By the Late John Brockman (8 page)

People world: things, objects, knowledge, ideas. Universe: “And say of what you see
in the dark / That it is this or that it is that / But do not use the rotted names.”
⁶⁶

“I think,” or “I do not think:” syncategorematic, cannot be used as terms in themselves.
The finite, irreversibility of coupling cannot be ignored. It does not take “finding
to show what we were looking for, and fulfillment of a wish to show what we wanted.
it is not the expected thing that is the fulfillment, but rather: its coming about.
The mistake is deeply rooted in our language.”
⁶⁷
Universe is finite: at once both subject and predicate of conventional language.
The word that must be said; that can’t be said; not a word and yet another kind of
word, “that hallowed and accursed word which is life and death at the same time.”
⁶⁸
Universe is finite: “a form to speak the word / And every latent double in the word.”
⁶⁹

Our knowledge has led us to this place: nowhere. Our knowledge has proven one thing:
nothing.

It’s a question of getting through the history of words: the spurious conceptions,
generalizations: the rotted names. “Is it peace, / Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon,
one finds / On the dump?”
⁷⁰

The experience of not having an experience: Everything is interchangeable on a live
level. Undifferentiation of activity: communication is a myth: here to there; you
to me; then to now; nothing to something. Everything is interchangeable on a live
level.

Experience a minute. Experience an hour. Can you experience a minute and an hour together,
simultaneously, at the same time? This is an important question to ask.

“It is very noteworthy that what goes on in thinking practically never interests us.”
⁷¹
The concern is always with thoughts . . . not thinking. “I see” . . . “I know” . . .
“I perceive:” syncategorematic: cannot be used as terms in themselves. They are noun’d.

Everything is interchangeable on a live level. “Can I think away the impression of
familiarity where it exists; and think it into a situation where it does not?”
⁷²

Indeterminacy: interchangeability. “The actual occasions, the coupling of observer-observed,
are devoid of all indetermination. Potentiality has passed into realization. They
are complete and determinate matter of fact, devoid of all indecision. They form the
ground of obligation.”
⁷³
The concepts of the people world, the thing world: indeterminate: interchangeable.
Universe: determinate; noninterchangeable; irreversible.

People world, thing world concepts: syncategorematic: cannot be used as terms in themselves.
They are noun’d. Such terms “express the definiteness of the actuality in question,
but their own natures do not in themselves disclose in what actual entities, what
coupling operation, this potentiality of ingression is realized.”
⁷⁴
Actual entity: coupling: noninterchangeable: irreversible. Syncategorematic terms:
decreated. Me? I don’t.

Nothing left to say. “Any absolute statement relating to properties of the world around
us must be considered as an unjustified extrapolation. Only a description based on
observations and relative to the process of observation can be valid.”
⁷⁵
We no longer talk of states; we measure. The measuring operation: irreversible and
indeterminate.

Living with nothing: “costing not less than everything.”
⁷⁶
“Do I dare / Disturb the universe?”
⁷⁷
Living with the knowledge that intention makes no difference. “In the oblivion of
cards / One exists among pure principles. / Neither the cards nor the trees nor the
air / Persist as facts. This is an escape / To principium, to meditation. / One knows
at last what to think about / And thinks about it without consciousness, / Under the
oak trees, completely released.”
⁷⁸

There is no difference in doing less. You can’t pay less than one hundred percent
attention. There’s no quantity in a no thing, non-accretive dimension. Numbers don’t
count, from one to two. Quantity: ha ha. The doing of “you do,” the doing of “you
don’t:” one hundred percent attention. The name, the sign of distinction, the description
are assumed as a consequence of the coupling: undifferentiated activity; coupling:
a verb. You can’t pay less than one hundred percent attention: call this a part, call
that a whole; call this man, call that God; call this finite, call that infinite;
call this the totality, call that the selection obscuring the totality: the description
is the thing. The assumption of the description: a consequence of coupling: the observational
operation: complete, determinate, one hundred percent. You can’t pay less than one
hundred percent attention. “The part / Is the equal of the whole.”
⁷⁹
Everything is interchangeable on a live level.

Awareness no longer matters. Knowledge makes no difference: there is no outside world
to change. There can’t be communication if there are no differences: here and there,
before and after, now and then. From and to are no longer useful words. Between is
merely ridiculous.

There can’t be communication if there is no differentiation: point A and point B.
No differentiation: no communication. No differentiation: no signal accretively advancing
by increments of space and time from message source A to message destination B. The
current word is nonaccretive, undifferentiated, mathematical: the statistical expression
of coupling: only the final sum matters: no communication.

Negation of the accretion principle. “There is a prevalent misconception that ‘becoming’
involves the notion of a unique seriality for its advance into novelty. This is the
classic notion of time, which philosophy took over from common sense.”
⁸⁰
“There is a becoming of continuity but no continuity of becoming.”
⁸¹
No accretion: put off sense and notion. “This is the springtime / But not in time’s
covenant.”
⁸²
/ / “Where is the summer, the unimaginable / Zero summer? Spring-time: not in time’s
covenant. Space-time: not in time’s covenant.”

No end, no beginning. “No matter how often what happened had happened any time any
one told anything there was no repetition.”
⁸³
No repetition, no competition, no emulation, no comparison, no meaning. This doesn’t
compete with that. This can’t be a repetition of this.

Coupling produces finite interaction: the universe is finite. No mirrors, no pictures.
To measure is to disturb. The measurement: the coupling the matter of fact of physical
phenomena: a statistical expression, the consequence of an event which is independent
of time and place. There are no clocks, no mirrors, no place. There is no one to talk
to. To live is to forget. “Feign then what’s by a decent tact believed / And act that
state is only so conceived, / And build an edifice to form / For house where phantoms
may keep warm. / Imagine, then, by miracle, with me, / (Ambiguous gifts, as what gods
give must be) / What could not possibly be there, / And learn a style from a despair.”
⁸⁴

Universe: “Physical experiments have found no solids, no continuous surfaces or lines—only
discontinuous constellations of individual events. An aggregate of finites is finite.
Therefore, universe as experientially defined, including both the physical and metaphysical,
is finite.”
⁸⁵

Universe: a description. “All physics one tautology; / If you describe things with
the right tensors / All law becomes the fact that they can be described with them;
/ This is the Assumption of the description.”
⁸⁶
Assumption of the description: decreation of the thing described. Assumption of the
description: the compulsion to assume the existence of an entity. By decreating we
invent the existing entity; invent the unnecessary unit in a language; invent history;
invent universe; invent reality, nature, etc. The decreation of the thing described
compels us to assume the description of the thing described. Activity is undifferentiable:
the names, the signs of distinction, the descriptions, are a consequence of the event,
the coupling operation. “Progress so far has consisted not so much in specifying what
is actually observed, as in eliminating what is definitely unobserved and unobservable”
⁸⁷
: the assumption of the description: decreation of the thing described. “We approach
a society / Without a society.”

“Most men find the final dissolution of the universe as distasteful a thought as the
dissolution of their own personality, and man’s strivings after personal immortality
have their macroscopic counterpart in these more sophisticated strivings after an
imperishable universe.”
⁸⁸
The universe is finite: there is nothing beyond, nothing outside this finiteness.
Just the next measurement, the next word.

No explanation, no solution, but consideration of the question. “Every proposition
proposing a fact must in its complete analysis propose the general character of the
universe required for the fact.”
⁸⁹
The description, the proposition: not a definition, but a commission. “Understanding
a commission means: knowing what one has got to do.”
⁹⁰

“The final truth about a phenomenon resides in the mathematical description of it.
We go beyond the mathematical formula at our own risk; we may find a model or picture
helps us to understand it, but we have no right to expect this and our failure to
find such a model or picture need not indicate that either our reasoning or our knowledge
is at fault.”
⁹¹
The description is the thing: “Description is revelation. It is not / The thing described,
nor false facsimile.”
⁹²
Nothing to describe.

Intention embarrasses. “Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning.
/ Every poem an epitaph. And any action / Is a step to the block.”
⁹³
Hope? But “hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”
⁹⁴
Love? But “love would be love of the wrong thing.” Stopping or starting: intention
embarrasses.

Names: the description is the thing; the word must be the thing it represents; the
most important thing is the next word. Getting through the history of words: Throw
away the lights, the definitions, / And say of what you see in the dark / That it
is this or that it is that / But do not use the rotted names: mind, space, time, people,
place, life, death, world.

Awkwardness: the only way to bear so much reality. Camouflage: the only way to live
on the sophisticated edge of awareness. Confusion: the only way to live with the trivia
of daily life.

Fact: doing. Fact: events. No nature at an instant. Activity: the matter of fact.
“The exquisite environment of fact. The final poem will be the poem of fact in the
language of fact. But it will be the poem of fact not realized before.”
⁹⁵

Facts smirk.

Waste time: the thing world, the people world. Waste time: the trivia of daily life:
the forms which command attention, respect. Waste time: the belief that idealization
is above performance. Waste time: “Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before
and after.”
⁹⁶
Waste time: “Hill, cloud, field, wall . . . / All that we touch, see, think . . .
/ Unliven all: the stone, the dust / The Earth itself and man and Man / Turn thing
/ And must.”
⁹⁷
The incredible something of nothing.

No differentiation: “Anybody can be interested in what anybody does but does that
make any difference, is it all important. Anybody can be interested in what anybody
says, but does that make any difference, is it at all important.”
⁹⁸

“Forget, forget . . . Forget what you forget. / The diary entry: name, fact, place,
and date / Let go and let the loitering dead be dead.”
⁹⁹
Universe is finite: obligatory, devoid of indecision, determinate. “Will, doubt,
desire, thought . . . / All in us: / Faith, Hope, Love . . . / Naught but THINGS itself
away / And you, and I, as meant, obey: / Are noun’d / To naught.”
¹⁰⁰
The incredible something of nothing. “Still missing it though: / Though what, none
know.”
¹⁰¹

No accretion: no hierarchical order. “There cannot be a hierarchy of the forms of
elementary propositions. We can foresee only what we ourselves construct.”
¹⁰²
Praise-blame: no hierarchical judgment. You are not to blame: what does this do to
this. People do not help people: what does this do for this. No accretion: no hierarchical
order. There cannot be a higher intelligence whether alien, technological, etc., for
“what cannot be expressed we do not express,”
¹⁰³
what cannot be known we do not know. Judgment is impossible. No hierarchical order:
Nature is never more complicated than we imagine it.

Numbers don’t count. “A multiplicity merely enters into the process through its individual
members.”
¹⁰⁴
Counting: comparison: one for a; two for b; There is no comparison. No accretion:
no hierarchies. The description is the thing. No multiplicities: “it is the chord
that falsifies.”
¹⁰⁵
Numbers don’t count. “A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird
/ Are one.”
¹⁰⁶
Numbers don’t count. No one: unitless unity. Not a number, but a commission. Not
a word and yet another kind of word.