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A disturbing thought he had as a child, growing up somewhere in Maryland:
What if there were nothing?
Nothing.
No planets.
No universe.
No space.
No darkness.
No light.
No abstract philosophy to contemplate space.
Nothing.

No space.
No thought of the universe.
No thought.

No memory.
No concrete.
No abstract.
No past.
No present.
No future.
No reality.
No illusion..

Nothing.

You cannot ask the question: what if nothing existed. Or: what if there were nothing. Nothing doesn't exist. It is not a question of Being. It is not a question of Not Being, because there would be no opposition to Being. There would always never have been being.

The tubers he remembers are now no more. Now, the figures are together, despite his having dis-arranged them, delved into them, previously. The group is not a group -- no longer the canyon he has made of them, no longer the vessel of abjection he approached through the synaesthesia of song. No longer the rot. Now, they are individuals, once again. As they always have been. But what they were doesn't exist. And there is no way to speak of it. And this lack of dialectic is/is not finally expels him from the realm into which he has thrown himself. It is he, perhaps, who has been executed.

And now, as before, the table, The Committee, is before him, and he before it.