Who could have known that Euclid would be correct only in space, the fact that earthly application is all Euclidean notwithstanding. The flatness of space makes it a difficult place to hide nothing, especially because space is full to its flat brim of the rest of the universe. Is there other life out there? Don’t know. Don’t care. Are there other dimensions? No. We seem always to want to imagine dimensions that we assert are impossible for us to perceive, no doubt the same impulse that stuck us with notions of deities, but perhaps in space there are only two dimensions, and let’s face it, time is hardly a dimension at all, no more of a dimension than love, dismay, or dizziness. And of our three dimensions, the ones we use for tables, stools, and other people, height, width, and depth are, I imagine, all of equal importance or insignificance and all inadequately named. About time and its lack of dimensional status. Logicians, mathematicians, scientists all worry that their proposed theories will yield a contradiction, the coffin nail of rational thought, but should they be more like theologians and corporate and tax lawyers? That one of your axioms is false is met with “yes, I meant that.” It is not enough to show that a statement is false; it must as well be demonstrated that its denial cannot be deduced from the sum of our understanding of the world. Why am I wasting time on this? Time, like nothing, in one way, cannot be seen (being seen is not the same as being observed), and though we have clocks, incredibly precise clocks, time cannot be measured, as one cannot measure any abstraction, convention. Without people there would be no time, just as there was no time before people and will be no time after people. Nothing, on the other hand, is not abstract but the most concrete of the concrete world, and it not only precedes humans and rocks and lava and gases but will continue, if not cause, the collapse of the convention time, the implosion of galaxies, and the evaporation of radio signals projected into deep space by wide-eyed optimists like John Milton Bradley Sill.

Of my understanding and, for lack of a better word, theory of nothing it had been said, as it was said of Hilbert, Das ist nicht Mathematik, das ist Theologie. Axioms, postulates, theorems, and proofs bored me into senselessness. My younger, baby self would have quarreled without end with my present stance, but of course I was smarter when young, for what that’s worth. Trigo lay sleeping on the table in my lab and I looked at my containers, many shapes, sizes, and materials, full of nothing. I could open none of them, as to open one would have been to empty all. I was asked often to do just that, so as to prove my assertion. Such a demonstrative proof, however, would have at once shown me to be correct and also necessarily wrong. To empty a box of nothing would have been to lose nothing and to have nothing left to show for it. So, nothing doing.