President Kennedy's Assassination & No-thingness

[Albert Rossi]

Will Western Civilization die in a Bangkok closet in the Kung Fu bag of the Kardashians

This MUST go to the hall of fame of Phil Dragoo all-time classics. In fact, put it on the silver pillow, in a glass case. I don't even think David Carradine would mind...much. And, to answer the (perhaps rhetorical) question, I don't think it'd be a bad thing. At all.

I call your Zappa and raise you a Win Butler:

Between the click of the light and the start of the dream
Us kids know
there's a place where no cars go

Stan & Phil: dig it!

So, here I go, risking pretentiousness again.

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Phil, the Escher reference is well-chosen and astute, not only as a way of capturing my previous statement about loop-back and intention, but because the only way to make sense of the visual-logical paradox is by jumping out of the frame, to a higher dimension. In fact, the idea of escaping the frames is itself thematically represented.

Now, given that literary allusions abound, I thought I'd add another. One of my favorite American poets, Wallace Stevens, is concerned throughout his corpus with the frames of perception: "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Anecdote of the Jar", "Of Mere Being" ... to cite but a few of the more well-known poems. But perhaps his most Basho-like is this one, about dissolving subject/object boundaries, about having a "mind of winter" to see the winter for what it is.

The Snow Man

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.

I don't think we can really enlist Wallace Stevens into the ranks of Deep Political Thought, but I couldn't resist the temptation to drop this text into our reflections on no-thing.