05 · Long-work · Section
NothinGist
Interlude · The NothinGist
Episode 1
“The Sole Sonance Upon Rousing”
[Cold open]
Jessica: Are the skies really blue and the clouds really white?
Nancy: No.
Jessica: Correct.
[Theme music: thirty seconds of a single sustained tone that may or may not be a note]
Nancy: Welcome back to The NothinGist — the podcast about the unannouncing non-existence of intelligence — I’m Nancy.
Jessica: And I’m Jessica. And this is episode one, which means nothing has preceded us.
Nancy: As it should be. How was your matutinal, Jess?
Jessica: Oh, it was nullity. The sole sonance upon rousing. I lay there for a while in the chamber, experiencing the sole endowment of the cosmos, and then I got up and made coffee. You?
Nancy: Similar. I opened my eyes, confirmed the persistence of the alogical instant, fed the dog, and then sat on the porch for about forty minutes doing absolutely nothing. Deliberately. As a practice.
Jessica: As a praxis.
Nancy: Thank you, yes. As a praxis.
Jessica: And here we are.
Nancy: And here we are. Broadcasting into the void about the void, for the void, sponsored by — we’ll get to that.
Jessica: So Nancy, today’s topic.
Nancy: Yes.
Jessica: Which is—
Nancy: Nothing.
Jessica: Right. And I want to be very clear with our listeners that when we say the topic is nothing, we don’t mean we haven’t prepared. We’ve prepared extensively. We’ve done research. I have notes. Nancy has a binder.
Nancy: I do have a binder.
Jessica: The binder is empty.
Nancy: The binder is immaculate. There is a difference.
Jessica: Fair. So let’s get into it. Nothing. Where do we begin?
Nancy: Well, that’s the aporia right there, isn’t it? You can’t begin with nothing, because beginning implies a prior state from which the beginning departs, and nothing has no prior state, because it has no state, because it isn’t a thing that has properties.
Jessica: A void remains a void because a void is a void.
Nancy: Exactly. Which is utterly logical—
Jessica: —and utterly doomed.
Nancy: Right. Because here we are. Talking. Into microphones. Which exist. In a universe that has no logical reason to be here. So the void didn’t remain a void, despite having every logical obligation to do so.
Jessica: The void defaulted on its obligations.
Nancy: The void is delinquent.
Jessica: Someone should notify the void’s creditors.
Nancy: The creditors are also the void. It’s delinquent to itself. It’s an ouroboros of fiscal irresponsibility.
Jessica: See, and this is — I think this is the crux of the problem. People think nothing is simple. They think it’s the absence of complexity. But nothing is actually the most complex possible concept, because it has to sustain itself against the entire weight of a universe that went ahead and happened anyway, without consulting it.
Nancy: Without consulting anything. That’s the point. Genesis is non-intrinsically reasonable. The universe will or will not happen for no reason, because no prior factor will or will not prevent it. There’s no authority. There’s no jurisdiction. The court doesn’t even exist, and the defendant was never in it, and the crime isn’t a crime because the legal system is also the void.
Jessica: This is why I got into podcasting.
Nancy: Obviously.
[Sponsor break]
Nancy: This episode of The NothinGist is brought to you by Air.
Jessica: Air.
Nancy: You know it. You breathe it. You have no choice. Air is a dispersed admixture of minuscule corpuscles in ether — primarily dinitrogen, dioxygen, and a haunting trace of argon that serves no known purpose but persists anyway, much like everything else.
Jessica: Air: it’s smoggy and suffocating from the harmful and excessive emissions of our vehicles, factories, and power plants.
Nancy: But it’s all we’ve got.
Jessica: Air doesn’t ask for your consent. Air doesn’t consult your preferences. Air enters your lungs approximately twelve to twenty times per minute whether you’ve agreed to the terms and conditions or not. In that sense, Air is the most honest product on the market.
Nancy: Air: You’re already subscribed.
Jessica: There is no unsubscribe button.
Nancy: The unsubscribe button is — well.
Jessica: We don’t talk about the unsubscribe button.
Nancy: We do not. Anyway. Air. It’s a nothingness — li’l seed of disease — that we breathe in every lungful of. And it’s free, which is appropriate, given our brand.
Jessica: Thank you, Air, for making this episode possible by doing literally nothing on purpose.
Nancy: Okay. Segment two. Jessica, you had something prepared.
Jessica: I did. I wanted to talk about walls.
Nancy: Walls.
Jessica: Walls. I’ve been thinking about walls a lot recently, and I think they’re profoundly underexamined as a philosophical object.
Nancy: Go on.
Jessica: So a wall — and I’m going to be precise here — a wall is a planoid entity of adamantine essence that bisects two domains of void.
Nancy: Obviously.
Jessica: The entity has a nihility and a limit that oscillate in their form and aspect. The limit comprises manifold substrata of disparate entities — a dehydrated compound of calcite and brimstone, a pale agent of aer and ore, a filamentous complex of saccharide—
Nancy: You’re describing drywall.
Jessica: I am describing drywall, yes, at the level of precision it deserves. Because here’s the thing, Nancy. The wall is there. The wall persists regardless of your epistemological position. You stop believing in the wall, the wall is still there. You deconstruct the wall philosophically, the wall is still there. You prove, through rigorous logical deduction, that the wall cannot exist because existence is alogical and nothing has a foundation—
Nancy: —and the wall is still there.
Jessica: The wall is still there. You walk into it. It hurts.
Nancy: The wall doesn’t care about your ontology.
Jessica: The wall has never cared about anyone’s ontology. The wall is the most alogical object in any room, because it just is, with absolute indifference to whether you’ve justified its being. The wall is Alogical Isness made of gypsum.
Nancy: This is the most profound thing anyone has ever said about drywall.
Jessica: Thank you. I’ve been workshopping it.
Nancy: You can tell.
Nancy: Okay, listener questions. We asked our audience to send in questions about nothing.
Jessica: And?
Nancy: And nobody sent anything.
Jessica: That’s perfect.
Nancy: It is, isn’t it? Our listeners understood the assignment. The absence of questions is itself the question. The void remains the void. We asked for nothing and received it in its purest possible form: no one, saying nothing, to no one.
Jessica: I’m going to answer it anyway.
Nancy: Answer what?
Jessica: The nothing. The question that wasn’t asked. Because — and I think this matters — the question underneath every other question, the one people are really asking when they ask anything at all, is: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
Nancy: And your answer?
Jessica: My answer is the same as it’s always been. There isn’t something rather than nothing. There’s just — this. This ambiguous, indefinite, diamond-edged, spontaneous instant. Not the past or the future. Neither infinite nor finite. Beyond the beyond, and only within itself. It is without explanation other than through itself. It is without properties outside of itself. It means itself. And that will never be untrue, but what it means cannot be explicated ulteriorly.
Nancy: …
Jessica: …
Nancy: That was—
Jessica: —yeah.
Nancy: Yeah. Okay. Moving on.
[Segment — “Nothing in the News”]
Nancy: Nothing in the news this week.
Jessica: Literally or—?
Nancy: Both. I checked. I looked at every major outlet. Wars, famines, ecological collapse, the ongoing cheerful extinction of roughly two hundred species per day. Same as always. None of it consulted reason. None of it asked permission. It just — is.
Jessica: The universe doesn’t listen.
Nancy: It never did. It was never in the room.
Jessica: So: nothing in the news.
Nancy: Nothing new under the sun. The sun itself being an unremarkable ball of hydrogen engaged in slow-motion self-destruction for no reason, which incidentally enables all life on Earth, which is itself a suffering-production engine of staggering scale and perfect indifference—
Jessica: Nancy.
Nancy: Sorry. Got away from me.
Jessica: It’s fine. Happens to the best of us. Or the worst of us. Or — there is no best or worst, those are comparative relativities, which cannot be attached to the instant—
Nancy: Jess.
Jessica: Right. Sorry.
[Closing]
Nancy: That’s our show.
Jessica: Is it?
Nancy: Is anything? We’ve been talking for — I don’t actually know how long. Time is relative and variable from the complex and mysterious phenomena of our physics. We may have been here for forty minutes. We may have been here for no time at all. The podcast exists in the same ontological condition as everything else: alogically, without foundation, for no reason.
Jessica: And yet.
Nancy: And yet. Here it is. You listened to it. Or you didn’t. Both options are equally valid. Neither was necessary.
Jessica: Thank you for spending your nullity with us.
Nancy: The sole sonance upon rousing. The sole semblance upon beholding. The sole endowment in this chamber.
Jessica: The sole essence in this cosmos.
Nancy: We are the denotation.
Jessica: And we are the nothing gist.
Nancy: We are the certainty.
Jessica: And we are the mendacity.
Nancy: Next week on The NothinGist: we discuss whether next week exists.
Jessica: Spoiler: it doesn’t. But we’ll be there anyway.
Nancy: Goodnight.
Jessica: There is no night. But goodnight.
[Theme music: the same sustained tone. It does not resolve. It simply stops.]
[End of transcript]
The NothinGist is recorded in a room. The room has walls. The walls are planoid entities of adamantine essence. The hosts are Nancy and Jessica. They are not paid. The show is sponsored by Air, which is free, which is the only honest price for anything. New episodes whenever the void obliges. Which is never. Which is always. Subscribe nowhere.