The other thing I would like to read
is from the title section, Driven To Abstraction,
which is really a kind of--
well, for one thing, it's based on a wonderful book
by Brian Rothman, called Signifying Nothing,
or A Semiology of Zero.
And it's a book about how the introduction of zero
really changed our civilization and goes together
with the introduction of perspective,
and also, with the changes in carrying gold around
to having written promises, and finally,
paper money, these kinds of processes of abstraction.
And this fascinated me.
And also because I'm very ambivalent,
I know this abstraction is very necessary and also
very exciting.
But at the same time, I want the body.
And I want the concrete physical things, especially in writing.
So anyway, I stole the whole structure
of the book and many quotes from it.
And so what I'm going to read is the first section,
which is called The One Who Counts, Who Paints,
Who Buys and Sells.
And the first poem is directly on zero.
"Zero, the Corrosive Number."
"Impossible.
Without the idea of counting, to imagine numbers,
repeating an identical act, a particular mark, over and over.
Like languages that express a plural
by repeating the singular, or a man with a woman, and another,
and a third, a fourth.
Et cetera prolongs its shadow, its mathematical imperative,
the idea that ceaselessly a string of beads,
of follies, of particulars, elementary.
As long as the momentum zero, as trace of one who counts,
is under the spell of women, naked, infinite progressions,
delirious possibility, offspring.
I dig a hole, he said.
And then dig another, and fill it
with a soil I took out of the first hole.
A system of numbers, instead, ties a knot around nothing,
of abbreviations, conventions of syntax and grammar,
conventions instead of notch, tally mark, a pebble, instead
of.
Thou shalt not make unto the any image, no likeness of a thing,
no catalog of ships, no list of wars.
Imagine counting emptiness.
Fearless, the mountain people cross the abyss
on a flimsy bridge, finger the empty space on the abacus,
has no value, but colors what's around it.
Like a premonition, not just other numbers
into place, origin, and starting point,
position without precedent, as if being in the world
without being born.
Once we have eaten of the fruit, we cannot be like one who has
not, cannot vomit up the fruit and kill the ox that drank
the water that put out the fire that burnt the stick that beat
the dog that bit the cat that ate the serpent that crushed
the coordinates."
The next one is "Invention of Infinity." .
"If zero marks the place of one who counts,
then perspective of the one who sees,
who casts his shadow, whose soul takes flight
for the point of view, of anchor, of vanishing,
more as in deaths than like a bird.
And from the distance watches appearance
shed its way, the way a flame leaps up to meet another flame.
And an alarm goes off, and his soul returns to his body
with increase of temperature and a pinch of salt.
And memory uncoils into fresco and secco,
like a bud into a leaf, lest it, God forbid,
be consumed by the fire.
Yet even its charred residue can, by the method
called spolvero comfort the space
your wife's face had been, for being so deep and empty now.
In Gothic paintings, however, different places,
different historical moments impinge
without traffic jam on one another,
because enfolded in the eye of God.
And out of these very simple images,
so very holy, shrines a spaceless, noiseless sun.
And you dare not stare too long, because your vision thereafter
might not refer to objects in the world.
The way Nicholas of Cusa thought a portrait
could float a monk towards things divine,
if the eye in the portrait held him.
And so he walked from east to west, did not leave him.
Then he will marvel how motionless
the eye moves, and in like manner,
moves for one who walks a contrary direction.
Then he won't be able to contain such hallucinary intensity,
anymore than light in a bowl.
The icon of God such an image was
called, because like unto the gaze that never quit us,
just as the gold in the halo, precious and immutable
as he is, could shelter his presence
without annulling his transcendence.
And if you understood, you'd be delivered from this congenital.
But Alberti urged, in his treatise on painting,
to reject God in favor of white, to show
the structure of holiness.
Being both color and absence of color,
white performs for God's presence what the vanishing
point does for his image, the artist, and your memory,
for his image, your wife.
But more than you want to see your dead wife's face,
you yearn to touch her body and try
to find her touch in the hand that hands you a loaf of bread.
But haunting is stopped by cold skin.
And the third one is "Bank Money."
Is there a measure on Earth?
Gold was thought to be the standard against which
to gauge, not a color that vanishes in the dark,
unchanged as it replaces the ox, the loaf of bread, the bean.
No pricing system stays the light
on a face, even remembered.
So the gold of the sun accelerates up,
circulating in the leaf.
And makes a wooden table smell of forest
and recall broken weeping.
And butter melts in the mouth.
Gold was precious before some prince
stamped his effigy upon it and returns to what it was.
So what does the act of signifying add?
A level of abstraction higher?
As the human soul is said to emerge into the world
with, at bottom, the spirit of an animal,
but reaches up through the majesty of the revealed word
toward high up the sphere of nothingness,
from which all words emanate.
It's still our bottom we sit on.
Time moves through matter, and matter decomposes.
The edge of the leaf curls and yellows, the skin sags.
A gap arises between good money, the unsullied issue
of the state, and the worn or fraudulently diminished coins
in circulation, between face value and the frayed contours
of a face in memory, a little more dead.
Because of this gap, a new form of money
emerged in renaissance states with international trade,
like Venice and Amsterdam.
Not currency in the old sense, but a promise, stretching time,
imaginary coin, a difference between
is and means worthy of wars of religion.
Its value globally a fixed rate of gold or silver,
and locally, a variable amount of gold money exchangeable
for it, bank money, exact to the standard of the mint, the mind.
And with it, a new type of transaction, money
bought and sold, entering into relations with itself,
as if it too could insert the mirror,
but without reflection or light gathered against it,
without the glow of an apple against the darker leaves,
without hold on feeling.
And then comes sort of an interlude
on where I sort of think about my own ambivalence and writing.
Middle English grammary, grammar, or book learning,
came to mean occult or magical lore,
and through one Scottish dialect form,
has emerged in our present English as glamor,
spell cast by women.
Grammar girls, with words that spell power, and cast spells,
and provoke matter.
So a black panther treads at my side
and above my fingers there float petal-like flames, words
with a nimbus, a glory, a sphere of radiance,
beyond the horizon called definition.
But writing is the tool of the negative, through which meaning
comes to us.
Effortlessly, it burns all substance
off the blue shapes in the east to a density
less than thinnest clouds, the word hills without body, so
with forum, therefore, not like God.
And nothing that foams on the inks plate.
The word's power to kill.
And I'm not thinking a white gloved White House memos.
It's violence against what it names.
But it can name only by taking away its materiality,
destroying its presence.
Is death itself speaking?
Or is it?
If the word both kills and shows a certain slant
of light on Sunday afternoons, that we'd
search in vain anywhere else?
If the word horse boils the animal down to the concept,
and yet, in the way of hunger, hallucinates four legs, a mane,
and folds of flesh, then maybe this death
is not a simple matter, and must hold a kind of life,
the way fog holds light.
Some say it's because the daughters of the gods
came down from the heavens and mated with humans
that the order of the world was thrown out of joint
and opposites became entangled.
So that, without out the letter that kills,
there is, perhaps, no spirit to give life?
Thank you.
[AUDIENCE CLAPPING]