If, then

Abstract beginnings

Text from “Cloud Piece” by Yoko Ono (1963-64). Courtesy of Hyperallergic.

If this crisp weather is stimulating your brain like it is mine, then you must be full of clouds too. I’ve been thinking about abstraction lately—what are the uses of being totally obtuse? Of your words always standing in for something else?

This is often a fair criticism of academics—that we are talking around something and are not brave enough to state our ideas concretely. But I wonder about using the projections of math to structure writing, of infusing literature with more possibilities than endings.

I’ve been reading Anna Kornbluh’s The Order of Forms (very, very slowly, mind you). Her argument is that all literature projects a potential new reality ... and a lot of other things I’m frankly still trying to grasp. But I was drawn to the simplicity of her opening to the chapter on “Symbolic Logic.”

At once, three propositions. Mind this form, because the arc of this chapter bends ultimately toward its own three propositions.

A. Nothing is better than eternal happiness.

B. A ham sandwich is better than nothing.

C. A ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness…

You might detect something fishy about this ham syllogism. The deduction of a conclusion from two related premises that share a common term absent from the conclusion (here, “nothing”), syllogisms are not inherently fishy—only, their being right hinges on the uniformity of the common term. Here, the signifier “nothing” in A (negative universality; there is no exception) is unequal to itself in B (negative presence; there is no nothing); not all nothings are equal, but a true syllogism requires that nothing means nothing more than what it means.

Nothing means more than what it means. Nothing means happiness? We don’t know what nothing means. Nothing means nothing. The syllogism keeps nothing going, perfectly uselessly. And this uselessness leads us down more tunnels, finding nothing to put inside of this “nothing” at the end of it—but creating, something?

“Prose Architectures 206” by Renee Gladman (2022). Courtesy of The Poetry Foundation.

I am not a mathematician, but I remember thinking back in high school that calc was beautiful—that circle of affinities on the board. Even if the idea itself didn’t make sense to me, how an absence of meaning can bring people into the fold of a most personal potential: a blobbed shape, a refracting mirror, an equation that squares in our brain and not others.

I’ll be coming here every couple weeks with hard-to-parse ideas—as trippy and naked as they are when the critical theorists and spiritual mamas deliver them to me—and seeing how I can pin them down in writing.

If you want to go deeper, I’ll be alternating these musings with writing prompts and astrology readings, some of which I hope you’ll take into your practice, fill them with your particularity, make the shape yours.

The world is so tough right now. But getting up in the clouds, my Aquarius sun would like to remind us, is not an escape. It’s a beginning, a trajectory into the thinnest part of the atmosphere, where we can hover over the beautiful strangeness of our conglomeration, figure out how to break it down.

I remember you from up there. There were orbs in your eyes, too.

I miss you already ✨