With Me, It's All or Nothing

I'm reading a book by Brian Rotman called Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, and one of the things he talks about is the Greco-Christian opposition to the idea of nothing: it was a scandalous idea, a terrifying idea, an idea that attacked everything that made sense, it was intolerable. And that's just what it was to the Greeks. To the Christians, it was even worse, because it seemed situated, in every important scale, across the table completely from the Godhead, which was a plenum: a site of fullness. Zero and nothingness, especially to, say, Saint Augustine, are the ultimate privation, the most complete sense of difference from God, whose majesty lies entirely in His completedness: hence Augustine's conception of the God before time, outside of time, et cetera.

Naturally, those of us who have to wake up in the morning don't exist in any plenums, or even near any. Do you all remember the episode of Futurama called The Why of Fry? No? Well, in that episode, a bunch of sentient cerebrums (cerebra?) called the Brainspawn decide that they are damned close to an epistemological plenum -- that they, as a race of sentient brains, have come to know everything -- and that they ought to destroy the universe in order to close the set of potentially knowable things, so that they will not have to come to know anything else. The knowable but unknown foreclosed, fullness achieved. Luckily -- luckily! -- the plan of the Brainspawn is foiled by Futurama's protagonist, delivery boy Philip J. Fry, in a series of events that you should all familiarize yourselves with by watching this and every other episode of Futurama. But the plan of the Brainspawn is an interesting, if high-concept, rejoinder to the horror vacuii that Augustine responded to with his exaltation of the plenum. It's one thing to think of the fullness of God as something a spiritual analogue to pre-Oedipal life in Freud, or to any other condition of pristineness (each pray'r accepted and each wish resign'd), but the thing about the fullness is that the fullness is DONE.

The quotidian ballast to this high thought balloon came about in my life today when, bored at work, I made a list of books that I will soon be able to X off of my list of Books Bought and Unread, among them Brian Rotman's Signifying Nothing. There's a way in which the entities that make up that list could be fulfilled, obviously, which is that I could actually finish reading all of those damn books and eventually my library would be a wall of accomplishments (such as they are) rather than aspirations (ditto). It is more likely that the constitution of my Books Bought and Unread will never really achieve a plenum, that they will be less like the Labors of Heracles (check, check, check) and more like the people of the Earth, interred and replenished as need and desire strike. The list -- refillable until the Big Crunch or not -- is itself a weird space where it's unclear to me what sides fullness and nothingness take. Finishing each book, moving it off of my current truncated bookshelf and onto the now three (progress!) piles of Books Read, next to the fan and behind my box of sweaters -- should that represent an increase in fullness (Now my Read Books are fuller) or in the nothing (the list, after all, is getting smaller)?

There's an allure to the middle state of incompleteness, the participation in a going concern. It's like people who don't want to have watched every episode of a television show they like, because then there's nothing left to watch. I did a similar thing, or at least committed to a similar thing, when I was sixteen and fell in love with Slaughterhouse-Five, and vowed that I would never read the entire Vonnegut oeuvre, lest there be no oeuvre left. But I fucked up, and had read all of the available Vonnegut before I was twenty. So it goes. Of course, the books I might read is crucially different from the books that Kurt Vonnegut wrote, in that one is practically inexhaustible and the other one I exhausted. But the feeling, the sliding from incompleteness to fullness to nothing, is there when I watch the list contract and expand. Make a list, feel the presence of the plenum, and then, even faintly, nothing.