Heifer: Johnny Pulp and the Lemonheads

In the cathedral The void is black, about the size of a football and floats gently as if on a breeze. It is a null. It is in all. It is the nothing in our something and equivocates the pen. It’s harmless cousins are shadows, holes, absences, borders, cracks. Shut in a closet you felt your own shape in the dark. What you recalled was that you existed. The blind can’t see ergo can’t see darkness. There was a guy who took nitrous oxide to understand Hegel. I often find myself in the noumenal abyss with my chickens, pigs, guinea fowl and horses. The goats I never include. They have sinister side effects. When young I was terrified of being swallowed up by something larger than existence. I think I once not only met but spoke with an angel. She exalted my appreciation and damned my choice of friends. You’re a sad mean between everything and nothing was what she said, sucking on a small black cigar root so her face dwelled in the shimmering immensity of smoke and eternity. Giraffes and vacuum states are organized elementary physical stuff in fields. The void is the absence of fields. On some other days when not going on about voids I think we’re secretly talking about ether. Down by the sea shore I wear a vest with a straw hat and flip flops. I find light more established here. One night the rain lashed down and the white globe of a street lamp seemed all that there was. I wrote you. Futility lies between the lines. My emotional life is all action at a distance. The woman from the Punjab saw in it a lack of differentiation and nothing more. Her dismissal was curt, orthodox and weightier than the moon and sixpence. There were so many vanities playing out like causal links throughout space and time. Like Midsummer Murders and Descartes I gain through translation. The void is a little nothingness bouncing like a balloon in the corner by the washstand. These seaside hotels have primitive charms. Most lack form. But here is a void as well. The first time anyone admitted such a thing straight might have been in the thirteenth century. I have a map of heaven where it lies three miles to the north of where it actually is. I’m a jostler and pusher and get out of the way when necessary. Can you even move? If you don’t exist then what can this sentence mean? You claimed to have paraphrased me and moreover remembered the list but you know I know that’s a lie. Anyhow, I loop and you missed that. In the Cathedral I sat in its wild existential fog and wondered about how many other voids there could be. And the disasters of division by zero. The Eucharist images on the tall glass screamed: ‘Where’s the necessity of numbers without the empty set?’ and hummed caricatures of our essential negative thought. What shall I pray in the face of the void? I placed my feet on the stone slabs between the cracks. The verger knew his stuff. But hope is vicious. Awake’s a curious limbo.