[This prior to reading Heidegger's "What is Metaphysics." If one looks around and experiences, physical and immaterial, and considers, not even contemplates, one can come up with paradoxes philosophical. I celebrate the capacity of ordinary people to speak of extraordinary things and have others ponder life's greatest questions. Thus also, not that I am in any way special. Each is and is worthy of embrace.]
There is _is_,
then everything else.
The latter colonizes fully
such that we forget,
or we are confused
thinking _what is not_
also _is_ and a what.
But that is not so.
The opposite of _is_ is
_is not_, or _is-not_, _non-is_,
an inconceivable no-thing,
paradoxically a named void.
Everything else seems clear
or practically so,
but also without _is_ itself--
that's so hard to imagine.
In fact we can't.
The _non-is_ isn't,
without even a word
as name or to point with.
How can you capture
this whatever _non-is_?
_It_ is not even an _is_,
not abstraction nor subtraction.
Now _it_ points to it,
but this it is no-thing,
related to but not the _it_
that does not exist.
How can all this be?
Just this: There is _is_
then everything else,
and that seems enough.
So we forget,
or in confusion give up.
Or posit a silence
so big that it bangs.
Was there no _is_ before bang?
Must have been, we say,
'cause silence that was so
was so deafening we hear it!
But this the same trap--
silence is a non-experienceable
and it to answer the questions
some void asks us to know.
God then to the rescue,
for those so inclined,
but s/he talks biblical bipolar,
or from our own bicameral mind.
Thus no salvation or knowing.
There is _is_ and everything else
and no-is or ising
or anything of the sort
till the next revelation.
