By the Late John Brockman (9 page)

Living with the growing terror of nothing to think about. “Not a persistent thing
with varying states but a system of interrelated events. The old solidarity is gone,
and with it the characteristics that, to the materialist, made matter seem more real
than fleeting thoughts.”
¹⁰⁷
The incredible something of nothing. “Matter of solid objects and hard particles
has no existence in reality and only appears to exist through our observing nonmaterial
things in a confused way—through the bias of human spectacles.”
¹⁰⁸

“No language can be anything but elliptical, requiring a leap of the imagination to
understand its meaning in its relevance to immediate experience.”
¹⁰⁹
Take the available language with its ambiguities and use it. The language is completely
elastic. Anything can be said. Welcome the confusion: welcome the contradictions.
Knowledge, wisdom, are a dead end. You can’t know any more than you do know. Ask the
fool.

Physical knowledge: observational: each item an assertion of the results of an observation.
The coupling of observer-observed: undifferentiated activity. No difference: “the
duality of choice becomes the singularity of existence; /The effort of virtue the
unconsciousness of foreknowledge.”
¹¹⁰
No distinctions: life-death; real-apparent; actual-hypothetical; no distinctions:
true-false-maybe. No distinctions: past-present-future; end-beginning. Life is just
a question of whatever you get away with.

The only place left is nowhere. “So which way’s which is now no more a query / And
up or down’s as free as heads or tails. / Without a center or a pull to check it /
The very sense of that dimension fails: / Rise! Fall! Sinkswim? All idle theory.”
¹¹¹

Waiting for the present.

“Things fall apart.”
¹¹²
No other to fight. No cause for which to struggle. No ideal for which to offer sacrifice,
“You are a metaphor and they are lies.”
¹¹³
And I . . . “Not mine this life that must he lived in me.”
¹¹⁴
No other. No self, No man’s land. “Do you look into yourself in order to recognize
the fury in his face? It is there as clearly as in your own breast.”
¹¹⁵
No one: the unity is unitless. “One beats and bears for that which one believes,
/ That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all / Be merely oneself?”
¹¹⁶
The unity is unitless.

Don’t try to repeal circumstances. Try something new. “A people without history /
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / Of timeless moments.”
¹¹⁷
“Ahistory: Amen.”
¹¹⁸

“All time is eternally present.”
¹¹⁹
Not in the past, future, or present. Not before or after. Not now, then or when.
Not anywhere. “Here and there does not matter / We must be still and still moving
/ Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion.”
¹²⁰

“The composition we live in changes but essentially what happens does not change.
We inside us do not change but our emphasis and the moment in which we live changes.
That it is never the same moment it is never the same emphasis at any successive moment
of existing. Then really what is repetition? It is very interesting to ask and it
is a very interesting thing to know.”
¹²¹
What is repetition? What is insistence? What is repetition? What is insistence? What
is repetition? What is insistence?

“The theory of description matters most. / It is the theory of the word for those
/ For whom the word is the making of the world.”
¹²²
Description is the thing: nothing.

Confusion: no-thing=thing. The incredible something of nothing.

Things operate the waste system. Idealization or performance: “Ridiculous the waste
sad time / Stretching before and after.”
¹²³
Activity is undifferentiable: no difference: no between. The performance decreates
the idealization, the thing. And yet . . . the description of performance is itself
an idealization, a thing. Confusion: “we had the experience but missed the meaning,
/ And approach to the meaning restores the experience / in a different form, beyond
any meaning.”
¹²⁴

The empirical: knowledge derived from experience. The epistemological: investigation
of the methods and limits of knowledge. At the intersection of the empirical and the
epistemological: a convenient nowhere, anytime, to be or not to be. Confusion: the
incredible something of nothing. Beyond the reality principle there is nothingness:
the void. And beyond the void: description of the void: the idealization, the objectification
of nothing. Description of nothing, of event, of process, of doing, of void: a thing.
The description is the thing. At the intersection of the empirical and the epistemological:
a convenient nowhere, anytime, to be or not to be.

There is “only a limited value / In the knowledge derived from experience. / The knowledge
imposes a pattern, and falsifies, / For the pattern is new in every moment / And every
moment is a new and shocking / Valuation of all we have been.”
¹²⁵
At the intersection of the empirical and the epistemological: the first time that
says anytime; the first place that says nowhere; the first thing that says nothing:
the fact with a sense of humor.

Truth is now a matter of convenience; concepts are valid only in their capacity to
sustain interest: only in their use. The interchangeability of concepts is a consequence
of the non-interchange- ability of the coupling operation. The description of the
coupling of the undifferentiated activity: a thing, a distinction, a differentiation.
“An instrument which would depict the Source / Does not produce what baffles it as
well.”
¹²⁶
The description is the thing: everything. It is not a case of different ways of putting
the same thing. “Life consists / Of propositions about life.”
¹²⁷
It’s the next word that matters. “That one word might be a name, the release from
a name.”
¹²⁸

The round earth followed from the flat earth. Before the of the round earth, all thoughts,
concepts, were the product of the sensibility of life on a flat earth. The earth was
flat until the point of creation of the round earth; which is not to say that the
earth was flat until we realized that all along it had been round.

The information on the previous page is false. The previous page is the flat earth.
This page is the round earth. The earth is round: this page is being read. If we talk
of a flat earth producing a round earth; the round earth is doing the talking. If
we talk of the previous page: this page is doing the talking. The previous page as
an entity is the invention of this page, it can exist only on this page, it can live
only on this page. We must not assume the existence of any entity until we are compelled
to do so. Without this page the previous page could not have existence as an entity.
The previous page exists as an entity only through decreation; this page decreates
the previous page. Decreation of the thing described: assumption by this page of the
description of the thing described: this page describing the previous page. Decreation;
this page invents the previous page: round earth invents flat earth.

“There is nothing more to invent, nothing more to play with.”
¹²⁹
No creation, no becoming, no pretention, no intention: “that’s not how the show is
run: / This independent mind, / Unkingdom’d, might as well be none.”
¹³⁰
No one: “Not the intense moment / Isolated, with no before and after, / But a lifetime
burning in every moment / And not the lifetime of one man only / But of old stones
that cannot be deciphered.”
¹³¹

And whatever you can do . . . there will be no difference. And whatever you will do
. . . there will be no difference. And whatever you could do, don’t do, should do
. . . and whatever you do . . . there will be no difference.

Unitless unity: silence. “But listen! When, / If ever in the windings of the dance,
/ To-be-said and saying in perfection fit, / Another silence listens: listen again.”
¹³²

Stopping: never having started.

Disposable world.

The world is a waste system. A disposal of categories and names.

The world is no longer important. The world is no longer a thing: description is.
It’s a world of words. Words are finite: they signify nothing other than themselves.
“The word must be the thing it represents. Otherwise it is a symbol. It is a question
of identity:”
¹
there isn’t any. There’s no thinking subject: only words. Only descriptions.

No thinking subject. Metaphysical I, instead: not a part, but a limit. A unitless
unity. The physical, the phenomenal world is gone. We are no longer a part of it.
We never were a part of it. The world is finite: the objective world was no more real
than the words that were its habit.
²
A finite world of words: the world as limits of language. “The limits of my language
mean the limits of my world.”
³
No part, but limit. “No longer any refuge in the infinities of grandeur,”
⁴
of the universe, of physicalized reality. No part, but limit. Never forget this finiteness,
this limit of man.

Finite man: metaphysical I: unitless unity: no part, but limit. It means that there
is no longer any possible distinction between observer and observed. It means that
we live in a new whole, a new reality, one that is slippery, one that is expressed
in language but cannot be expressed by language. It means that “observing is completing
and we are content in a world that shrinks to an immediate whole that we do not need
to understand, complete without secret arrangements of it in the mind.”
⁵

“The same old fallacy persists—the desire to introduce a unity in the world: the mythologists
made it a woman or an elephant; the scientists made fun of the mythologists, but themselves
turned the world into the likeness of a mechanical toy. One analogy is as good as
another.”
⁶

The “words of the world are the life of the world.”
⁷
It is the speech of truth in its true solitude: a nature that is created in what
it says.
⁸

The world is no longer important: true. The world is the only important thing to think
about: true. The world: a closed door. “A closed door slammed in the face of man.
It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.”
⁹

But through what? The physical world: an artifact, made or constructed of some basic,
primary substance. The physical world is a created world: the production of something
from nothing. The finite world, world of words: a new world, nonworld: everything
must come from everything. Description is the thing: the world is created in what
it says. Created: thus destroyed. The physical world is meaningless: “transfer physical
to language.”
¹⁰

Finite man: “he disposes the world in categories.”
¹¹
A waste system: there’s no getting rid of them without naming them, that’s the thing
to keep in mind.
¹²
Thus, any name, any definition or category empties the world as it creates it. It
is a name that gives birth, gives life, while at the same time bringing separation
and death. The world is a waste system of the unreal: nothing is left but the unreal.
Just to name things.

The death of the world: “the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the
world dies too . . . all I know is what the words know.”
¹³

Tired of the old words, the comfort words, bored with the old descriptions. All categories
are pseudo-categories. All categories, all concepts are waste. Magic, myth, religion,
art . . . ideology, science, literature: comfort words. There is no longer any possibility
of objective points of support outside speech or thought. “Meaning and necessity are
preserved only in the linguistic practices which embody them.”
¹⁴

Thus, no meaning can be ascribed to “existing world.” It is “neither significant nor
absurd. It is, quite simply. That is the most remarkable thing about it. And suddenly
the obviousness of this strikes us with irresistible force. All at once the whole
splendid construction collapses.”
¹⁵
And the world born of the word goes back to the word.

“Universe is not a very large expanding balloon with galactic light bulbs interspersed
at varying distances.” E= MC
²
showed that “Universe is not a simultaneous assembly of things. Universe isn’t even
there
—in fact man’s invention of the concept reveals his terror crouching behind a facade
of omniscience.”
¹⁶
Universe: the most comprehensive world generalization. Universe isn’t
there
: it simply
is
. It’s not a thing, or things:
it is
. It’s not
how
things are in the world that is mystical, but
that
it exists.
¹⁷

We are deprived of our comfort words, our comfortable world. We are denied, everything
is denied. Things no longer have any meaning. Things no longer exist. There is no
longer the possibility of a universe of psychological, social, or functional signification.
There is no longer the possibility of constructing a new objective world, even though
it be more solid, more immediate. There is no longer the possibility of a single world,
a whole world, a unified world.