Unmargined Evasion

Here's the thing, Scientist and Believer, and I've come to believe you are one in the same...There is nothing at the beginning and there is no beginning. Finding out, via Large Hadron Collider that there really is some theoretical particle that only exists in the world of super colliders will tell you nothing about the nothing that is. In other words, what comes "before"--what is first; philosophy, certain branches at least, want to know this too...what is the first-mover; believers in a god are simplest, they don't want to want to know; they want to believe they already know and forget about it.

The last is most sane.  There is no way of knowing...done. And thinking about it creates madness. Really, try it. Imagine there's a "Big Bang" but don't worry about the why and how of it. The thing you are confronted with first is "that's not a beginning from nothing...there are somethings banging..."  Then you're stuck.  No answer.

Here are some responses to that answerlessness.

***

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

From Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-lighted Place."

***

"The Snowman" by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

***

Here is my own "nothing that is."


(“For that you need a Sistrunk.”
Welty’s Ponder)

That’s a tough sucker he says
Digging and scraping at the spot
Raised black on her back
His liver-spotted too-thick hands
Surface mine a determined
Category of anomaly
He deposits the ore as categorically
(pyritically malapropped)
He is a daughter’s grandfather
Benign in his demeanor and classification
Intending a routinized good
Freezing will arrest the reactive
wounding.

Secreted by scarring
A residually unmargined evasion
This diminution in particulate
Persisting inviolate
A dynamic violation
Becoming a newness
Sustaining an unknowing
Unknown inalienable you
A meta state of unbeing
Tomorrow and tomorrow
And tomorrow
And
And
And
And
…
..
.