substack
(p.s. drag me!!!!!)
After-Dinner Hours
and
there were other things, too, things
like how I couldn’t imagine myself at thirty.
And most of my problems circled back
to the manifestation technique, or rather,
the inability to visualize, myself, at thirty. I felt
in this psychic fallacy of mine a kind of lofty maxim.
Kant’s Table Of Nothing cleared up some dispute.
A particular class of “nothing” can be intuited
as form-having, and form-having then intuits exist-having.
Anyway, she said I was the most Beautiful Woman
she’d ever seen. Anyway, this tattoo has started to stretch out
ever since my stomach’s been giving out. Space
is not something that is made up. It has dimensionality,
like stars and planets and stuff, a kind of depth
that can be measured. Potentially. It’s hard to give form
to things, and then to measure them in retrospect. I loosely
think about how everything must seem so much bigger
from out there. Earth through a magnifying glass. Earth
as mammoth. I can’t really see it—the idea of nothing
intuitively made into a kind of blackness, a starry-ness, a mess
of chunks and rock and fire and all. I can’t see myself suspended
in that intuitive blackness, starry-ness, nothing-ness, at thirty.
There’s a fourth kind of nothing that Kant asserts, a nihil negativum.
A combination of contradictory contradictions: empty object and empty concept,
he says. A nothing of a nothing. When retrospective measurement yields zilch.
When the dinner table is not only cleared of food and crumbs, but is missing
plates, missing glasses, missing the table in and of itself. What is it
to not be able to fathom neither the curve of the three, of the zero, too,
nor the age itself—the kids, the guy, maybe, the house and job
and something fleshy some might call beautiful. Woman is something
of a concept, yet within myself there’s often an abundance of air, absent
table settings. A lack within a lack. A lack means there once was,
someone dear once told me. That moment of sitting at the table
once everyone’s finished. Once everyone’s gone. Once everything’s
been cleared. Once you find that you’ve actually been squatting
on the floor. Once you hear your stomach growl with a searing kind of vacuity.
like how I couldn’t imagine myself at thirty.
And most of my problems circled back
to the manifestation technique, or rather,
the inability to visualize, myself, at thirty. I felt
in this psychic fallacy of mine a kind of lofty maxim.
Kant’s Table Of Nothing cleared up some dispute.
A particular class of “nothing” can be intuited
as form-having, and form-having then intuits exist-having.
Anyway, she said I was the most Beautiful Woman
she’d ever seen. Anyway, this tattoo has started to stretch out
ever since my stomach’s been giving out. Space
is not something that is made up. It has dimensionality,
like stars and planets and stuff, a kind of depth
that can be measured. Potentially. It’s hard to give form
to things, and then to measure them in retrospect. I loosely
think about how everything must seem so much bigger
from out there. Earth through a magnifying glass. Earth
as mammoth. I can’t really see it—the idea of nothing
intuitively made into a kind of blackness, a starry-ness, a mess
of chunks and rock and fire and all. I can’t see myself suspended
in that intuitive blackness, starry-ness, nothing-ness, at thirty.
There’s a fourth kind of nothing that Kant asserts, a nihil negativum.
A combination of contradictory contradictions: empty object and empty concept,
he says. A nothing of a nothing. When retrospective measurement yields zilch.
When the dinner table is not only cleared of food and crumbs, but is missing
plates, missing glasses, missing the table in and of itself. What is it
to not be able to fathom neither the curve of the three, of the zero, too,
nor the age itself—the kids, the guy, maybe, the house and job
and something fleshy some might call beautiful. Woman is something
of a concept, yet within myself there’s often an abundance of air, absent
table settings. A lack within a lack. A lack means there once was,
someone dear once told me. That moment of sitting at the table
once everyone’s finished. Once everyone’s gone. Once everything’s
been cleared. Once you find that you’ve actually been squatting
on the floor. Once you hear your stomach growl with a searing kind of vacuity.