Out of Nothing
By Trena Machado
review
Out of Nothing, by Trena Machado, 120pp., $12.00,
RAW ArT PRESS, www.rawartpress.com.
Out of Nothing is a hybrid—part philosophy, part psychology, part linguistics, part poetry, part narrative, but actually none of these—a new genre that takes the reader on a wild ride through ideas and mental acts that are on-going, that are a process with no clear beginning or end, but that try to come closer to an adequate expression of “being.” Reading it, I felt carried along as on a river, sometimes rushing along, sometimes almost drowning, but obtaining flashes of insight. It is odd that the book, like much of our lives, takes place in language and, yet, often, the book itself, tries to get beyond language. It is trying to say the unsayable, and in fact, in a sense, it succeeds, for moments—in as much as human language can do so. The fact that one of the three central instances is "____," which is not an ordinary word, but is a piece of language and can work well within sentences, and does frequently in the sentences, indicates that “____” is both inside and outside language, both inside with words and getting past them into mental actualities that refresh and stimulate. It is still mental, but then it is a book, isn't it? It is “reality in a book.” Perhaps that is one of the most intense realities we can know. I think the greatest tribute to the book is that it gets the mind, indeed the whole consciousness and unconsciousness, working in new ways.
Dr. Marc Hofstadter