relentless repetition, to seem arbitrary, blank—sound carved out of nothing, hieroglyphic, shells. The voice from deep within one’s self, set lodged there, of an other, toned out through the lengthy corridors of skin. The speech, particularly in passing into others, might not come out as you’d meant, or even at all, in the range or urge of your intention for standing in a room. Contact with bodies is someone else’s. Machines learn to trick you. Lights are loud—and the night, its saddened trick like someone placing a blanket over the cage in which for all these years you’ve been, inside yourself, corralled—room to room to room forever, mazes in a map, inside a video game made of air and buildings, no beginning and no end.
The default thought in light of all this, again, is to try to think of nothing. We are told, in sleep trouble studies, to try to clear our mind, to feel the stress and ideas pouring down out of our body. Silence. You’re supposed to let everything go. The idea of thinking of nothing then quickly becomes the thought of trying to think of nothing, and the thought of that, and that. So begins the landslide, as to think of nothing is to think of everything at all. White space screams, “Complete me.” Silence waits for how it will be filled. The very expectation of this nowhere coming on in definition works harder than any particular thing itself, filling around the want of blank with a hot vacuum, magnetizing mind.
In “Nothing: A Preliminary Account,” Donald Barthelme approaches nothing’s endless explanation by presenting a list of things nothing is not. “It’s not the yellow curtains. Nor curtain rings. Nor is it bran in a bucket, not bran. . . .” The list goes on in loops of undefinition, hurrying itself forward to pack in more and more of nothing in the short remainder of our time, until soon, pages later, at all points failing to complete the list, it finds itself speaking of itself: “But if we cannot finish, we can at least begin. If what exists is in each case the totality of the series of appearances which manifests it, then nothing must be characterized in terms of its non-appearances, no-shows, incorrigible tardiness. Nothing is what keeps us waiting (forever).” The elucidation ends, again, opening unto identity via blank, here made ominous in the knowledge that before any kind of such expectation could be completed, the duration of our lives here must end, which Barthelme again negates in his final iteration, “Nothing is not a nail.” So here again is endless branching, reaching unto nothing and finding exactly that over and again where it is not, and again we feel exhausted and have gone nowhere, though perhaps in the meantime we have bumped up against some light.
John Cage reckons this silent, destructive expanse of nothing one step further in his “Lecture On Nothing,” which opens with its own collapse:
I am here , and there is nothing to say
This sort of nothing, though, has definition, structure, interior lattice, flow:
there are silences and the
words make help make the
silences .
This space of time is organized
.
Cage’s simultaneous acknowledgement of the nothing’s presence, and, within that presence, a nameless architecture that both makes the utterance futile and gives it shape, lend to the entire program a kind of noiseless pressure, an expectation both of the nothing itself and where the nothing seems to lean toward a break. The lecture continues in this strange progression, asking questions with no answers that then turn the frame onto itself, acknowledging the circular, independent, vexing, self-destructing mirror-hole of time. Each confrontation of the silence and its hidden, underlying structure evoke in the wandering field that is created a kind of insistence of the necessity of this blanking for the self’s manifestation in the face of void: a pattern in the arbitrary that
The default thought in light of all this, again, is to try to think of nothing. We are told, in sleep trouble studies, to try to clear our mind, to feel the stress and ideas pouring down out of our body. Silence. You’re supposed to let everything go. The idea of thinking of nothing then quickly becomes the thought of trying to think of nothing, and the thought of that, and that. So begins the landslide, as to think of nothing is to think of everything at all. White space screams, “Complete me.” Silence waits for how it will be filled. The very expectation of this nowhere coming on in definition works harder than any particular thing itself, filling around the want of blank with a hot vacuum, magnetizing mind.
In “Nothing: A Preliminary Account,” Donald Barthelme approaches nothing’s endless explanation by presenting a list of things nothing is not. “It’s not the yellow curtains. Nor curtain rings. Nor is it bran in a bucket, not bran. . . .” The list goes on in loops of undefinition, hurrying itself forward to pack in more and more of nothing in the short remainder of our time, until soon, pages later, at all points failing to complete the list, it finds itself speaking of itself: “But if we cannot finish, we can at least begin. If what exists is in each case the totality of the series of appearances which manifests it, then nothing must be characterized in terms of its non-appearances, no-shows, incorrigible tardiness. Nothing is what keeps us waiting (forever).” The elucidation ends, again, opening unto identity via blank, here made ominous in the knowledge that before any kind of such expectation could be completed, the duration of our lives here must end, which Barthelme again negates in his final iteration, “Nothing is not a nail.” So here again is endless branching, reaching unto nothing and finding exactly that over and again where it is not, and again we feel exhausted and have gone nowhere, though perhaps in the meantime we have bumped up against some light.
John Cage reckons this silent, destructive expanse of nothing one step further in his “Lecture On Nothing,” which opens with its own collapse:
I am here , and there is nothing to say
This sort of nothing, though, has definition, structure, interior lattice, flow:
there are silences and the
words make help make the
silences .
This space of time is organized
.
Cage’s simultaneous acknowledgement of the nothing’s presence, and, within that presence, a nameless architecture that both makes the utterance futile and gives it shape, lend to the entire program a kind of noiseless pressure, an expectation both of the nothing itself and where the nothing seems to lean toward a break. The lecture continues in this strange progression, asking questions with no answers that then turn the frame onto itself, acknowledging the circular, independent, vexing, self-destructing mirror-hole of time. Each confrontation of the silence and its hidden, underlying structure evoke in the wandering field that is created a kind of insistence of the necessity of this blanking for the self’s manifestation in the face of void: a pattern in the arbitrary that
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