Language as Zero

[Smoke Teff]

Sayeth Mark: "I also think: one of P's motifs is the failure of words to
capture the ineffable from Lot 49 thru GR passim.
He wants the ineffable to Be."

I think you're right. And along those lines I think you can think of the
final membrane separating language and being as its own kind of zero point that
might be gone beyond. I was trying to get after this in my discussion of
the irreducible "screaming." I guess you could think of this as being a
sort of linguistic atomism. You keep stripping away layers of decoration,
descriptiveness, figurativeness, etc., from language, as an attempt to keep
reducing it down to its truest and most basic representation of the thing.

But there is that final zero where the language is not the thing. The
"screaming" that "comes across the sky" is in a sense closer to the thing
than is, say, "an apocalyptic mechanical banshee-wail" that "explodes and
resounds throughout the once-playground of the now-dead gods." But it is
still not quite it. It is the zero not gone beyond.

How to get beyond it? How to get to the thing? Maybe, as the book evolves
(unfolds, explodes) the language no longer attempts to be the thing, but
seduces the reader, totally disorients the reader, captures the reader in a
sort of dream, and in that dream is the thing.
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