By Mitchell Kooh
In the beginning there was the word and the word was No. And no was naught was nothing and nothing was f o r m l e s s So nothing was the beginning. That’s how it usually is. Nothings into somethings. And by this declension into madness.
Void
darkness
nothing
something
everything
The beginning was the word and everything was No-thing because “No” was the onlything. If nothing is everything—the onlything—then everything is A thing. Everything must exist because nothing IS everything. Or something like that… And then something from nothing became some things from no things. Things become OTHERs and our selves come from suchthings.
I am, so other things must Be.
I am. Or at least, I think I am to think therefore I am. I think too much, I think. That’s what I think, but what do They think? Too little, too small, too big, too broad, too narrow? Too repetitively, redundantly, adjectivally adverbial. Ambition declining on passivity lurching forth from pride or excess of humbleness framed in verbosity.
[yes *that’s me!*]
Ideas bursting from man and God and love: stories aching to be told. By me? “But you don’t know anything” They say to Us. And They came from others came from us came from something come from nothing (weren’t you paying attention?).
Words words words. These words are not mine. Others speak them, and I listen. I submit my Self to them, to They, to some subjectivity.
Oh that is such an overused word, don’t You agree?
Way back in my beginning there was a word, and that word was No. That word is mine, but now it’s yours too. You. You is new, not like me or they or us or others. Not an abstraction of concepts or a cluster of insensible words. The numbness of me is nothing to you. You are the thing. The king is a thing of nothing to him, but you are everything to you, as I to me. Do you follow me? Yea, you necessarily follow me insofar as me is I and you follows me by alphabetical ordination. That clears things up I hope. Never wholly clear though. The inherent limitations of sentences, words, quirky qwerty particles on paper. Sentences strung in dainty order, words invented catalogued in wiki’s, letters arbitrarily Capitalized to delineate Meaning. What meaning? Man’s ‘Meaning,’ meaning the meaning of mean meaning little, is his mean understanding of the thing. Always striving to give us the thing rendered in words becoming of things. This is the ever-present peril. To morph the form, expression, suit it all to his conceit, to borrow phrases, borrow characters, borrow styles, break them down and toss them away, having to start from scratch and modernize everything, change all forms, radicalize, demonize, sensationalize, bowdlerize, mirror word to thought and thought to action, imitating the streams, modes, and expressions of consciousness, only to burn everything to the ground again.
And in case you’re an idiot and didn’t notice, I quote from Hamlet a lot (sorry, that was mean. We shouldn’t call you names [wait, what the ____ who’s this “we” character? We haven’t met him yet, have we? {oh shut up me, it’s alright, we is cool <ok, if you say so I>}]).
It’s impossible, to capture the thing in a word, the essence of a moment. To get any closer to the actual thing. Writing is only the expression of a thing, the thing an expansion itself of the Word. The word being No thing, it cannot be expressed in all these pretty somethings. As long as I keep telling you that, it doesn’t matter that “I” am nothing but words, words themselves being nothing, nothing being something, that something that nothing is being a word. A word to embody an idea (imagination being but the prettiest of all words). And in the end, words are no closer to describing the eye of God than the eye of corn. Que sera sera, sirrah.
In the beginning there was the word, and the word was.
But now I’m too meta for all these words (Just read the title!). Imma just go walk across my room and eat my goddam peach.