Saturday, February 22, 2020

Chinjenming

“‘Nothing’ is the force / That renovates the world—“

Ancient Captain Obvious,
My own ancestral spirit,
The residue of humans
Giving each other advice
About how to be human

(Which, when you think about it,
Is rather fascinating—
Either we need help being
What we are or we compete
By misdirecting others)

Never really existed,
That golden man, the great sage.
He emerged, like a fable,
From the clay of grave cliches.
To be human, be a ghost.

We’re always making nothing
From something, a new nothing,
A freshly labeled item,
A name—emptiness, the void,
Homer, Zoroaster, God—

And then producing, presto,
This nothing that is something
As the author of something
Where before there was nothing—
Number lines, infinities,

Epics, monotheisms,
The entire, damned universe.
It’s a trick where the rabbit
Produces an empty hat.
We need not-being to be,

Could not even hope to think
Clearly about what is not
Until we had a symbol
For not as something that is,
When something is what it’s not.

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