Nothingness

"White on White" by Kazimir Malevich (1918)

How to imagine nothingness? Not just nothingness but that thing that existed before the beginning of what we call time, before there was a big bang and the first boson emerged in the cosmic ether? Now that dark energy is creating a new kind of void, one wonders 

if the universe isn’t recoiling and fulfilling the biblical “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” And is that where God comes in, in the positing of things which are unfathomable? On the most basic level nothingness connotes no mass or volume and if something is nothing it would also be impalpable and thus invisible. But is the absence of anything really nothing? And one wonders if there are whole universes of nothingness, which may not have previously occupied the multiverse as we know it, but which function like parallel universes to the extent they have a notational existence, in spite of the fact that they don’t have any properties of being. Is a vacuum nothing? And does it lie on the precipice of being everything by virtue of the fact that a large enough one could eventually be the repository of all that is. Let's head back 13.8 billion years before that first explosion. There's no light, though like the parable of the branch falling in the forest and no one hearing it, it’s hard to conceive of darkness without somebody there to perceive and in effect there's no space since space is a function of matter. And where does that leave time. Can you have time without space? And if not, is this what nothing really is?