محمدعلی کرمی’s Reviews > Chasm > Status Update

Fundamental ontology tells us that whatever happens (in time) is not time, and being is no thing. “The nothing nothings nothingishly,” or whatever Heidegger said, or didn’t say, it matters not, until unnonfiction seizes upon it (as it will). There can never be enough negative ontology, because what being is not exceeds it.

Horror anticipates philosophy, spawns it automatically, and provides its ultimate object – abstraction (in itself). It comes from the same non-place to which philosophy tends. If skepticism teaches philosophy what it need not think, horror persuades it that it cannot. In this way, the pact between abstraction and horror – the thing – surpasses anything philosophy could ever be, or know.

Here’s the thing. What you think is behind, and beneath, isn’t so. That’s an image. You spun it for the sense of protection it brings. It disguises a hole, because if you saw what was missing, you’d never sleep. You don’t know what’s there, at all. You can be shown that you don’t know what’s there. It isn’t hard, to show that. A simple trick is enough to do it. There’s a gap in you - a massive missingness.

"Bolton (ignoring Zodh): You remember it?
 
Scruggs: That ancient joke? Of course. Because seven eight nine. Is this about fear, or devourings? Terror of successors, of disappearance, of being out-sized, and out-numbered, of hidden meanings. Dread of death, of primacy, of God’s lightning bolt, of divine order, of the End."

"That seemed like a good place to end it. I turned away, expecting him to wink out of phenomenality. When I glanced back, to check, he was still there."

“There’s no such state as ‘understanding’,” Bolton said. “Not really. Von Neuman put it best: In mathematics, you don’t understand things. You just get used to them. You ‘understand’ at the point you’re permitted to stop thinking.”

“Did you ever read anything about ontology?” Bolton asked me. I was familiar with the word, just a little, but enough to recognize it as a tangential response to my question.
              “Whatology?”
              “Ontology,” he repeated, missing the deflective intent of my query. “It’s the science of being. An investigation into the thingness of things, or perhaps not that – not exactly.”

The last vague suggestions of distinct terrestrial existence were erased in the night. The cosmos was a silent storm, a stellar cyclone...