By the Late John Brockman (11 page)

I’m going out of my mind. I’m trying to hold on to my body, my life. It’s a horrifying
experience.

“We had thought to control it by assigning it a meaning, but the world has only, little
by little, lost all its life.”
⁴⁶
Man is dead. It’s not enough to perish. One has to become unintelligible, almost
ridiculous.

“No sign of life but life, itself, the presence of the intelligible in that which
is created as its symbol.”
⁴⁷
Life is a knowledge, not an existence. Life is not lived, it is known. Known: not
experienced. Imagine, you had an experience.

Disposable world. A reality of “decreation: to make something created pass into the
uncreated.”
⁴⁸
“Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the
revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers.”
⁴⁹

To make something created pass into the uncreated: no action, but realization. All
created things are dead things. They belong to the world. “We participate in the creation
of the world by decreating ourselves,”
⁵⁰
by peopling the world with the dead images of mankind.

The created world is a world of waste, of life. And life is the elimination of what
is dead. We give names to things that can’t be named: we create life, we create death.
Creation: the waste system. “Life is the elimination of what is dead.”
⁵¹

All these things. All these people. All these places. All this waste, this garbage:
it’s me. There was never anyone, anyone but me, anything but me, talking to me of
me.
⁵²
“When I dream and invent without a backward glance, am I not . . . Nature?”
⁵³

Dispense with the notion of nature: a creative power that makes something from nothing.
Nature is scenery built up by man. Man is dead. The unity is unitless. There is no
continuity, no accretion, no incremental serial advances, no depth. There is no nature.
There was never anyone but me talking to me of me. No nature: just a nature created
in what it says.

Dismiss yourself. Man is dead. There’s no nature but “a fall, into the state of nature.
The spirit, the human essence, hides, buried in the natural object: ‘projected’ . . .
the death of gods and the birth of poetry.”
⁵⁴
A nature created in what it says.

“Each herb and each tree, mountain, hill, earth and sea, cloud, meteor and star, are
men seen afar.”
⁵⁵
There are no external points of support in reality. The unity is unitless: this is
not just a rival to an objective reality. There is no real world: it is an illusion.
The unity is unitless. This is the whole truth, and it can only be apprehended through
its contrast with the illusion, the real world. Thus, “man perceives in the world
only what already lies within him; but to perceive what lies within him, man needs
the world.”
⁵⁶

Take the real out of the world and put it back where it belongs, where it always has
been: realization. Any system that attempts to base a pattern of thought, or a linguistic
practice, on some independent foundation in reality, is impossible. Any system is
impossible. If these systems “need any justification, it must lie within them, because
there are no independent points of support outside them. That kind of objectivism
is an illusion, produced, no doubt, by the reassuring character of explanation, which
is that any support that is needed comes from the center, man himself.”
⁵⁷

But the center has dissolved. Man is dead: the great explainer, the great explanation.
He has lost the center: he was the center, the whole in which he was contained. There
can be no more explanations, no more worlds.

There is no center, no source. You can’t explain what isn’t there. Metaphysical I,
nonphysical I: it’s “the fault of pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for
me, all the trouble comes from that.”
⁵⁸

No center, no source, no whole, no one: and now no me. What in the world do you do?
“It’s a lot to expect of one creature that he should first behave as if he were not,
then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is
not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.”
⁵⁹

The physical world is no longer real. That rational, reasoned, objective world of
classical science and humanistic thought is now positively mystical and occult. “Combat
all rationalist dogmas that stand in the way of a metaphysical universe.”
⁶⁰
Man is dead. Metaphysical I instead. Not reality, but realization. Dismiss yourself.
Let go: there’s nothing lost.

This is the age of unimportance. Reject world. Reject external reality: reject internal
reality. Say no to yourself, to your great truths, to your great men, to your great
books.

Not revelations of belief, not the Capital Letters: Truth, God, Freedom, Justice,
Will . . . but the precious portents of our own powers: the limits of my language
mean the limits of my world. Finite man: he “made a personal matter of what had before
his time been treated in dogmatic form, dominated by tradition. He had no use for
anything except evidence or observation scrupulously verified. What this amounted
to was a refusal to attach to language any value derived merely from people or books
. . . his self tipped the balance.”
⁶¹

No more great men, no more great books: his self tipped the balance. His realization
was the balance: is the balance. But in a finite world, even the self is denied, reduced
to an object. No more great men, no more great books . . . no more importance. Deny
your “own validity . . . Surrender to the flux, to the drift towards a new and unthinkable
order.”
⁶²
“Uproot yourself. Uproot yourself, socially and vegetatively. Exile yourself from
every earthly country.”
⁶³

No: negation is the only way, there is no way. The universe must be created out of
all, not created from nothing. Created by negation for creating or not creating changes
nothing. Changes nothing because all created things are unreal: are nothing. Negation
is the only way: no.

Finite man: he says no to everything in order to get at himself. Yet he’s not alive,
he’s not himself. He lives in his image: the unreal.

What is: is other things. Man is dead. He lives in his image: the unreal. “How can
anyone be what one is? No sooner does the question occur to us than it takes us out
of ourselves, and at once we see how impossible we are. Immediately we are astonished
at being someone, at the absurdity of every individual fact of existence, at the curious
effect of seeing our acts beliefs and persons duplicated; everything human is too
human—an oddity, a delusion, a reflex, a nonsense. The system of conventions becomes
comic, sinister, unbearable to think of, almost unbelievable! Laws, religion, customs,
clothes, beliefs . . . all seem curiosities, a masquerade.”
⁶⁴

Metaphysical I: of whom I know nothing. I don’t know who I am. There is no signifiable
reality. No one truth, no essence. It’s slippery: there’s nothing left to hold on
to. We are completely deprived. You are totally denied. And I: I don’t know who I
am. “It has not yet been our good fortune to establish with any degree of accuracy
what I am, where I am, whether I am words among words, or silence in the midst of
silence.”
⁶⁵

I: words among words or silence in the midst of silence. The final answer will be
in the transcendence of all categories, of all names: the death of the word. But this
can’t be so: there is no transcendence: no answer. World is finite: there is no distinction
between observation and its object. Not reality, but realization. Transcendence belongs
to the real, infinite world: reality. But there can be no transcendence of realization:
no distinction between observation and its object. No differentiation: there was never
anyone but me talking to me of me. And me: I go where the words go: nowhere. There
is no final perfection, no answer. No one.

“Our kind of innovation consists not in the answers, but in the true novelty of the
questions themselves; in the statement of problems, not in their solutions.”
⁶⁶
What is important is not “to illustrate a truth—or even an interrogation—known in
advance, but to bring to the world certain interrogations . . . not yet known as such
to themselves.”
⁶⁷

A total synthesis of all human knowledge will not result in fantastic amounts of data,
or in huge libraries filled with books. There’s no value any more in amount, in quantity,
in explanation. For a total synthesis of human knowledge, use the interrogative. Ask
the most subtle sensibilities in the world what questions they are asking themselves.

The words have no author. “There are words better without an author, without a poet,
or having a separate author, a different poet, an accretion from ourselves, intelligent,
beyond intelligence, an artificial man.”
⁶⁸
The words have no author. The book is a lie. It’s a performance: by a reader. Reader
is a comfort word and the author has no intention of its meaning. Author is a comfort
word and the author has no intention of its meaning.

An accretion from ourselves, intelligent, by an intelligence, an artificial man. Unreal
realization: “freedom is like a man who kills himself each night, an incessant butcher.”
⁶⁹
Artificial man’s not himself: unreal realization. He is revealed, secularized as
a thing, an object. “He has lost the whole in which he was contained.”
⁷⁰
He has shed his human clothes.

Just as the ancients peopled the universe, we have set out to empty it of all life.
It’s a finite world of words: there is no life in man, there is no existence in things,
there is no evolution in nature. Man is dead: “drowned in the depth of things (of
himself), man ultimately no longer even perceives them: his role is soon limited to
experiencing, in their name, totally humanized impressions and desires.”
⁷¹
But there is no depth in things. Words are what count: the word must be the thing
it represents. Words are finite: there can be no depth, no interiority.

There’s no perfection in humanity. Man was considered the perfect center in a world
of infinite things, infinite depth. But man has been rooted out of his human home,
disallowed his humanistic habit. Man is dead: he is “thinged,” he is artificial: he
mocks his own meaning, he’s not to be believed.

But humanism attempts “to recover
everything
, including whatever attempts to retrace its limits, even to impugn it as a whole.”
⁷²
No matter what: there is man and his nature. And “a common nature must be the eternal
answer to the single question of our civilization—only one possible answer to everything:
man.”
⁷³

This humanistic attitude is considered the inevitable attitude of the emancipated
and instructed man. But answers are no answer: there’s no perfection in humanity.
“Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal, whose nature is absolutely constant.”
⁷⁴
A veritable object. “Man is a sick animal:” to think he can be cured is to “imprison
him in the disease.”
⁷⁵

What was an animal? It is the human that is alien, the human that has a cousin on
the moon, “the human that demands speech from beasts and the incommunicable mass.”
⁷⁶

The mass. The human mass. The impossible agglomerate mass. The incommunicable human
mass. The people. “From their places masses move, stark as laws. Masses of what? One
does not ask. There somewhere man is too, vast conglomerate of all of nature’s kingdoms,
as lonely and as bound.”
⁷⁷
The impossible people.

The mass is nothing: the people aren’t. It’s the human that is alien. Man is dead:
the men have no shadows. “A man is a result, a demonstration.”
⁷⁸
An unreal realization.

I am out of my mind. Beyond the I to something else. A place of nothing else and no
beyond. I am out of my mind. Deprived even of my I. The I which becomes merely a more
immediate object in the wasteland of objects. And “the role of objects is to restore
silence, for objects are no more real than the words that are their habit.”
⁷⁹
I am out of my mind: am I words in the midst of words or silence in the midst of
silence.

The narrator is gone. The universe as a narrative story isn’t there. Evolution as
a narrative story never happened: words are what matter. Evolution is a matter of
the words used to describe it. There is no continuous, infinite, evolving world-universe-nature-knowledge
waiting to be explained by man. It’s a word of words: a nature created in what it
says.

The universe isn’t there. Man is dead. But “I can find no way of escape from what
is not! Speech so fills us, fills everything with its images that we cannot think
how to begin to refrain from imagining—nothing is without it . . . Remember that tomorrow
is a myth, that the universe is one; that numbers, love, the real and the infinite
. . . that justice, the people, poetry . . . the earth itself are myths.”
⁸⁰
The universe isn’t there. It is.

Don’t believe any of this. Place no value in the book, in the author. “Private authorship
or ownership is not to be respected. It is all one book.”
⁸¹
Give it up, the idea of an author, of truth. Give up all belief: believe only in
yourself. You: your experience is my experience. Me: “it’s of me now that I must speak,
even if I have to do it with their language.”
⁸²
Them: “I slip into them . . . it is a stratum, strata, without debris or vestiges.
But it’s a world filled with debris and vestiges: before I am done I shall find traces
of what was.”
⁸³
What was: is me, “never anyone but me talking to me of me, in words, made of words,
other’s words, what others . . . the whole world is here with me.”
⁸⁴
Me: I don’t. I don’t believe any of this.