Begin with ASCII zero or HEX zero or just plain 0, origin of the writing
machine. Stands for all nothings and absences you can think of. After
death if you like. Before birth if you like. Right here in the middle of
things whether you like it or not. No knowing where it is. And where it
isn't. No is/isn't to speak of really. The only way the fly can get out
of the fly-bottle (except by pure chance - oh free will, oh
determinacy) comes by an imagining, making a model in whatever medium it
can manage of its tiny flyhood self, and thereby seeing itself as 'a fly
in a bottle'. But part of being a fly is getting trapped in bottles,
otherwise no need for models in the first place. So at best the fly can
get itself out of the bottle and into the 'bottle'. Can that possibly be
right? Hard to tell: those tiny marks can be truly inventive sometimes -
don't you find? And are there really people out there who sit about
thinking about - Nothing? What thing about nothing can there be said?
Why do they do this? Why should anybody want to bother with the constant
gonad ache of such? What benefit to we-the-unwashed to listen to the
ghost stories of these nothing mongers and semioticos of zero, these assorted
logic doctors of the void fixing the quick of things? But then,
from within the machine, far below the pretty alphabet of ASCII-0 to
ASCII-255 and that wonderful pixellated dance on the screen, comes the
whisper of presence (and absence) thirty million million times a second.
It's the fly quivering deep inside its bottle.