By the Late John Brockman (10 page)

The unity is unitless: man is dead. This is a terrifying concept for man to contemplate.
Absolutely terrifying. We have tried to force reality into a framework of space and
time just as the ancients tried to place reality within a framework of emotions. It
doesn’t work. Witness the image of the earth as seen from the moon: night and day
at the same time: all times all the time: no matter what the time. Times have changed.

“Everyone talks about the Earth being round but does anyone actually believe it? Nature
of roundness is that you eventually get back to the same place—nowhere to go—no infinity.
Not condensation, but condensation of mind. We are all living through one of our most
terrifying dream horror fantasies: we’re locked in a room, and the walls and ceilings
are closing in on us. All the things we’ve been raised to worship—man’s limitless
power, the ever-giving nature of mother earth—all these infinite possibilities are
beginning to seem less infinite. In fact, the infinite horizon is heading this way
fast.”
¹⁸

We can’t even continue to talk of Earth: the place: a physical clump of dirt spinning
around outer space: outside what. The world still goes spinning around, but it’s in
my head. It’s happening in my head. I do it all in my head. It’s a finite world of
words: “where is this world . . . and what do I know of it? Where do I seize it? Where
do I believe it? Where do I surrender myself to it entirely? Here! Or nowhere.”
¹⁹

Words do not signify anything but their own reality. Words do not create the universe
out of nothing but out of all. All possibilities exist in any: “the whole story from
Genesis to Apocalypse in any event; in any metamorphoses. Therefore it is important
to keep changing the subject. The subject changes before our very eyes.”
²⁰

What is: is something else. Finite man: he has no interest in what exists. He has
no time for what is. No beginning, no ending. He lives without life: the story of
life. It’s over: never began. It’s not a physical death, a physical end. It’s simply
that “to tell a story has become strictly impossible.”
²¹
It’s a world of words: saying is inventing . . . you invent nothing.
²²
Saying makes it so.
²³

Beyond the world: a world of words with no beyond. No psychic walls of I’s. No incommunicable
mass of we’s. A finite world of words: a sense of limit, a limit which does not energize
subject matter, but penetrates it, dissolves it, creating both dream and reality,
life and death. A finite world of words: you can’t tell where the subject is, you
can’t tell what the subject is.

Reject the world. Metaphysical I instead: no part, but limit. Reject the world. Reject
man. Be faithful to the conception of a limit. The new finite view of man: the rejection
of humanism (doctrine that man is the measure): a complete anthropomorphization of
the world, whether pantheism, idealism, or rationalism. Reject man. Reject the world.
Reject the thinking subject for limit, the limit of language, a world created in what
it says. “I’m in words, made of words, other’s words . . . I’m all these words, all
these strangers.”
²⁴

Man is no longer necessary. Neither are you. Man is dead: he is totally deprived.
Of himself, even of nothing. There is nowhere to go in the absurdity of his lifetime.
Any new style, any new life, any new world, is but a god where gods are no longer
valid. “The god that one so finds is but a word born of words, and returns to the
word. For the reply we make to ourselves is assuredly never anything other than the
question itself.”
²⁵

Reject world as unit. There is no phenomenal world as an external point of reference,
of support. There is no possible communication between these illusory points. Communication
is impossible: “the thing said and the thing heard have a common source.”
²⁶
And it’s not an inventing mind, a thinking subject. Metaphysical I instead: no part,
but limit. Me: I do it all in my head: what head?

“A world full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
²⁷
It points to nothing other than the fact that it is. It’s not a metaphor. It’s nothing
you can believe in. It is. The moment you let it out of your head, it’s dead: it’s
real.

Reject life “in any number of ‘worlds’ or ‘universes’ or in trifling delusions such
as ‘past,’ ‘present,’ or ‘future.’”
²⁸
It’s all denied. Finite man in a finite world. Or, finite man as finite world.

The world is unintelligible. “It is impossible to include it all under one large counter
such as ‘God’ or ‘Truth’ and other verbalisms, or the disease of the symbolic language.”
²⁹
All such words are comfort words. The world is unintelligible. There is no one way,
no one. The world is unintelligible: the world is our intelligence. “Here, now, we
forget each other and ourselves. We feel the absurdity of an order, a whole, a knowledge,
that which arranged the rendezvous, within its vital boundary, in the mind.”
³⁰

Any definition empties the world as it creates it. Empties it of all life. Any definition
of the world fixes it. If it is fixed, it is dead. Only by a name do we know what
is dead. Only through a category do we comprehend the unreal. Names and categories,
names and definitions: comfort words. And “nothing has been changed except what is
unreal, as if nothing had been changed at all.”
³¹
Disposable world: comfort words: there’s no getting rid of them without naming them
and their contraptions, that’s the thing to keep in mind.

In a world with no signification, in a world where psychic, social, and functional
resolution is impossible, in a world where life lies hidden in language . . . the
fate of the author is to have nothing, absolutely nothing to say. The book is a lie,
the words have no author. To live in this world beyond the world, a world of words
with no beyond, the author does not write about the world. Any attempt to do so is
merely another fiction in a world of fictions. The aim of the book must be to attract
subtlety, to attract complexity. But then, this is not a book, it has nothing to do
with books, with literature. It can’t be read: it’s performance. Performance without
a player. The author has no intention of its meaning.

“All the notions by which we have lived are tottering. The sciences are calling the
tune.”
³²
Knowledge is now transitional. The real is no longer neatly delimited. Place, time,
and matter admit of liberties that, not long ago, no one had an inkling of. Common
sense is now appealed to only by the ignorant. The value of ordinary evidence is down
to zero. What was once believed by all, always and everywhere, seems no longer to
carry much weight.
³³
Knowledge is now transitional: it’s something to forget.

When knowledge enters the room, forget it. None of the categories work, all explanations
are wrong. Description vs. explanation: explanation is always wrong. It’s a world
of words, of descriptions, and “description comes to an end, and we realize that it
has left nothing behind it: it has instituted a double movement of creation and destruction.”
³⁴

Knowledge: the expression “to know everything” has as its complement the word universe.
But to know everything includes knowing that the universe isn’t even there. The universe
is the big con. Our widest possible knowledge-world generalization has dissolved into
metaphysical ha-ha.

Universe is the big con. Physical theory is no longer “reality.” We got lost “once
speculation was concerned no longer with subphenomena assumed to be similar to the
phenomena directly observed, but rather with “things” that in no way resemble the
things we know, since they only send us signals which we interpret as best we can.
Plus our language, and our logic, our concepts have been found wanting: all this intellectual
material will not fit into the nucleus of an atom, where everything is without precedent,
without shape. Debatable probabilities have taken the place of definite and distinct
facts and the fundamental distinction between observation and its object is no longer
conceivable.”
³⁵

What in the world has happened? “Simply that our means of investigation and action
have far outstripped our means of representation and understanding. This is the enormous
new fact that results from all the other new facts. This one is positively transcendent.”
³⁶

“The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind.”
³⁷
This new fact is positively transcendent. But in the new world, nonworld of this
new fact, there can be no transcendence. The world is finite: it can’t fit into the
terminology, into the constraints of humanistic consciousness. It will only be viewed
there as an absence, as a negation of the terms and categories that inform Western
man. It’s not explainable. It won’t be defined. It’s bereft of all the dogma of rationalism,
of humanism. Forget it.

No man is my friend. I have no interest in the human condition. No interest in you,
your ideas, your words. No interest in your opinions.

Don’t believe it. Don’t believe anything I say. There’s nothing to say. I have nothing
to say. There’s nothing to think about.

Disposable world: enigmatic world. Epistemological enigma: “the facts of inquiry dissolve
into the reality of the enquirer, casting further doubt on both.”
³⁸
The world is a waste system of extinct epistemologies.

One is the great signifier: creator of all the comfort words: God, Truth, Humanity,
Writer, etc. One is obsolete. We can no longer deal with single level definitions.
It doesn’t follow that there are multiple level definitions either. There is no signification.
One doesn’t signify. One obscures. There is no identity beyond the words that are
its representation. There is no identity: words are what count. One musn’t let one
get in the way.

There can be no psychic, social, or functional resolution of all this. We must get
back to the source. But there is no source. The source, the one reality is not to
be found. There is no source. There is no answer.

I beseech you enter your life. “I beseech you learn to say ‘I,’ when I question you:
For you are no part, but a whole. No portion, but a being.”
³⁹

A leap over the psychic walls of man. Drop the body: the physicalized conception of
perception. Meditate the putrifying corpse. The discovery of the private individual
form: thank God for the names of the body.

Crashing through the personal psychic walls. I am out of my mind. “The lives lived
in the mind are at an end. They never were. Were and are not. It is not to be believed.”
⁴⁰
I am out of my mind. Out of the personal psyche. He was not a man yet he was nothing
else. If in the mind, he vanished, taking there the mind’s own limits, like a tragic
thing. Without existence, existing everywhere.
⁴¹

Self-conscious option isn’t enough: self-conscious option is too much. There’s no
thinking subject. Thus, it’s not a question of thinking. It’s not a question of thinking
but of that which is its intelligence. It’s of intelligence that I must think.

Description “once claimed to reproduce a pre-existing reality; it now asserts its
creative function. It once made us see things, now it seems to destroy them, as if
its intention to discuss them aimed only at blurring their contours, at making them
incomprehensible, at causing them to disappear altogether.”
⁴²
Man is dead: but the humanist, the modern man instructed by the terms of liberal
thought and conventions, will be completely unable to understand this uncompromising
attitude of finiteness.

The world is made up, not made. The world is created, and created things can no longer
be considered as intermediaries leading to an infinity of other things. They are dead:
they are their own fictions, begin and end in themselves, live and die in themselves.
Created things are dead. The life you live is a lie. The world you inhabit is a lie.
There is no need for fiction in the world: the world is the only fiction.

Personality is not the only way. The individual is one of the problems of our time.
So, too, the mass of men. What to do about amount, what to do about quantity. They’re
nothing, starting from one. In a finite world, numbers don’t count: words do. There’s
no addition, no accretion, no infinite attainments. Nothing and everything, no one
and everyone: man is dead. “The mass is nothing. The number of men in a mass of men
is nothing. The mass is no greater than the singular man of the mass.”
⁴³

Finite man, finite intelligence: control. Not in control, but as control, as reality,
as intelligence. Finite intelligence: the mass is no greater than the singular man
of the mass. Expect no life from the mass. Expect no voice from the people.

Life is inexpressible. Life is inexcusable.

It’s getting much harder to live. It’s getting much easier to accept the idea that
“it is an illusion that we were ever alive.”
⁴⁴
Life is a knowledge, not an existence. Life is disposing of the waste: names and
categories. Name it: it’s dead. Then you live in those names and by those names. You
live in those names and by those names when you live in the world.

It’s no longer possible to tell a story: life is a story. It’s a story, a narrative
series of pictures. A series of timeless tableaus, an infinitely successive series
of nows. But this can’t be. It isn’t. “A picture held us captive. And we could not
get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us
inexorably.”
⁴⁵
The world is finite: that means “it” isn’t. We are free from the pictures and the
lives lived in the mind are at an end. Words are what matter.