The cosmos is not only within us — it is us. The self-awareness we possess is like two mirrors facing each other, one the force and the other its reflection, an infinite tunnel of self-reference of which the very head that is trying to see down it gets in the way. Baffling and absurd, we find ourselves, to quote Saul Williams, “participants in a ritual older than our collective memory,” a seamless stream of energy attempting, in an eddying moment of self-realization, to find out what the flying hell is going on.

“Why?” is a question that grasps for intent, for a fundamental reason. It’s impossible to answer because there will always be another “why?” until we find ourselves staring the void in its faceless face, its answerlessness, its stoic silence, the only answer.

Though we also find ourselves attempting to reconcile our compulsion for ultimate meaning with a realization that such a thing would be a knowledge that would require a frame of reference above and beyond that which we are capable of having by being something fundamentally embedded within it all to begin with. We wouldn’t recognize the answer, and if we did, we probably wouldn’t like it. We’d wonder why it wasn’t something else, dissatisfied with the manifestation. So we gradually become okay with the point being precisely the pointlessness.

After all, doesn’t silence define the sound? The universe is at play for play’s sake. In its trial and error, sometimes it gets hurt, but out of these infinite dice rolls of chaos, potential, and probability, magical eruptions of mirthful, ineffable order do manifest.

The void fills itself because it has to. It was never a void. In order for it to have ever been a void, there would have needed to be an infinitude to define it as such. In being defined by what it’s not, each is the other, and the endless inevitability of that tension, linking nothingness to the pure implication of the infinite possibility it fundamentally represents.