nothing at all

I don't think we realized how much of our world had come to be made of nothing at all.

Well, maybe not nothing, but nothing you could touch, or taste, or smell, or get the feel of, only what could be seen and sometimes heard — and most of the time not even either of those, most of it was only something you remembered, or talked about, or wrote about, just an idea in your head, something you or somebody else gave a name, and then the name got passed around, built up and built out with more talk, and then the talk got a name, and that got passed around and built up and built out, and so on.

It was all talk, and it was nothing but talk, but somehow the vehicles and devices we used to conduct all this talk profused and multiplied — they became the only things you could get the feel of — yet it still wasn't them, but the *talking* you used them for, that you got the feel of, and that's just a figure of speech, something you say, the name you give something that happened after you did something with something long enough — but the something you did was talk, nothing else, nothing but talk — a phrase that now meant something different from what it used to mean, something more, something else... — well, to talk about, to put a name on and then talk about that.

This must have started long ago, no one really knows when — I mean, there were arguments about that, about when this all started; everyone had a different idea about what was wrong, or even if anything really was wrong, anything anyone could actually do something about, to stop it, I mean, if it was something that had to be stopped — or was it just the way things worked, what happened when things went on like this, things changing, as they always did, into something nobody could have imagined or foreseen? But if anybody did foresee it they didn't say anything, or else they said it in a way nobody could understand, or what they said didn't sound like anything that could really happen — just some 'expert' saying something on some occasion where somebody was supposed to say something but nobody really expected such a thing to happen.

And, when that hit us, we stayed hit.