By the Late John Brockman Page 6
I: a noun. I am: noun’d. Existence is being: noun’d. To be or not to be: noun’d. Universe as finite: negation of the noun: no things: nothing.
Coupling: irreversible: noninterchangeable. “If you came this way, / Taking any route, starting from anywhere, / At any time or at any season, / It would always be the same: you would have to put off / Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, / Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity / or carry report.”60
Coupling of observer-observed system is finite: the observational process is irreversible. “Physical knowledge is of an observational nature, in the sense that each item is an assertion of the result of an observation, actual or hypothetical.”61 “The study of coupling between observer and observed system, between man and physics, will probably oblige us to revise the notion of value and to dissociate it from that of scarcity.”62 “Value is in activity.”63 Physical phenomena: a verb. Value is not to be found in scarcity of people, things, ideas, etc. Physical phenomena: the irreversible coupling: a verb. “Only the final sum matters.”64 The computation assumes the history of the system in its expression. “Physical science consists of purely structural knowledge, so that we know only the structure of the universe which it describes. For strict expression of physical knowledge a mathematical form is essential, because it is the only way in which we can confine its assertions to structural knowledge. Every path to knowledge of what lies beneath the structure is then blocked by an impenetrable mathematical symbol.”65
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.
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?