Du Vide III: Voidism

Part 3 of the Du Vide Cycle

International Raumschach Federation  ·  2026

“Every thing, including even time itself, has always yielded to entropy, the mere handmaiden of the Void” — Avidius Du Vide, De Vacuo, II.

XI. The Villa

Avidius left Rome and headed to the countryside. He gathered his two cats, his space chess set, his scrolls, and other belongings. He rode south, away from the disorder he was beginning to appreciate. He rode toward his future as a scholarch. As civilization fell, he sought to retire to study and teach on his own terms.

From his savings from his days as an imperial advisor, he afforded to buy a small villa atop a hill by the sea. His cats loved the central courtyard, and Avidius, by returning to the countryside, felt like he was returning home. They settled right in, he with an eye toward transforming this villa into a school.

Without wasting any time, he considered terminology, and settled on Voidism (Vacuismus), as introduced by Du Vide. Likewise, a follower was a Voidist (Vacuista). He named this villa, this school, the House of Vanity (Villa Vanitas). On the gate he inscribed: THE HOUSE OF VANITY, School of Voidism, Here is potentiality (VILLA VANITAS, Schola Vacuistarum, Hic potentia est).

This villa had a defensible position, and that may be required later. For the moment, the Christians were distracted by the fall of Rome, by the fear of barbarians.

A few rooms in his villa had the potential to be classrooms. In the geometric center of each of these rooms he placed a game of space chess. Chairs and tables would later encircle it. However, these central games were only instructive, never to be played to completion, to spacemate, because rifts would be the ruination of the school. Games would be played to completion, but only in strategic locations, such as contained within nearby sea caves, participants and spectators guided by torches so no one would disappear accidentally into a former rift.

One of these rooms, he envisioned becoming a scriptorium, where his philosophical treatise would be copied incessantly by scribes, who would have access to natural sunlight from two windows. The lecterns would have to be arranged to maximize light, with the inner wall being filled with shelves and cabinets holding parchment, ink, and tools.

And central to the central courtyard would be a shrine to the Void. A smile washed over the face of Avidius as he daydreamed. Upon approach, one would read an inscription: “Here nothing contains everything” (Hic nihil omnia continet). The shrine of black slate should be circular and sunken. Worshippers should traverse a few shallow steps downward. And it would contain a shallow pool of water, surrounded by five columns without a roof.

From the beginning, Avidius walked daily in his courtyard, like a true Peripatetic, espousing philosophy to his following felines. Just as they had normally followed him from room to room, and they continued to do so, they also followed him around his courtyard. During one circular journey, he declared that the interior of the Villa Vanitas will be decorated exactly as would a Roman, not a barbarian. The empire of Rome was orderly, and there were times at least when it sought expansion for the good of humanity by bringing the barbarians to order and reason, just ask Marcus Aurelius, Avidius quipped to himself. Abruptly his feet were stopped by the revelation that entropy overpowered order with disorder, its end. Jupiter and Pluto looked tired, and laid down.

XII. Potential

Before Avidius could open a school to the public, before he could teach Voidism, he had to formalize its doctrines. He approached it as would any Peripatetic. First he developed a definition of the Void, and compared it to the Categories.

After long deliberations, he found the Void to be pure potentiality, which conflicted strongly with the Aristotelian notion of potential — which required actuality. He defined the Void as the Whole or the All, a genus with no differentia. There was nothing else from which it could be differentiated.

He analyzed its qualities, listing essences against accidents. Typically, essential qualities function as differentiae, but in this case which lack a differentia, essential qualities are propria. He began with Du Vide’s entropy. Was it possible to conceive of the Void without entropy? No. If entropy were unnecessary, if it did not apply to every body, every bundle of relations, there would be bodies that do not rot. Thus, entropy is part of the essence of the Void, as a proprium.

That winter, he burned many candles while considering many such qualities. He regarded self-sufficiency, self-causation, and much more. But it was pure potentiality that most caught his attention, and to which he kept returning. If all is merely relational, things seem to actualize, but there is no actuality. Potentiality and actuality differ considerably here from Peripatetic literature. Consider potentiality to be like a predicate, something that could cohere to a subject, but does not need to. For example, “to walk” is an infinitive verb that may cohere, such as when “Avidius walks,” but when no one in the cosmos walks, if that moment ever existed, the infinitive “to walk”; remains everywhere in potential. And so an infinitive verb is an example of a predicate that does not cohere necessarily.

Perhaps all bodies — nouns — reduce to infinitives, to infinity. Is the Void self-caused? Is this not like asking: Is the Void a cause to the Void of some infinitive predicate? Does this not reduce to: The Void contains all infinitives, all potentiality. And actuality, then, is nothing more than bundles of potentiality, potentialities which seems to cohere, but do not. The only thing bundles of potentiality actually do is rot.

So, entropy is the expression of the supreme force of the Void, which acts only upon bundles of groundless relations.

Without delay, Avidius began to compose On the Void (De Vacuo), his masterpiece. In so doing, he crossed a philosophial threshold; he can no longer be Peripatetic. Avidius forged new ground. This treatise is organized into three scrolls, in an inversion of the Peripatetic structure:

Book I, in addition to definitions and essences, also included the Chiasm, which was not understood merely as a place or a perspective, but as the ontological structure of the Void itself. Here, he introduced the vanity of all things, that the emptinesses experienced as bodies were merely bundles of rotten relations.

In an aside, Avidius explained that part of the journey of every student attending the Villa Vanitas will be, when the student becomes deemed ready, to journey through a rift to the Chiasm as a rite of passage. But, he warned sternly of the dangers involved, that the Chiasm is not a realm for the living, but is the midpoint between the Void and our cosmos of referents. He warned that in the Chiasm, duration causes dissolution. Only the truly successful student would return from the rift. Unproven students cannot be allowed to be spacemated, for their own safety.

Book II concerned the physics of decay, the handmaiden’s work, the consumption of everything. Nature has always consisted of five dimensions, in this order: Void, time, and body which has been constituted by length, width, and depth. The Void is the original and divine dimension. It created time and the bodily dimensions to have something to eat. And along with the creation of these dimensions, entropy was required by its appetite. Thus, entropy is an essential rather than accidental handmaiden, as implied by the metaphor. Although the Void is primordial, the force of entropy governs the secondary dimensions.

Entropy was the name given to the dominant force of the cosmos. Even time yielded to entropy, according to its theory. In contrast, Aristotle had described forces, but they were interpreted here as inferior and subordinate, such as that motion required a constant force to maintain it, because objects naturally came to rest unless pushed.

Every body in the cosmos has always decayed toward the same actualized end, the perfection of which is complete dissolution. The natural state of everything is to be in decay. Entropy is the universal force of decay that causes a return to pure potentiality, the divine and superior state. Entropy has always fed the Void, appeasing its appetite.

The elements of air, earth, water, and fire became regarded very differently from Aristotle. For Avidius, air is the formless non-substance and represents the Chiasm, earth is actualized and formed substance that is slowly decaying and on a journey back to water, fire is the element associated with change and consumption and represents entropy, water is formless substance and represents pure potentiality. Hence, the elements pertain to the secondary dimensions. This completed Voidist physics.

Book III contained the practice and thus the ethics of Voidism. All of this was derived from potentiality, the virtue for which a Voidist cultivates judgment for when a given moment demands remaining unforeclosed versus actualized. Just as there is a right time to speak and a right time to be quiet, there is a time to keep options open and a time to reduce them. This practice was influenced by the Nicomachean Ethics. A Voidist is on guard against excess or deficiency, vices that surround the one virtue. An excess of the virtue of potentiality often regarded endless deferral, the refusal to act or commit, often caused by the desire to keep options open as long as possible; excess became a vice of cowardice disguised as wisdom. A deficiency of this virtue often regarded impatience causing premature closure or early commitment; it is the vice of precipitant form. In general, Voidists were on guard against deficiency. The practice of Voidism, he wrote, became an ethics of readiness to meet a moment, not about what can be proven. Avidius has arrived at doctrine without syllogism.

To cultivate such judgment, Avidius instructed students to practice identifying potential and actualization of selected moments. Develop this as a skill. Next, introspect and observe patterns, and correct by bending judgment in the contradictory direction a little too far, just as one pushes too hard on warped wood in the opposite direction so that it will settle straight. For example, if Avidius noticed that he tended toward deficiency of this virtue in the context of friendship, then over-correct and make decisions that tend toward excess while aiming eventually at the mean, the virtue itself.

The authorities knock. If the authorities knock on your door, demanding to know the location of your friend, Avidius wrote, a Voidist would regard that demand in the context of what the demanded act did to potentiality. If the Voidist knew the location and blurted it out, that would be the deficiency of virtue, the premature assistance of actuality and loss of potentiality. A Voidist would refuse to be made the instrument of the closure of potentiality for the hunger of someone else. The Voidist would lie, which also actualizes, but actualizes less.

The magistrate and the unproven accusation. Someone stands accused, evidence incomplete. To condemn on suspicion alone is to actualize a guilt that has not yet been demonstrated — the deficient vice again, premature closure serving impatience rather than judgment. But to refuse verdicts forever, out of an excessive devotion to keeping the question open, is the opposite failure: a magistrate’s whole office is to eventually close what the law requires closed.

The merchant and the unsigned contract. Two parties have reached a fair, considered agreement; only the signature remains. A Voidist merchant who delights so much in the unclosed moment that he keeps reopening terms already settled, for no reason but love of potential, is not practicing virtue — he is indulging a vice that happens to look like patience.

Voidist music. Voidist music was mode-less music, because one could find beauty in expression outside of the modes by systematically avoiding anything that established a musical mode. Let the example be of melody. The Du-Vidéan Method:

1. From any note, one may move more than a [half] step in either direction, in any interval but a perfect fifth.
2. One may not proceed continuously in the same direction more than thrice.
3. After a leap, motion in the contrary direction usually follows, and when it does, it must be by a single [whole] step only.

Avidius cautioned that a Voidist may develop either a fear of actualization or a contempt for the actualized. Examples of such contempt include a happy couple may be perceived as deluded settlers, and a successful author as a sellout. But, bear in mind, he advised, each actualization contains the seed of its own dissolution. Moreover, actualization is not a prison if reversible. The happy couple can break up, the successful author can fail in many ways. Pure potential, conversely, is not a state to be preserved but a gift to be spent. Oftentimes, the virtue is a virtue of reversible commitment — learning that one can choose, act, love, and create without thereby becoming trapped. Actualization is more of a wave that returns to the sea than a dungeon without a key.

In a footnote, Avidius explained that to Aristotle, actualization was the perfection — the completion — of its telos, its end. But every body has the same ultimate end: dissolution. In Voidism, actualization is a fall from grace, and the Void is not privation but plenitude, not empty but uncommitted.

The social consequences of Voidism are more acute. The love of someone is an actualization, and a categorical error. To love someone exclusively is to forsake all others of that same love. The Voidist finds balance, virtue, with more of a universal detachment. After all, beauty is neither in the beholder nor the beheld, but only in the in-between, and only beauty is the proper object of love. For this reason, the love of someone, of any body in the cosmos, has always been a false attribution of beauty. The correct attribution of beauty has always been only to the emptiness of a relation.

Avidius described his love of his two cats: Jupiter and Pluto. This philosopher could not rationally love them as bodies, he wrote, but instead he loved the relations between him and his cats. He found beauty in Jupiter needing to sit in his lap whenever he sat down, not in Jupiter the object, just as he found beauty in Pluto fearing strangers and finding complete comfort in him. There is no such thing as an object, absent relations; do not be deceived by such evident emptinesses. The relations are everything.

Out of concern for the safety of the reader, the last aspect of practice concerned space chess and spacemate, and the resulting rift. Space chess was the original game of chess, was 5×5×5, and its ruptural power was theorized to derive from its dimensions in relation to the five dimensions of nature. Spacemate was the conclusion of the game, which causes a rift. All of this was compared to 8×8 chess, termed flat chess, which was theorized to remove the primordial dimension and repeat the secondary dimensions, resulting in a secondary game. This section was revised and revised again, while he nurtured a fear of barbarians, because the opening and the location of any rift must be hidden from the barbarians.

XIII. Against the Barbarians

One sunless day, Avidius strode around his cold courtyard, Jupiter and Pluto no longer on his heels. He recalled his proclamation that barbarians will never know science, and that it could only be hoped, at best, they become accidentally close to it. And in this new world without Rome, the Christians are certainly barbarians. He announced to the followers of heels, “I foretell the Christians will be the successful barbarians. Some of them play with logic, but only when it agrees with their doctrines. At best, they can only become accidentally close to reason.”

“When a person can only become accidentally close to something, that thing has to be compromised, corrupted”, he reasoned aloud. Deduction, for example, will either be applied only selectively, such as the Christians have demonstrated, or it will be replaced with its nemesis, induction. Time will tell. Since every induction is false by definition, induction is the worse result compared to partial deduction. He turned to Pluto — the black, feline fountain of energy — and chided, “I expect the barbarians will gradually become inductivists.”

Several loops around the property were made in unphilosophical silence. Avidius knew that he must posture defensively. Pluto, he recalled while also acknowledging his absence, knew well the ways of the xenophobe, and to avoid the barbarians is, in this case, one of the best methods of opposition. Least effective of all would be rigorous literature, for that would require rigorous readers.

Like an emotion, Avidius felt a syllogism coming on:

The downpouring rain made that day unsuitable for a walk about his courtyard, so he performed his Du-Vidéan Method on his cithara, with his cats lying idly nearby, patches of orange and black in his periphery. He meditated on avoiding barbarians while he eluded musical modes. The Du-Vidéan Method produces melodies that are always pleasant. The mood is ambient, dreamy, and transcendental. The experience is contemplative and meditative, lulling and trancelike, if not outright otherworldly. This escapist adventure is deliberately labyrinthine, never seeming to arrive anywhere. His improvisation was satisfying, but his predicament was not. He finished with a descending perfect fifth and the declaration of a mode, having delayed its actualization long enough.

What a horror, he set down his cithara and recounted to himself, that in this new and barbaric world without Rome, the knowledge of the Whole must be forbidden. Voidism, then, was knowledge suitable only to the civilized, only to one who embraced reason. To everyone else, Voidism was forbidden knowledge, decreed Avidius. Reasoned inquiry cannot be allowed, not into the doctrines of the Void. To avoid the barbarians is seemingly to avoid all of humanity. Indeed, this is a daunting task. The school of Voidism must moreso be a fortress. Only the civilized may enter.

XIV. Desolation

Avidius fortified his school. De Vacuo was moved underground. On rare and then rarer occasions, someone approached the new school and sought entry. Avidius used syllogisms to test the reason, the potential civility, of each one. Due to this test, this logical fortification, no one ever entered. Everyone was a barbarian at his gate. Whenever Avidius went to town, seeking supplies, he avoided the barbarians as best he could. He dressed like a beggar and carried a walking staff. What had become of this former Peripatetic?

When Pluto died, it broke more than Avidius’s heart, it broke his crippled but remaining spirit. Together, he and Jupiter perdured, until one bleak day Jupiter fell. These were the last souls known to Avidius, the ailurophile, and he valued them infinitely more than he valued any barbarian. The philosopher was more than devastated, he was desolated. As a Voidist, he was keenly aware that all of their potentialities, the ones of which he was so very fond, have been actualized. And the handmaiden had delivered, as always.

Nowhere left to turn, and rather than awakening alone the next morning, Avidius trudged into a classroom to play space chess against himself. He was pulled toward it, his body complied as if it were answering a Call, as though he was summoned by the Void itself. There was no point in playing out an entire game, just as everything for him had already played out. His opening was long forgotten. Almost every principle of his principled middlegame had been overthrown. The days of the glory of being the methodical machine were behind him. There would be no more emperors to require him. His potential had actualized. A tear dripped while he grabbed three pieces, almost with an abandoned violence, and crafted his own endgame. His alabaster king was tucked away in Aa1. The protected amethyst king belonged at Cc3, and his queen at Cc2. He looked back at the joy that was Jupiter, admiring him one last time, then Avidius moved that merciless queen triagonally to Bb2. The silent black asp ushered him back into the relational abyss of near-nothingness. He looked and he looked around him, but he failed to find any orange relations. Forlorn as a syllogism stripped of its middle term, the sensation of dissolution returned to him, but Du Vide never did.

Long after the death of Avidius, Christian torches began and ended the ultimate decay of the School of Voidism. To no surprise, Avidius Du Vide had been charged with impiety. And the rifts have been buried like the truth.

* * *

Finis
Appendix: On the Void

Dedicated to Pluto