From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The empty world
This article documents a recurring imaginative space across C. W. Smith's work. For the meditation sequences themselves, see Empty World Meditations.
The depopulated world recurs throughout C. W. Smith's oeuvre as an imaginative threshold where selfhood and landscape become reversible. In the novel, Leif and Katita move through an emptied Newcastle and Shanbudia in states of ontological incompleteness; the narrator wishes to “blink off the side of the screen”.
In Antinomicity, this space empties further into philosophy: “a city reaches its functional peak once it becomes empty of people… the city becomes an instrument, and the sunlight… the bow with which it is played… love songs in their most pure form.” The empty city is not absence but amplification—each street a tuning fork for otherwise inaudible frequencies.
''Everyone I Love'' names this explicitly: “I want to be alone in the world, while all the people I love are alive and well.” The Empty World Meditations sequences (#3, #9, #27, and beyond) are structured as second-person guided walks through vacant streets—a form of consciousness requiring absence of crowds to become audible. This emptiness is not tragic but generative.