La Razón

La Razón De Ser of Speculative Fiction

∞ I have a void inside my soul. For lack of a better term, I call this void dark energy. What physicists mean and what I mean by dark energy may be two different constructs (or three or four, since dark energy isn’t a settled matter). Mine is a philosophy that makes sense of my place in an incomprehensible universe, and theirs is an argument that must be fine-tuned, like music, to fit a mathematical model. For them, either the numbers fit, or they don’t. For my part, I wonder what the purpose is of knowing the numbers, if I can’t perceive the significance of them.

Dark energy is bound inextricably to the space I think of as void. And, for that matter, dark energy is what fills my soul, for which there is no discernible numerical value. Instead, the void is a negating series of contradictions: nothingness and matter; darkness and energy; chaos and order; force and inertia. It fills me with dread, until my teeth are set on edge, and I wander from dark room to empty room, and I don’t know where to go or what to do.

To quell the panic, I engage with the world around me. I drink wine, wander the desert, study a multitude of subjects. I study the Enlightenment and read Gothic literature. I watch swallows and learn to play the accordion. I sing songs in Spanish. My interests are diverse and diverting, but they’re activities of the mind, used to enervate or energize, and they’re useless to forget the void because a feeling that deep can’t be forgotten, only quashed.

My husband and I discussed the night sky the other night, along with the dark energy that waits between the visible stars. Where we live in New Mexico, the night sky is incredible, rarely occluded. Its inevitable presence overhangs our nights—a natural subject for conversation. For him, it’s an integral part of who he is, or, to be more exact, he views himself as an integral part of the whole. By comparison, I tremble. I shake with dread every time I study the constellations because I know I can never be at peace with the vacuous space that shakes with energy, or one with the kinetic forces, the nuclear fission of the stars. Due to my enlightenment studies, I know to call this terror sublimity. I have a name for it, but that doesn’t change the overwhelming sensation that the universe, with all its energy, is going to consume me. Knowing the name that Edmund Burke gave to such indescribable terror is little better than knowing the numbers.

Here I am, pounding away at my keyboard, desperate to explain why I write at all, let alone this biography. I write because it’s the only way I know to bridge the void. Writing is the only safe passage to the other side of an ever-faster-expanding cosmos. Outside it, God in his understanding, his omniscience, waits for me, and somehow, because of him, I’m not consumed. The universe doesn’t annihilate me.

I write to cross the void. I write speculative fiction to understand the void. That’s my razón de ser, and I wouldn’t presume to conclude with anything else. ∞