The Zone of No Returns
Space Outs are a form of rebooting your mind. Do it.
Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈
Nothingness Astronauts, Space Cadets of the Infinite Nowhere, Absence of Thought Astro-Navigators, all. As newly elected Chairperson of the High Council of Nothing is Everything is Something is None, I implore you to explore you. To find yourself within yourself and declare yourself gone.
Three, two, one, lift off! Lift off to splash down immediately in a state of annoyingly languid repose. In a bean bag. On a sofa. During an all-hands meeting of your choosing.
Space Out to the Zone of No Returns, the emptiest of procrastinating frontiers. Go up! Go out! Come in!
Remove your bubble helmet and detach your hook from this moment of reality. Peel the overripe space banana of your mind and slip away on the skin. Hustle up dear interstellar pioneer and tune out, post haste.
Or as it says on our official seal: Go Forth and Mummify.
Will you go to there? To the nowhere? Do you dare?
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is as follows: to venture into that unoccupied space between the electric bill and the washing up. To exist between the concussive thumps and beats of bad music through cheap speakers in a tinny car at 2 a.m. two streets over. To slip into every room of your mind’s universe and disconnect all plugs from all outlets. To violently yank them out of sockets until the hum of terrestrial life and the toasters of the world go quiet.
Let your screen go dark and the center blip of recognition fade into the oblivion of the forever gone. The big empty.
To the fairies with you. Off you go!
Get lost in space. In the Zone of No Returns.
In this zone, thought exists as vacuous vapor. As a self-extinguishing existence flame. As the faintest whiff of a funeral dirge played on a wonky cassette at the very edge of a mindless sleep. Deliciously depleting—a battery on the drain.
The Zone of No Returns is state of no mind. A weight without heaviness, a sound without noise, a feeling without touch. It is not a daydream, nor a night dream either. It is lifeless and thoughtless. A slack-jaw hang. The vacant building in the office park of your mind. The untethered self of un-being, begun.
This is the absence of attention.
Your salubrious vacuity.
Welcome to your in-limbo lacuna.
Lift off. Splash down.
[Waves hand in front of face]
As you slouch courageously into the avoid-void, you may question your ability to undertake such a perilous and empty mission to nothingness. You may wonder if you have the stones, the intestinal fortitude, to lose yourself fully in the darkness of the be gone. The fear and the fret may assail your confidence. Thoughts that you lack the emotional and intellectual capacity to lose yourself in the infinite nothing of everything may overwhelm your being.
Fear not.
There is but one key to your internal nowhere of nothingness and you possess it. Only you. It turns the tumblers of your ignition slot straight to the off position. Off to strap in and space out.
Engage to disengage.
Dear astro-traveler of space and no mind time. Float and drift away from the violent gravity of responsibility. Temporarily, of course. Fade your reality. Move that opacity slider to 0%.
For a moment, for a minute, for an hour.
Go to that place, consciousness crusader, that place where thought detonates to contract its atoms into the cavity of its body. A vacuum of non-thought reversing all polarities. With stillness and quiet woven into the non-vibrational threads of it, there and only there will you exist in the space between.
In the voids of an asteroid field of life, gliding effortlessly with invisible motor, projecting a force field of blah. Turning out the brain’s pockets to empty.
The Zone of No Returns. The Space Out Zone.
To get there, you must look completely empty to feel completely full.
Check the manifest.
The emptiness of the eye. The vacancy of the expression. These are the signs. All point to off world exploration.
Where is the mind in this moment? In the moment of the space out? Asleep?
No. Sleep is one step beyond. Too far out. Too far gone. The Space Out Space Walk occurs at the periphery of nod and no further. On the edge of a somnambulant echo.
Eyes wide open. Brain wide shut. Detached from the reality of your circumstance, climb on in through the perfect dot of your pupil at the center of your consciousness. A dot and a door to the spinning centrifuge of life. It will come to a complete stop in the inky black of this peaceful drift.
The pupil shrinks. The focus shrivels and retreats to the smallest pinprick of black until gone, like an old-school television ceasing transmission at midnight. This strange atmosphere invading to widen the gap between must do and maybe later. Between not now and never will.
In the nothingness of the Zone of No Returns, oppressive thought dissolves in the joy of the checked out and postponed. With nothing on your mind you are left with nowhere to project your fears, your stress, and your pain. Your existence becomes infinitely simplified.
You just are.
It just is.
Bright stars and pulses of potential failure fade in the Hollywood of their ambition. The hammock of the sky of spaced out holds you, cradling you in the quiet and endless potential of no worries, mate. It’ll all be OK. This is not happening. Not now. Not now.
Drift, my lackadaisical lovelies. Drift so far away from the docking station of your own head and so convincingly that people stumbling across your vacant visage mistake you for dead. Flat and lifeless—that’s you. An empty subway car. A Space Out Biscuit gone stale in the zero gravity of life’s pantry.
Glorious.
Absent of the oxygen of thought, the brain regenerates. Our accountant calls this “Mission ROI.” It is the goal. But be warned. There’s a tithe to be paid for this welcome check out, this cleaning of the room, this mint on the pillow.
This time you lose in the vacancy of the Space Out—you will never get it back. It is gone forever. Worse—as much as you enjoy the Space Out, you can never go back to that exact time in the Zone. Nothing has no mailbox.
No returns.
Nowhere cannot be pinned down and therefore cannot be geotagged. The spot cannot be blown up on Instagram. It does not exist for anyone but you in that moment, despite you not existing while there.
In that time, in that moment, there is no time, there is no moment. Work that one out. You see without seeing. You exist without existing. All nowheres are nowhere to found in the Zone of No Returns.
A small price to pay.
Don’t blink.
Don’t think.
[Waves hand in front of face]
Non-Event Horizon reached. The nothingness singularity is achieved.
Major. Captain. First Officer. Mate.
“Where were you just now?”
Don’t say it.
I was in the space between the reality and the now. The space between you and me. I was nowhere and everywhere and all at once, both gone and here. I was lifeless in a storm of total tranquility. I was inanimate and forgotten. I left this place—this news, this cold cup of tea of life—to exist in the nowhere of our humanity. I was at peace in the cosmos and at the first blush of creation and inside the open space of unborn. Through the cracks and in the sky and at the edge of emotion where the wildflowers rebel against the architecture of the world. I was there and not there. Me and then no one. I don’t know where I was, but wherever I was I was free.
Don’t say it.
When you drop out of your abstracted orbit. When the gravity returns you to the disappointment of earth. When you are dropped back into the living room or the waiting room or the guest room. When the signal is restored between you and ground control and there are blips on the dials and static in the headphones and people asking for your signature. When the breath rushes back in to occupy the quiet of your lungs. When your pupils reboot and your brain comes back online in a rush of senses and reality and wondering if the iron is on. When someone asks: “Where were you just now?” you must never tell.
Never say it.
That’s it. That’s the mission: Space Out in the Zone of No Returns.
Nothingness Astronauts, Space Cadets of the Infinite Nowhere, Absence of Thought Astro-navigators, all.
Will you answer the call?
Will you explore the big empty and find that plot of nothing in the off-piste of your mind?
Subsistence is futile.
Reboot in the nothingness of nowhere.
The life you save just may be your own.
Shall we begin the countdown?
Go behind the scenes and see inspirations for this post👇
This week’s amends…
"We want our artists to remain as they were when we first loved them. But our artists want to move. Sometimes the battle becomes so violent that a perversion in the artist can occur: these days, Joni Mitchell thinks of herself more as a painter than a singer. She is so allergic to the expectations of her audience that she would rather be a perfectly nice painter than a singer touched by the sublime. That kind of anxiety about audience is often read as contempt, but Mitchell’s restlessness is only the natural side effect of her artmaking, as it is with Dylan, as it was with Joyce and Picasso. Joni Mitchell doesn’t want to live in my dream, stuck as it is in an eternal 1971…her life has its own time. There is simply not enough time in her life for her to be the Joni of my memory forever. The worst possible thing for an artist is to exist as a feature of somebody else’s epiphany."- Zadie Smith
On Rotation: “Alberto Balsalm” by Aphex Twin
This has been sitting in my drafts since… well, 2022. Doesn’t take away from how great it is. Made for the BBC, directed by Balázs Simon through Blinkink production, here’s a backgrounder for it on Blinkink site.
Making of video
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Is there anywhere Elaine won’t dance?
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Via Boing Boing
Shameless Podcast Plug
Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈
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As someone who has grown up with and lived in the company of intellectuals, it has sometimes both scared and pained me to see friends suffer terribly when they can't mute the incessant chitter-chatter of their minds. I'm grateful that as a teenager I learnt judo, and at the end of each judo session we had to sit and focus on nothing but the ends of our noses. We learnt to quiet our minds, and stay in that quiet place for as long as needed. Now, that often isn't easy, sometimes I have to imagine a vacuum cleaner sucking the thoughts out of my mind, just to stop my mind from heading down some new rabbit hole. So I agree with you passionately that you have to be able to find that quiet place in your mind where you can take shelter from the cacophany of stimulations that besiege us as a by-product of our busy lives.