Entropy

Silence is crushing. Not the silence itself but the space that the silence fills, that used to be occupied by something else. My dad calls it entropy, the inevitable balance of energy within a system; one thing taking the place of another but always the space stays the same. But the Hindus had this down long before Rudolf Clausius blew away the scientific universe with his discovery. They called it 'karma.' It's funny how simplicity works sometimes.

As I sit here writing the silence disappears too, for the moment. Things come in, take the place of something else; simple. The noise in the silence is what's frightening. Before, just vacuous fluff. It reminds me of the Pink Panther insulation commercials I see on the local cable channels. Those giant rolls of pink cotton-candy that save you hundreds of dollars in energy costs. And it's always nice to know you can go down to the corner and buy yourself a 40 of that pink fluff, to insulate you for the night. But when it's gone, there's nothing to insulate you from the cold you wanted to keep out in the first place; the wind howls a lot closer. Even whispers in an empty hallway echo louder than it feels they should.

Silence is ugly. It's worse than nothing. Fluff is nothing, that's purgatory, that I can deal with. But when so much is displaced at one time and you have to replace it all, there's just not enough beauty in this world. Barry Hannah said it's all about not averting your eyes - art is staring to the point of rudeness. But when the whole thing is so ugly, when you stare long enough to realize this, it's no wonder the world loves a freak-show. It's us but it's not us. We can forgo the silence and still consume ourselves with that pink, cotton-candy mush.

In Genesis, Abraham was promised that the twin cities (one being anal intercourse's namesake) would be spared if ten righteous men could be found in them. But is that enough? If we apply this allegory to ourselves, is there enough beauty in ourselves to sustain such a challenge? Or is it all just fluff? And how much of that wonderful ambrosia is enough to drown out Iago's repulsive hissing in his giant, silent ballroom? Ask Hemingway, or Hunter Thompson. What would they say?