Steve Roach
The Magnificent Void

“Nothing is more real than nothingness.”
Samuel Beckett

Few artists have truly been able to delve into the depths of the human condition. Delving without any fear, without any preconceived hesitation; simply diving in and bringing back what has been seen (or believed to have been seen), even if it's uncomfortable, even if it's desperate, even if it's unbearable.

Beckett is among the first who come to mind.

Texts that reach directly to the gut, slurred monologues attempting to communicate the incommunicable, jammed and bizarre actions trying to reach the unreachable. Putting on shoes, taking off shoes; putting on glasses, taking off glasses; brushing teeth, rinsing the mouth. And then, the endless sequence of horrid daily verbs: working, cleaning, paying, buying, organizing…

Beckett is a dangerous artist; he was never satisfied and knew how to sink into the meanders of the existential swamp. What he brings back to the surface is terrifying: not only do we come from nothing and will end in nothing, but life itself is nothing. Not ephemeral, not tiny, simply nothing; a big zero weighs down our steps even before our birth and permeates with its odor every single word we utter, every minimal movement we dare.

Roach has never been satisfied either; after the apparent oxymoron of a concept album about silence, after a grand plunge into primitive magical rituals, here comes “The Magnificent Void”. The nothingness.

Streaks of smoke, black columns exhaled in the distance from a steamboat, hiding portions of the sky; dense, dark, uneasy bundles; climbing to superhuman heights and brushing against the sublime angst of “Zeit”.

Drones filled with promises that will never be fulfilled, hopes drowning in oily waters; echoes of primitive fears sleep in the undergrowth of consciousness, while never-born butterflies are buried in ash chrysalises.

At times, shapeless shadows dance on the walls of the past; ataraxia is scratched; the stone begins to roll, the monk begins to doubt, and the Temple is crowned with electromagnetic storms laden with omens.

And the nothingness wraps me, submerges me, cradles me; and I feel I must start again precisely from it, from nothing.

Let us embrace the nothingness that is inside us, or rather the nothingness that we are; let us rise by stepping on the only step that really exists, explore the impossible, discover what lies at the end of the rainbow.

Beckett was right! The nothingness is the least common multiple of all our emotions, the true particle of god, the real loom on which every strand of DNA is grafted.

And now, sprawled on the couch, I feel the nothingness wedging a knee on my chest and, by blocking me, I see it slowly bend over my face. It does nothing, says nothing, just looks me in the eyes; it stares with determination, I stare back and finally see. My gaze is its gaze, its gaze is mine, mine and that of all of us.