WEBVTT

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The other thing I
would like to read

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is from the title section,
Driven To Abstraction,

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which is really a kind of--

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well, for one thing, it's
based on a wonderful book

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by Brian Rothman, called
Signifying Nothing,

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or A Semiology of Zero.

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And it's a book about how
the introduction of zero

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really changed our
civilization and goes together

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with the introduction
of perspective,

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and also, with the changes
in carrying gold around

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to having written
promises, and finally,

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paper money, these kinds of
processes of abstraction.

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And this fascinated me.

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And also because
I'm very ambivalent,

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I know this abstraction
is very necessary and also

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very exciting.

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But at the same time,
I want the body.

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And I want the concrete physical
things, especially in writing.

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So anyway, I stole
the whole structure

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of the book and
many quotes from it.

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And so what I'm going to
read is the first section,

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which is called The One
Who Counts, Who Paints,

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Who Buys and Sells.

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And the first poem
is directly on zero.

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"Zero, the Corrosive Number."

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"Impossible.

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Without the idea of
counting, to imagine numbers,

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repeating an identical act, a
particular mark, over and over.

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Like languages that
express a plural

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by repeating the singular, or a
man with a woman, and another,

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and a third, a fourth.

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Et cetera prolongs its shadow,
its mathematical imperative,

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the idea that ceaselessly
a string of beads,

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of follies, of
particulars, elementary.

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As long as the momentum zero,
as trace of one who counts,

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is under the spell of women,
naked, infinite progressions,

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delirious possibility,
offspring.

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I dig a hole, he said.

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And then dig
another, and fill it

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with a soil I took
out of the first hole.

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A system of numbers, instead,
ties a knot around nothing,

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of abbreviations, conventions
of syntax and grammar,

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conventions instead of notch,
tally mark, a pebble, instead

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of.

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Thou shalt not make unto the any
image, no likeness of a thing,

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no catalog of ships,
no list of wars.

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Imagine counting emptiness.

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Fearless, the mountain
people cross the abyss

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on a flimsy bridge, finger
the empty space on the abacus,

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has no value, but
colors what's around it.

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Like a premonition,
not just other numbers

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into place, origin,
and starting point,

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position without precedent,
as if being in the world

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without being born.

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Once we have eaten of the fruit,
we cannot be like one who has

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not, cannot vomit up the fruit
and kill the ox that drank

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the water that put out the fire
that burnt the stick that beat

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the dog that bit the cat that
ate the serpent that crushed

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the coordinates."

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The next one is
"Invention of Infinity." .

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"If zero marks the
place of one who counts,

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then perspective of
the one who sees,

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who casts his shadow,
whose soul takes flight

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for the point of view,
of anchor, of vanishing,

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more as in deaths
than like a bird.

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And from the distance
watches appearance

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shed its way, the way a flame
leaps up to meet another flame.

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And an alarm goes off, and
his soul returns to his body

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with increase of temperature
and a pinch of salt.

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And memory uncoils
into fresco and secco,

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like a bud into a leaf,
lest it, God forbid,

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be consumed by the fire.

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Yet even its charred
residue can, by the method

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called spolvero
comfort the space

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your wife's face had been, for
being so deep and empty now.

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In Gothic paintings,
however, different places,

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different historical
moments impinge

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without traffic
jam on one another,

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because enfolded
in the eye of God.

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And out of these
very simple images,

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so very holy, shrines a
spaceless, noiseless sun.

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And you dare not stare too long,
because your vision thereafter

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might not refer to
objects in the world.

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The way Nicholas of
Cusa thought a portrait

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could float a monk
towards things divine,

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if the eye in the
portrait held him.

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And so he walked from east
to west, did not leave him.

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Then he will marvel
how motionless

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the eye moves, and
in like manner,

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moves for one who walks
a contrary direction.

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Then he won't be able to contain
such hallucinary intensity,

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anymore than light in a bowl.

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The icon of God
such an image was

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called, because like unto
the gaze that never quit us,

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just as the gold in the
halo, precious and immutable

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as he is, could
shelter his presence

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without annulling
his transcendence.

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And if you understood, you'd be
delivered from this congenital.

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But Alberti urged, in
his treatise on painting,

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to reject God in favor
of white, to show

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the structure of holiness.

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Being both color and
absence of color,

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white performs for God's
presence what the vanishing

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point does for his image,
the artist, and your memory,

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for his image, your wife.

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But more than you want to
see your dead wife's face,

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you yearn to touch
her body and try

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to find her touch in the hand
that hands you a loaf of bread.

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But haunting is
stopped by cold skin.

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And the third one
is "Bank Money."

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Is there a measure on Earth?

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Gold was thought to be
the standard against which

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to gauge, not a color
that vanishes in the dark,

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unchanged as it replaces the
ox, the loaf of bread, the bean.

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No pricing system
stays the light

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on a face, even remembered.

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So the gold of the
sun accelerates up,

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circulating in the leaf.

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And makes a wooden
table smell of forest

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and recall broken weeping.

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And butter melts in the mouth.

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Gold was precious
before some prince

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stamped his effigy upon it
and returns to what it was.

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So what does the act
of signifying add?

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A level of abstraction higher?

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As the human soul is said
to emerge into the world

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with, at bottom, the
spirit of an animal,

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but reaches up through the
majesty of the revealed word

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toward high up the
sphere of nothingness,

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from which all words emanate.

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It's still our bottom we sit on.

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Time moves through matter,
and matter decomposes.

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The edge of the leaf curls
and yellows, the skin sags.

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A gap arises between good
money, the unsullied issue

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of the state, and the worn or
fraudulently diminished coins

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in circulation, between face
value and the frayed contours

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of a face in memory,
a little more dead.

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Because of this gap,
a new form of money

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emerged in renaissance states
with international trade,

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like Venice and Amsterdam.

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Not currency in the old sense,
but a promise, stretching time,

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imaginary coin, a
difference between

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is and means worthy
of wars of religion.

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Its value globally a fixed
rate of gold or silver,

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and locally, a variable amount
of gold money exchangeable

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for it, bank money, exact to the
standard of the mint, the mind.

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And with it, a new type
of transaction, money

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bought and sold, entering
into relations with itself,

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as if it too could
insert the mirror,

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but without reflection or
light gathered against it,

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without the glow of an apple
against the darker leaves,

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without hold on feeling.

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And then comes sort
of an interlude

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on where I sort of think about
my own ambivalence and writing.

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Middle English grammary,
grammar, or book learning,

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came to mean occult
or magical lore,

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and through one
Scottish dialect form,

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has emerged in our
present English as glamor,

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spell cast by women.

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Grammar girls, with words that
spell power, and cast spells,

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and provoke matter.

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So a black panther
treads at my side

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and above my fingers there
float petal-like flames, words

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with a nimbus, a glory,
a sphere of radiance,

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beyond the horizon
called definition.

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But writing is the tool of the
negative, through which meaning

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comes to us.

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Effortlessly, it
burns all substance

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off the blue shapes in
the east to a density

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less than thinnest clouds, the
word hills without body, so

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with forum, therefore,
not like God.

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And nothing that foams
on the inks plate.

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The word's power to kill.

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And I'm not thinking a white
gloved White House memos.

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It's violence against
what it names.

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But it can name only by
taking away its materiality,

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destroying its presence.

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Is death itself speaking?

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Or is it?

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If the word both kills
and shows a certain slant

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of light on Sunday
afternoons, that we'd

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search in vain anywhere else?

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If the word horse boils the
animal down to the concept,

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and yet, in the way of hunger,
hallucinates four legs, a mane,

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and folds of flesh,
then maybe this death

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is not a simple matter, and
must hold a kind of life,

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the way fog holds light.

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Some say it's because
the daughters of the gods

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came down from the heavens
and mated with humans

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that the order of the world
was thrown out of joint

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and opposites became entangled.

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So that, without out
the letter that kills,

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there is, perhaps, no
spirit to give life?

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Thank you.

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[AUDIENCE CLAPPING]

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