The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

Things are needy. They take up space. They want attention, and they will drive you mad if you let them.

Benny was conceived in 2001, the year the future began.

Inside? Outside? What is the difference and how can you tell? When a sound enters your body through your ears and merges with your mind, what happens to it? Is it still a sound then, or has it become something else? When you eat a wing or an egg or a drumstick, at what point is it no longer a chicken? When you read these words on a page, what happens to them, when they become you?

Cranked by the power of your big prefrontal cortices, the engines of your imagination gathered steam until, in tumultuous leaps of what you came to call progress, the Made proliferated, relegating the Unmade to the status of mere resource, a lowly serf class to be colonized, exploited, and fashioned into something else, some thing that was more to your liking.

Human language is a clumsy tool. People have such a hard time understanding each other, so how can you even begin to imagine the subjectivities of animals and insects and plants, never mind pebbles and sand? Bound as you are by your senses—so blunt and yet so beautiful—it’s impossible for you to imagine that the myriad beings you dismiss as insentient might have inner lives, too. Books are in an odd position, caught halfway in between. We are sensible, if not sentient. We are semi-living.

What makes a person want so much? What gives things the power to enchant, and is there a limit to the desire for more?

And what of the story itself? Are words the conduit through which your desire travels, or are they just an afterthought, an add-on, a trick of your human mind to justify the prelinguistic itch that prefigures it?

Books are works of love, after all. Our bodies may not be made to enjoy the mysteries of corporeal conjugation, but even our driest tomes, the most unromantic among us, can make your dreams come true.

When a young boy finds his voice, or a young girl tells her own story for the first time, these are causes for great celebration, and all of us, from the most ancient tablets inscribed in clay to the cheapest dime-store paperbacks, take note and rejoice, because without your voices we wouldn’t exist. So listen! It’s happening right now, as we speak, but it’s important not to rush. These things take time, and we must go slow.