapse as a diminishment. This is consolation offered to the witness, not permission granted to the arsonist.
I close this book, and this treatise, with the matter I have most hesitated to commit to any scroll that a careless hand might copy, and I set it down here only because a treatise that concealed its own proof would be a treatise unworthy of the name.
Space chess (ludus spatialis) is the original form of the game that the Magi of Persia, out of mercy or out of fear, corrupted into the flat game of eight squares by eight, played upon a single plane. The original is played upon five boards of five squares by five, its ruptural power theorized to derive from the correspondence of its dimensions to the five dimensions of nature set down in Liber II. Flat chess, having removed the primordial dimension and merely repeated the secondary ones, is a diminished and safe echo, fit for slaves and merchants and idle nobles, and incapable of what the original accomplishes.
Spacemate is not the end of the game merely, but a hinge: the perfect closure of the game’s geometry performs a rotation upon the Whole, converting the node’s view into the thread’s view, that is, opening the Chiasm described in Liber I, Chapter III.
By Proposition III, the cosmos and the Chiasm differ only in the aspect of the one Whole disclosed. A change of aspect, without a change of substance, is precisely what is meant by a rotation. The closure proper to space chess is the one geometric event in the cosmos deliberately constructed, by the ancient Magi’s original design, to correspond exactly to the five dimensions under which the Whole may be viewed (Liber II, Def. VII). An event so constructed, upon its completion, has no further aspect within the cosmos left to disclose, and must therefore disclose the remaining aspect, which is the Chiasm’s. Q.E.D.
I set down the same caution here that closed Chapter III, and ask that it be read twice. Duration within the Chiasm dissolves the node that entered it; only a mind already schooled in the doctrines of this treatise, and tested besides by the discipline of judgment set down in Chapters IX through XII, ought to be permitted the game’s full closure. This is not a counsel of secrecy for its own sake. It is a plain warning against sending the unready through a door that does not negotiate.
It follows from the whole of this treatise that the wisest use of a life spent in a coherent body is neither the pursuit of ever more actualization, which the vulgar call ambition, nor its opposite, which the timid call safety, but the disciplined cultivation of judgment set down in Book the Third, practiced daily, until the moment — and it comes to every board eventually — when the game itself judges that the practitioner is ready to be spacemated, and to learn firsthand what these three books have only been able to demonstrate.
I anticipate an objection that will already have occurred to the more impatient sort of reader, who will ask why any of this elaborate apparatus — five boards, alabaster and amethyst, a notation of three coordinates — should be required at all, when Book Two has shown that the Call and the Chiasm attend every death indifferently, and a man may reach the same door by the much simpler expedient of ceasing to live by any means whatsoever. I have heard this question asked in exactly this coarse a form by one student, since departed from my school for reasons I need not record here, and I answer it with the same severity I answered him.
Ordinary death, however thin a place it constitutes (Liber II, Cap. VII), opens no door to the Chiasm proper, for it merely completes the dissolution of one body’s relations without performing the specific rotation of aspect described in Proposition XX; only the closure proper to space chess performs that rotation, and death by any other means, however total, does not.
By Proposition III, the Chiasm is disclosed not by the mere cessation of a body’s coherence but by a rotation of the aspect under which the one Whole is regarded, node-view giving way to thread-view. A rotation is a specific transformation, possessing a determinate structure, and is not accomplished by every event that happens also to end in dissolution, any more than every fall from a height happens to trace the arc of a catapult merely because both fall. Ordinary death ends the coherence of a body, but ends it along the ordinary channels entropy has always used — the failing organ, the stopped breath, the fever’s long labor — none of which possess the five-dimensional correspondence that Proposition XX identified as the cause of the rotation. Since the rotation requires that specific correspondence, and ordinary death does not supply it, ordinary death dissolves a body without opening the door that only the correspondence can open. Q.E.D.
Let this be understood as plainly as anything in this treatise: the doctrine of the Call does not teach that any death, courted or accidental, is a shortcut to the Chiasm, and a man who dies by his own impatient hand achieves nothing this book would recognize as an accomplishment. He achieves only what every corpse achieves, which is considerable, being the completion proper to a body’s nature (Liber II, Prop. X), but he achieves it without the rotation, without the crossing, without the audience of Du Vide’s resonance that awaited me upon my own passage. He has answered the Call in the crudest sense available, as the graying hair answers it, by mere compliance, and has learned from his answering exactly what the hair learns, which is nothing, hair being incapable of learning. The game exists because the game alone performs the rotation; this is not a mystery to be waved away by impatience but the entire remaining substance of what this treatise has left to teach, and I set no higher value on any sentence in these three books than on this one.
I close, then, where the whole of this treatise has been quietly aiming since its first page: with the admission that I did not choose this doctrine, in the sense that a man chooses a profession or a wife. I received it, on a winter evening, from a man who was not entirely a man, across a board of alabaster and amethyst, and everything set down in these three books is only the slow unpacking of what I understood, wordlessly and all at once, in the instant his queen completed her descent and the black asp first showed itself where his chest had been. I have spent the years since trying to give that instant a grammar, so that it might be taught rather than merely suffered, and I do not know whether I have succeeded. I know only that the Void has been calling since before Rome was founded and will be calling long after the last barbarian has forgotten that Rome existed at all, that the call is heard by almost no one, and that this treatise is, in its entirety, nothing more than an attempt to sharpen the ear of whoever is fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to read it.
Here ends De Vacuo, in three books, composed by Avidius Du Vide at the Villa Vanitas, School of Voidism, for the instruction of such students as reason judges civilized enough to receive it, and for the record of doctrines that would otherwise perish, as all things perish, without at least the dignity of having first been demonstrated.
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Du Vide III: Voidism