It's one of those quick spurts of graffiti that gets almost idly sprayed on public utilities, you know them, you've seen them; the small irritating acts of vandalism, like a fruit fly gently droning around, that are annoying but ultimately not worth the effort of the cleanup.
It translates as 'Fill the Void' and for the longest time I just took it as a scathing indictment of television and assorted fiction, of all the couch potatoes sprawled in fattening comfort on sofas, after a hard day at work, stuffing themselves full to the gullet with utter time-filling nonsense of others' making, too weary to think and content to just lap it up, the brainless zombies of the information age.
But, somewhere along the line it's taken on a different meaning. The brainless cavity of the head has lost its central focus and what remains instead is the television and the words.
Where once they were critique, now they've become guideline.
They've taken on the hue of advice and they come as an offer of help.
Because it knows that everyone has that dark void; the terrifying thing that makes us reach out, in an effort to fill it, to satisfy the hunger, to blot out the ache that tells us we're incomplete. The social animal of man, most content to extract the much needed meaning and satisfaction from its daily tanglings with those most like himself, when left alone becomes an ugly, desperate thing and gorges himself on whatever has the ability to occupy him and make his crippling loneliness fade in the pound of its sensory input.
He takes it and goes forward because he finds that with the distraction the hours begin to fade and that soon the intricate dance of spheres will get to continue. Because he's an object and they are objects and all are caught in the mutual pull. They dance a dance of gratifying and satisfying in mutual self-affirming existence, those spheres that orbit because they resemble himself most of all, enabling and comforting.
Sometimes they move in near, sometimes they remain far.
Sometimes those divine, celestial bodies grind close with delirious need, and the gravitational havoc they play on eachother eclipses the rest of the dark, cold void.
And sometimes they hurtle out of eachother's influence and vanish from sight, leaving only that same void to stare at, now all the more darker. But there are always more bodies, and the void can always be filled again.
Some of us don't dance, we are unable to or we don't want to.
So instead we turn to other things: Television, books, comics, art, food, religion, whatever. It becomes the focus and we fill our lives to the brim with the meaning we endow them with.
I look above at the planets at play with fleeting envy and eternal hate and I grimly smile.
One way or another, sooner or later, we all end up desperately filling the void.
As I said, it's started to look like advice.
But then of course, if you look at what's drawn on the side...
Definitely a critique.
And here, from the pages of Hack/Slash, submitted without comment, because it isn't relevant at all in any conceivable way whatsoever:
No comments:
Post a Comment