The pilgrim thinks of a city without cattle. She goes further and thinks of nothingness in its place. She thinks of the void. The void thinks of her.
It remembers, oh so long ago, when she stared at it with her deep, chocolate eyes. So, so long ago. A tear would form in the void's eye if it weren't so devoid of shape and form. The void begins to feel that it is both literally and figuratively empty inside.
It feels a lot like an Anglo-French/Old French void in the 13th century: "unoccupied, vacant." The void's heart, were it to have a heart, is equally vacant. This emptiness brings to the void's mind some memories of the past. Those lonely old days when the void used to drink a lot of wine and was called vocivus. (The void's girlfriends called her vociva and his neuter friends called it vocivum. The void generally went by its root,vociv-, with good friends.) Back then, the void was "empty; void." But why wouldn't it be? After all the void used to hang out a lot with that vacuum kid, back when they called 'em vacuus/a/um. That bastard was the worst wino of them all. Vacuus/a/um was a whirling ball of nothingness. And vacuus/a/um always left an "empty, vacant, unoccupied; devoid of, free of" streak wherever it swept by. Those were long dark days indeed. And they lasted well into the Dark Ages.
Meanwhile, the pilgrim is sucked into her thoughts of the void. She wonders about the void as a space free of place. Or an emptiness of place and space. Which came first? Place or Space?
She muses. Space must be the lovable child of place (in a strange chicken and egg sort of way). She cannot conceive of space without first understanding what a place is. After all, a space is just a theoretical existence of a place before it becomes a place, right? So, wait. Maybe that makes place the child of space. ...sigh. Her brain and body burn with inward curiosity. She is sucked deeper into the void.
Jesus Christ! The void inwardly cries vacuously. It hurts so much to feel the pilgrim thinking of its nothingness, but to not touch her (no matter how far she is sucked into her thoughts of its vast emptiness).
The void is "lacking or wanting" (something), just like it felt at the beginning of the 15th century. It never really made sense why it felt that way. The void's legal career was really at its height in the 15th century. The void first got a reputation as a force to reckon with a couple centuries earlier. As a verb c.1300 the void would go gallivanting around to "clear" (some place, of something). And when it stepped into law it was quickly able "to deprive (something) of legal validity." By the mid-15th century the void already meant "legally invalid" in most courts throughout the English speaking world. Still, that whole time, while its legal career was skyrocketing, the void still felt "lacking or wanting" (something).
As the void remembers, the pilgrim swirls vacantly in the midst of her vacuous thoughts of space and place. The pilgrim thinks of those days back in the church. As she thinks she feels a strange sensation that someone is next to her. She speaks aloud to the stranger. "Who are you?"
A voice rings out from the void. It has a thick French accent. "I am a sew-zee-ologist, intelleczual, and philawsopher. Many conzider me a Neo Marxzist. I was zinking of la présence et l'absence and was zucked into zee void." The stranger's form slowly emerges in the pilgrim's thoughts. He wears a turtle neck and his hair is white.
"Tell me, petit soeur, of your church," He says as though clairvoyant, "I care."
The pilgrim slowly begins, "the church created a sense of place and space. It was a place that could be divided into three spaces: mental, physical, and social. The church brought those separate fields into one theoretical unity, though there is always tension between mental and social space. Visually, the verdant imagery in the church's apse mosaic and the quincuncial form in the Pre-Cosmatesque floor evoke a mental space, an imagined form of paradise."
"Ah, indeed, but let me rey-mind zjou of zee lived or zocial espace," the old French man interjects, "How doze zee zocial espace define zee church az a place?"
"Time based rituals shape the church's meaning. I shaped the church's meaning," the pilgrim states with discovery, "I was at the Eve of the Assumption following the spiral floor design. I was inclined to admire the apse mosaic, to think of that imagined mental space. And I saw paradise. It was big, lumpy, and blue. It sparkled like a rainbow. It swam like a whale." The pilgrim is suddenly jolted to life. The whale king! She has left him in the Floating Sun Set City He is alone and surrounded by bovinic hordes. Thoughts of the void had sucked her in. She must regain control of her earthly form.
The void resists. It wants to be her mental space, to be her paradise. It does not want her to leave. The void has wanted her since those Dark Age days in the pilgrim's church. The void loves going to church, filling its place with unearthly nothingness. The priests on porphyry slabs are always kind enough to spread threat of the void all over the ears of sinners. The void loved spreading over the pilgrim's ears. It could sense the sin, the wicked freedom, in her. It wished that instead of seeing paradise, she would see the void. But she saw neither. She gave into that damn beast, that damn whale.
The pilgrim calls back to the void, "you can't fight the tide that binds. I am only free with the whale king. But truth is he is only free with me. Release me from your grasps, foul void. Move on."
The void releases. And it feels true emptiness. It tries to occupy its time with verb usage and legal work, but nothing quite makes up for her absence. By 1727, the absence grows so great that the void literally becomes a space, an "empty space, vacuum." In its timelessness, the void knows it has always been an empty space. The void decides to call its friend vacuum up. They get destitutely drunk on ancient wine. Deep inside the void a French sociologist, philosopher, and intellectual is drowned.
The pilgrim thinks of the whale king and the floating sunset city. She flows past miles of nothing. At the end of the nothingness she sees a light. Her salvation emerges in sight, like a gigantic blue turd with fins and a blow-hole. The whale king makes a sonic-sound of relief when he sees her.
Where did you go? thinks the whale king. Without her he felt almost non-existent. She hears his thoughts.
"Nowhere, now here," responds the pilgrim cryptically.
They stare at one another with deep, formless love. Distantly they can hear cows mooing "Rains down in Africa." The pilgrim buries herself deeply in whale king's mane. Their tears of joy salt the city sidewalk.
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