Vox Nihili
Voice of Nothing
As a curling spiral I’ll write these words without ever arriving. ‘Vox Nihili’ suits this project well as a first utterance. The phrase may refer to the act of making baseless philosophical claims, something which I intend to take upon myself. Not out of disdain for truth, but because I am looking for possibilities rather than certainties.
This blog is my Hamadi Jar – a container in the digital desert that may accumulate a collection obscure musings about religion, cosmogenesis, anthropology of the modern mind, etc. I have been longing for a space of my own to think and write more fragmentarily. It is something I do for my own sake, such that the relentless flux of ideas may not just slip through me but have a place to dwell. Of course I will be happy to pass on something of value, and i do gain a certain amount of excitement from making it public. But i am teaching myself to align my academic discipline and with playful passion, and this is my sandbox for doing so.
In some sense I have an inherent skepticism of words, but I love how they may compose mappings of the virtual space of existence – like trails and markers of things that exceed our momentary experience, moving between scales, times and places. There is a great danger in living too much in this virtual dissociation of the present body, and this I why I keep reminding myself not to confuse to map with the living landscape.
I have a particular interest in messy region between modern forms of religiosity and post-humanism. On the top of my mind, this field raises questions such as how religious elements may fluctuate and transform, how religious institutions may enrich as well as suppress spiritual resonance, and how we relate the overwhelming amount of possible truths into an integrated state of being. My words can only be a glance through the looking glass of something more vast and strange. I expect my texts to become like small islands of temporary refuge that nonetheless rest upon an ocean of multiplicity, complexity and unpredictable transfigurations. At the core of this endeavor remains a mystery, which I do not believe is something that can ever be discovered or fully comprehended, but I will nonetheless attempt to circle around this unknowable center. What emerges is perhaps a partial contour or negative image, a godshaped hole1.
Vox Nihili may also be translated as ‘voice from nothing’. I like to think of this phrase, as the image of ‘speaking something into existence’. Philosophy may be an act of creation rather than a search for immutable truth. I consider language to be ordained with magical power, like all acts of creation. While I value truthiness and righthanded academic rigor, but I want to give myself a pathway for moving differently in this terrain. I have an impulse for slinking and writing with my left hand too. If the academic approach resembles the slow but steady movement of a hedgehog, grounded and armed to the teeth with scholarly references, I’d see myself as a hedgehog that acts like a mole, diggin down into the regions below, guided by a starshaped-nose. Yet i am honestly prone to refraining going too deep into the layers of occult realities, maybe out of fear that I would forget which direction leads back to the surface of common reality. So you would see this shapeshifting hedgehog-mole, climbing up and down – through dark passages and coming back to the surface at regular intervals – without knowing where to or why. But i like the motion of thought, because it is music.
Notes:
1. I found the phrase ‘god-shaped hole’ in the great article by Jonathan Koestlé-Cate “Secular Pegs and God-Shaped Holes: The Uneasy Alliance of the Religious, the Spiritual and the Secular in Recent Art for the Church” (2015)
