the story of o

Still thou art blest compar'd wi' me!
The present only touchest thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.

---Robert Burns.

O, a letter without verticality, unlike b or p. Surprise or resignation? A number that is not a number; surrounded by 'real' numbers, searching for the one.

What's the problem?
Nothing.

There is something in us that wants to reach that nullity: to not be. To be a minimal self, an uncluttered soul, moved only by the elemental: a pure sound, not an image. The world is a concept. To smash the idols, the order of the world, which mirrors that of the ego. All is vanity.
So speaks the modern gnostic.

True, perhaps painfully true. But "we are ashes" very soon becomes "you are dirt". And if not that, the desire to lose oneself morphs into something sinister: the crowd. What happens when we lose that other image, that second space?

What's the point of living if you can't be beautiful?
----Howl's Moving Castle.

Does this place then become just another abstract space, a property to be possessed, indistinguishable, in fact, from anything else (exchange requires equivalence, a common currency, so to speak). What, then, does the earth become but a ground zero (when the Americans dispossessed the Red Man all they could muster was: this is a wilderness!) ; does time transform itself into something that can be counted, that is only a process without end? If this is true then what are we but some cosmic accident:

What was that acid spot in time
That went by the name of life?
---Leopardi.

What is the nihilist, the fanatic or the terrorist except one who searches for that ground zero, for that surface that disappears into a point, so that there is no more question of semblance and reality, no more tension between to and not to, between the 'I' and all that is 'not I'? The desire to come to a full stop, a place that is, beyond doubt, pointless, and without any weight. Nihilists live in a fantasy world (California), a virtual world, devoid of any of the rhythms of the natural world and the patterns of a human life. Texts are reduced to a pamphlet or a slogan, speech to a speech. It is almost as if one has to create nothing before reality makes us into nothing. Isn't that what that other extremist, Simone, once said? There is one truth, from that everything else follows; all else is 'innovation'.

What is this desire to be small but great at the same time, great in one's smallness? A question for the Germans?

The mouse may be blessed, but he lives in a hole. His nothingness is nothing because it is forced upon him. That is his destiny, after all. That black hole, his home, is a zero because, like hell, it is constituted by only so many fragments of time: a pure succession of moments. To live in an eternal present, de-void of memory, without regrets is, perhaps, a blessing for a mouse, but a curse for us. Man is, and lives in, a broken circle. And nothingness is only a stage, a moment, a stepping stone in the stream of time from which we return to the world and from where the presence of others, living and dead, touches our soul all the time.

Pleasure is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, and springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it.
----Hannah Arendt.

'Och' springs us from the domestic into the disconsolate. It is a common, almost pre-linguistic particle, one of those sounds (that in the words of Robert Frost) 'haven't been brought to book..living in the cave of the mouth. ..If 'ouch' is the complaint of the ego, 'och' is the sigh of ultimate resignation and illumination. Here, an on the countless occasions when it has been uttered by men and women in extremis since time immemorial, it functions as a kind of self-relinquishment, a casting of the spirit upon the mercy of fate, at once a protest and a cry for help.