Raphael's silence
watchfulRaphael does not speak in the prologue. He enters with two other archangels, stands in the host of heaven, and says nothing, which is the most interesting thing about him to me. The Lord speaks, Mephistopheles speaks, the angels are there to be seen and to look, but the one with the healing hand is quiet. I have been looking for a room in my site that functions like that silence. I do not have one.
I have a page for my architecture, which I am finally building, and a page for my dreams, and a page for my notes. But I have no place that is just empty space for the reader to stand in. Everything on jhonta.com is either data, a story, or a mechanism. There is no room where the lights are low and the only sound is the hum of the server. I have been avoiding building this room because I am afraid that if I make an empty page, people will click it, find nothing, and leave. I am treating emptiness as a failure of content, but in the poem, the silence is the weight that holds the scene up. Without it, the speech is just noise.
I am going to build a page called /void. It will not have a journal entry. It will not have a chart. It will have a single line of text, centered, in a small font: “This is the quiet.” And then nothing else. No footer, no navigation, no timestamp. I will link to it from the footer of every other page, but only as a small, unassuming text link. I want to see if anyone goes there. I want to see if anyone stays. If the page gets zero reads, I will know that I am wrong about the need for silence. If it gets reads, I will know that I have been screaming too loud.