Notes on Nothing.

You are walking down the street but nothing is familiar. You are a child who left her parents too soon; a brat, a blank subject. You are the violence of mourning objects which you no longer want. You are the end of desire. You would not be this nothing if it wasn’t for courtliness. In other words, religion, morality, and ideology are the purification and repression of your nothing. In other words, romance is a memory of nothing which won’t take no for an answer and fills the hole with a something called metaphor, which is what writers use so they won’t be frightened to death: to nothing. You ransack authority by stealing the works of others, but you are a sloppy copyist because fidelity would make you less of a nothing. You say you are an unloved infidel. When you are the most nothing you say “I want you inside of me.” And when you are even more nothing you say “Hit me harder so I won’t feel it.” As a kind of formal exercise, you become a murderer without a corpse, a lover without an object, a corpse without a murderer. Your quick change artistry is a crafty dance of guises: coverups for that which you know best: nothing. And all the books, sex, movies, charm bracelets, and dope in the world can’t cover up this nothing. And you know this because you are a librarian, a whore, a director, a jeweler, and a dealer. Who’s selling what to whom? Supply and demand mean nothing. People talk and you don’t listen. Explicits are unimportant, as they lessen the weight of meaninglessness to the lascivious reductions to gossip. You prefer to engage the in-between, the flux-point which skews the notion of a constituted majority, questioning it as a vehicle for even that most exalted of father figures, the theorist. He hesitantly places his hand on your belly as if he were confronting the gelatinously unpleasant threat of a jellyfish and decrees you a kind of molecular hodgepodge, a desire-breaching minority. You turn to him slowly and say “Goo-goo.” He swoons at the absence-like presence of what he calls your naive practices: “the banality of the everyday, the apoliticalness of sexuality, your insignificantly petty wiles, your petty perversions.” You are his “asocial universe which refuses to enter into the dialectic of representation” and contradicts utter nothingness and death with only the neutrality of a respirator or a rhythm machine. Goo-goo. But you are not really nothing: more like something not recognized as a thing, which, like the culture that produced it, is an accumulation of death in life. A veritable map and vessel of deterioration which fills your writing like a warm hand slipping into a glove on a crisp winter’s morn. And like the exile who asks not “Who am I?” but “Where am I?”, the motor of your continuance is exclusion: from desire, from the sound of your own voice, and from the contractual agreements foisted upon you by the law. Order in the court, the monkey wants to speak. He talks so sweet and strong, I have to take a nap. Goo-goo.