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Page 70 text:
“
ESSAY ON NO By Peter N. Vandenbosch o is a beautiful word. Consider it. Savour it until you see the delicacy of its lines and the lacy intricacy of its meaning. It stands on a page like a balanced thing, not entirely without beauty. The sharpness of the N; the roundness of the O. It means so much, but it MEANS ' Nothing ' . You use it each day, throwing it about the room as if it were your own personal property and as though no-one cared what happened to it. No hurts. It hurts children, dogs, employees, wives. But you dare use it as your private domain without savouring its beauty or feeling its It is the root for so many words of negation that I can ' t even name them all. But if you wish to be awed by the negation of it all, read that part of your dictionary dedicated to the suffix ' No- ' . Noplace, Noplace, Notime, Nobody, Nowise, None. You can almost feel the rhythm of No. A mystical anti- rhythm. The personal annihilation of Hindu- Nirvana. The primeval tribal dance rhythm that speaks No, No, No, No. The words are like a poem, forming, unforming, flowing together to mean anything. Nothing No- one Nowhere No is not a negative word that opposes Yes in meaning. It is negative in the undoing of Yes. The annihilation of Yes. It does not negate, it destroys. When you say yes, or connected words, you mean that you are giving permission to do SOMETHING. But no and connected words do not say to do the opposite of that something (a sort of anti-yes), they say NOT to do something. Sit still, do not move unless you can do something else. The French understand the feeling that must go with no. They give it a symmetry that the English word does not have. Nothingness IS symmetric. They also give it the dignity of being as negative as it wants to be. Forever do English teachers warn us not to use the double (and heaven forbid the triple!) negative. But the French let the negatives roll out. Personne ne fait jamais rien. That translates as, Nobody doesn ' t never do nothing. Ah, how that lightens the heart of the true no-lover.
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Page 71 text:
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No is a blackness. Black is as little understood as No, and its completeness is abused by the fools who don ' t even like it, but play with it because it is a new toy. Black is more than a colour, it is a state of mind; and more than an op- posite of white, it is the catharsis of white. Black is absolute absence. And you can ' t see a hole, you can only see the walls of a hole. And you can ' t see black because it isn ' t there. A smudge of truly black paint is a poem in itself, if only because it expresses more than a hundred thousand words--or a hundred essays such as this one. It is one of the most beautiful things in the universe- -it is quiet, infinite. . . it is not. Question mark. I see a large (?) rising out of the audience. Please take it back. You aren ' t ready for (?). A question mark is, like black, and, especially like no, the absence of something, anything. Most of us think of it as the absence of an answer. True, it represents man ' s quest for truth, and that is something- - a most important thing. But what, in four thousand years of civilized thought (filled with question marks) has man learned of truth (question mark, period) He asks but he never answers; so there is a lack, a vacuum: there is black. The question mark is no. No isn ' t statement, it is a question. O my reader (yes ' my reader ' --for while you are here reading this, you are experiencing my mind, and while you are in my mind you are mine), I could, as you have no doubt surmised, go on and on about Nothing. But what I have said should be enough to at least let you see No from a different direction. And if you can ' t see it, it ' s only because it isn ' t there. Please remember that my essay is imperfect. In fact, it is all wrong, and I wish you ' d forget it all right away. But you won ' t because, like me, you don ' t understand no, and you can ' t forget you can ' t negate, you are incapable of remembering black in the place where this essay used to be. All you can do is lay these pages down now and whisper a quiet emphatic No
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