Le Vide

Lyrics

A diagnosis, then.
For the space between the notes.
The pathology of the pause.

Aristotle had a word for it, back in 330 B.C.
A tidy, philosophical decree.
Natura abhorret vacuum.
Nature, he said, abhors the empty room.
Then Evangelista Torricelli, with his mercury and glass,
showed the old Greek that a vacuum could, in fact, come to pass.
But the ghost of the idea never left the brain.
The physical law fell, but the mental ache remains.

Horror vacui.
The terror of the blank.
The mind, a frantic artist, filling in the rank
and file of silence with chatter, with static, with dread.
Anything is better than the voice of the unsaid.
Anything is better than the empty.

You see it in the Baroque, the gilded, screaming gold.
A story on every surface, terrified of growing old
and quiet. A symptom carved in stone and paint.
Ernst Gombrich gave the fever dream a name, a formal complaint.
From the prayer rugs of Isfahan to the margins of a monk's mad scroll,
the desperate need to ornament, to take complete control
of every single inch of emptiness. A filigree of fear.

Horror vacui.
The terror of the blank.
The mind, a frantic artist, filling in the rank
and file of silence with chatter, with static, with dread.
Anything is better than the voice of the unsaid.
Anything is better than the empty.

And here you are. In a silent room, at 3 AM.
The engine is the Default Mode. The problem is the same.
It rushes in to furnish the quiet.
With a list of groceries. An unpaid bill. A half-remembered riot
of a conversation from nineteen-ninety-three.
The cosmic dread of the void, wallpapered with inanity.
Such a grand terror... for such a small, cluttered stage.

The vacuum is a fiction.
The observer is the noise.
The silence is contaminated by the observer's choice
to listen.
to fill.
to...