Refusal 2

In thinking of how to describe the experience, and looking at the earlier post, it struck me that it sounds, in the earlier writing and in the way I've explained it to people close to me verbally, like a quiet sort of thing. It sounds reminiscent of Heidegger's description of the call of the conscience, where a silent call gives no specifics to understand, but one immediately associates the word 'guilty'.

In some ways there are parallels, but the negativity of the guilty in the call of conscience is a past negativity. One is called forward 'out of guilt' and back to oneself. In that sense this experience was almost opposite, in that there was no feeling of judgement or even interest in the 'me up until then'. It was a judgement on what I might become, not what I had become.

As an experience itself, though, it couldn't have been more different. It wasn't quiet, it was louder than anything else I've ever experienced, louder than bombs, louder even than Iannis Xenakis in quad sound. It was loud visually, sensually, my sense of smell, taste, touch all overwhelmed. Rather than it slip away when I tried to grasp it it more overwhelmed me and made my grasp irrelevant. Most overwhelmed was thought itself - the intensitiy of the experience overwhelmed the muddle of memories words and experiences normally going through my head, obliterating them into quietude so that the immense volume of the experience itself was for the duration all that I 'knew'.

Nothing in the experience 'meant' anything in the usual sense. Nothing was implied, nothing was given. If experiencing "the nothing" was in every way more intense than any other possible experience that wouild be my best description. Whatever it has meant to me then and since there is no way to really communicate any meaning, even were I to discern something that could be communicated conceptually it would remain irrelevant to anyone else.