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  As Dürer draws him, he never once looks through his study’s Butzenscheiben at the world. Wary of the letter “l” (lust? love?) he holds on to the word. Should he look up he’d see. The icon of God’s death. And next a skull, terminal of his self-deprivation, warm-blooded mammal that he is, with hair on his body and nails that grow even after death.

  Miguel de Molinos, Quietist, likewise embraced nothing as a form of being. As if he could press it to his chest and lead it in a tango. And the bishops who said nothing’s not to dance with, may their name be forgotten. Killed off his will to thicken the argument. So God would have to work His own ways upon Miguel, the passive and sinless. Whose eyes were on the emptiness behind the clouds. Was this worth dying for, in a prison of the Inquisition?

  And how did Meister Eckhart escape the charge of heresy? Not only not finite, not mortal, not describable, not changeable, not temporal, not anything was his Godhead. But so far past all being that He must be. Absolute nothing. Nihte. The Nothing that is the ground of being. Not something you can hold. A here that is not here. An absence we feel and don’t feel.

  Once you open your mouth to the idea of nothing there is danger. Once you pronounce possible the absence of God you could fall through it. Then what happens to His eye on the sparrow? No. No. The void was to be (religiously) avoided.

  But zero had come and worked its mischief all through Christian Europe. And the pair of “nothing” and “everything” was too enticing to be kept under a doctrinal lid. The scientists (in the 17th century) worked hard to accommodate concepts of nothing: the physical vacuum — a hole in the life-giving plenum of air. “Empty space” — the hole in the plenum of matter. Which, like God, had been conceived as full and indivisible.

  Still a long way from what now our physicists believe, rejoining Eckhart. That nothing is the foundation of everything. That matter is constructed from it. That everything that exists is a complex enfolding of the underlying substrate of empty space. A universe of “nothing but structured nothingness.”

  so it’s nothing

  And the rabbis? In spite of the void in the beginning, not inclined to discuss it. Or other such questions. “Whoever ponders on four things, it were better for him if he had not come into the world: what is above? what is beneath? what was beforetime? what will be hereafter?” Says the Mishnah. They stuck to interpreting any other sacred text while the great winds blew from the desert and pillars of sand rose up in the air.

  Though nothing seemed, like the name of God, too fragile to be pronounced the Merkabah mystics pondered. The measure of His body. From the nails of His feet to the parting of His hair, the measure of His palm and of His toes, the dimensions of the tank He rides in, the enormous size of each of His organs, and the secret names of His limbs. And Enoch saw “the height of the Lord, without dimension or shape, and which has no end.”

  And one Day of Atonement, when the shofar sounded in the town of Guadalajara in the heart of Castile, there shone through the window of the synagogue the ten Sefiroth or names of God, through which the divine life pulsates back and forth. At the top, ain or “Nothingness,” the supreme crown of the Godhead, was veiled in vapor and light so that the other nine phases of God’s unfolding might be perpetually born and manifest. Nothing, having the same consonants as ani or “I,” said “I am that I am.” This supreme self-revelation of the fullness of His Being was received by Rabbi Moses ben Shemtob de Leon in prayer shawl, phylacteries, and complete devotion.

  What did Rabbi Moses de Leon remember seeing? A zero? A gap become visible in existence? The Godhead divided, self-conscious, saying “I” to Himself and loving this “I” as His female form? And so creating the world?

  And when night fell did Moses de Leon try to become nothing so that the words could leave his body to be put on paper? Or did he press his wife’s body to his own and say no more than was necessary? And everything happened of its own accord?

  Interlude: Thought Provoking Matter

  Middle English gramarye, 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 to 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 cloud, the word “hills.” Without body. Though with form. Therefore not like God. A nothing that foams on the inkplate.

  The word’s power to kill — I’m not thinking of white-gloved White House memos — its violence against what it names, what 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 winter 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 the letter that kills, there is no spirit to give life?

  Absence of Origin

  bonesetter’s luck: from zero to variable

  Impossible to picture nothing. Even in a mind where unicorns roam whose bodies crumble before the light. Always I find myself hiding somewhere near the edge.

  It’s not that nothing can come from nothing. Is it vanity, the delirious power of zero? Its exuberant potential? Of vanities? It manufactures (and without hands) an infinite of numbers we can barely imagine.

  And what profit has a man? Or, for that matter, a woman? Who loves the damp detour of the body? How, among infinite numbers — exceeding the grains of sand that would fill the universe — will they know each other?

  Plato’s numbers had “visible and tangible bodies” even though both his eyes were fixed on the geometric roots of the world. Dog-numbers counting dogs; sheep-numbers, sheep; and bird-numbers, a flutter of wings. The algebrista, the Spanish bonesetter, stood ready to mend damage.

  Aristotle saw abstractions, like seeing water evaporate, in his sleep. Yet still definite numbers of definite named things. A bird, a wing-blur, high, out of nothing. The vapor condenses and, in February, freezes. Dead sparrows drop from the trees.

  Zero belongs to nothing. It tells no beads or tales. It counts emptiness. To declare zero the origin is to proclaim all numbers free of refer­ence and give thanks for escape from material content. Not standing in for birds or beasts, or earrings, or guitars. Not even a cat chasing her shadow. Naked. Meaning only in relation to other signs within the system. The cat contracts her pupils and removes the picture of the world. There is no there there.

  Enter the variable. A place set at the table for Elijah. Who may come suddenly. Come in the form of a beggar. Come as a herald heralding the end of days. Or not come at all. A place which, like Space in the Timaeus, can receive all things and yet remain without character, without color, and hard to apprehend. But creates a tango of possible equations, inequalities, identities. Algebra. Any number may dance. And without fear of broken bones.

  xenomoney: from promise to tautology

  One thirty-fifth of an ounce of
gold for a dollar. The treasury was obliged. Till 1973, when the U.S. Government canceled. Such obligation. Since then exact resemblance for exact resemblance, exact same bill for exact same bill. And nothing, neither gold nor silver, in back of the mirror. (If there had been would it reveal scenes of Vietnam? Reasons of the fourfold increase in the price of oil?)

  Cut loose from any fixed equivalence, the dollar sets sail and floats off-shore on market forces. Into uncertain foreign waters and computer screens. Xenomoney.

  No more physical reality of a country to guarantee it. Xenomoney belongs to international business that trumps princes and States. No history or traceable origin. Like zero outside “natural” language. Anonymous. A bubble from no sinking ship.

  Here creditor does not know debtor. Though they are joined together in one long chain. He cannot examine balance sheets of every link. He can only bite his fingernails. And remember a river in Poland or New Jersey.

  Of course it’s long since money went beyond being pure medium of exchange and infiltrated the category of “goods.” Itself bought and sold. Both object and medium, thing and token, commodity and sign for a commodity, it signifies itself. As if a photograph could not only lose its reference to your dead wife but make you forget what is a face.

  No more “grounding” of money signs in some prior, natural thing. Just as zero did for numbers — what “thing” could zero possibly refer to? Though Mesopotamia is split crosswise and dollarwise.

  Money now creates its own significance. In the only terms available to it. Money is time. And can be bought as a financial future. According to qualities that are precisely not according. And are thought to burn open sexual parts.

  nothing and its shadow

  To be webbed with the world I turn my back on my husband’s body. I see photo-ops on a ground of oil and bourbon. And see tortured bodies. And in my head, words. Act, fact, pact, tract, intact, abstract. Hacked, racked, cracked, sacked, stacked, nackt.

  Not a painting with perspective fixed on the infinite. Which seems peaceful because nothing can matter much from such a distance. Here, through an error in localization, the racked bodies seem lodged in my own. Belie their image nature. Time, along with the heart, stops. Between one. And the other. The eye cannot superimpose them, no matter how neatly they are stacked.

  The screen image will disintegrate shortly. The bodies revert to heat. (though their traces be dated for 5730 years.) But the period where this shame remains trackable, recorded in books, could be infinite.

  Power of writing. Or toughness of paper? kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht. No thing without words, no fact before signs, no origin, no specie, no prior body? The signs I write down here preceded by signs preceded by signs? Turtles all the way down? In signs we trust. To build balconies out over the void.

  Many have thought the voice might save the body. From the abstractions we live in. Like Augustine: “we need to speak aloud into the ears.” Because “the deep of the world and the blindness of the flesh.” But even the voice of God walking in the garden could not make us vomit up the apple.

  Or remove the mirror from our brain. Its reflection holds the secret of our existence. But we look for it in the reflected image and do not understand. We should look at the mirror itself. Should speak, as the Germans say, fraktur.

  If there is no redemption by voice any more than by gold. If signs are irreparably dislocated from what is supposed to be their signified. How instantly then our writing, like our knowledge, becomes subject. To ever new interpretations and directions. Unsuspected futures. Off-shore versions of its previous self?

  And yet. It seems outlandish that I should need legs to love Emily Dickinson. But if I can know anything at all it’s because my body has made a pact with the physical world. Is plugged into it. Mindembodied intact. And yet. At the bottom of any thing I find a word that made it. And I write. Have made a pact with nothingness. Make love to absent bodies. And though I cannot fill the space they do not occupy their shadows stand between me and thin sky.

  Zero,

  or Closing Position

  Contradict as needed.

  The sequence “Driven to Abstraction” is based on Brian Rothman’s Signifying Nothing: the Semiotics of Zero, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

  Copyright © 2016 by Rosmarie Waldrop

  Copyright © 2016 by Nikolai Duffy

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors and publishers of the books in which the poems of Gap Gardening first appeared: The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger (Random House, 1972); The Road Is Everywhere or Stop This Body (Open Places, 1978); When They Have Senses (Burning Deck, 1980); Nothing Has Changed (Awede, 1981); Differences for Four Hands (Singing Horse, 1984); Streets Enough to Welcome Snow (Station Hill, 1986); Shorter American Memory (Paradigm Press, 1988); Peculiar Motions (Kelsey St. Press, 1990); A Form/Of Taking/ It All (Station Hill, 1986); Lawn of Excluded Middle (Tender Buttons, 1993); Split Infinites (Singing Horse Press, 1998); Love, like Pronouns (Omnidawn, 2003); and Splitting Image (Zasterle Books, 2005). The following books were originally published by New Directions: The Reproduction of Profile (1987); A Key Into the Language of America (1994); Reluctant Gravities (1999); Blindsight (2003); Curves to the Apple (2006); and Driven to Abstraction (2010).

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original (ndp1333) in 2016

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  eISBN: 9780811225885

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