When The Lightning Flashed

head like an orange

Laurie Anderson: Big Science

Today, suddenly,
I reached an absurd
but unerring conclusion.
In a moment of enlightenment,
I realized that I'm nobody,
absolutely nobody.
When the lightning flashed,
I saw that what
I had thought to be a city
was in fact a deserted plain
and, in the same sinister light
that revealed me to myself,
there seemed to be
no sky above it.
I was robbed
of any possibility
of having existed
before the world.
If I was ever reincarnated,
I must have done so
without myself,
without a self to reincarnate.
I am the outskirts of some nonexistent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.

I'm always thinking,
always feeling,
but my thoughts
lack all reason,
my emotions
all feeling.
I'm falling
through a trapdoor,
through infinite,
infinitous space,
in a directionless,
empty fall.
My soul is
a black maelstrom,
a great madness
spinning about a vacuum,
the swirling of
a vast ocean
around a hole
in the void,
and in the waters,
more like whirlwinds than waters,
float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world:
houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices,
all caught up in a bottomless whirlpool.

And I, I myself, am the center that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it. I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a center that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the center of everything surrounded by the great nothing.
And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there's the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything.
If only I could think! If only I could feel!

--Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

Laurie Anderson: Freefall