determinate negation francois luong If health is the life in the silence of the organs, as the surgeon Canguilhem said, I want to say sanity is the life in the silence of hammers falling against windowpanes, or in the blindness of construction cranes rotating with the celerity of a revolution of the Moon, unaware of the electron flying through the emptiness of a cathodic tube. The fluorescent lights of Main Street, blinking frenetically after dusk, seem to me like the static snow of a broken television screen on the night Louis Armstrong flew to the Moon, playing be-bop with Dizzy Gillepsie. Lunacy is my mother becoming a Buddhist nun. I would call this a Kodak moment, if not for her white face standing out of a sea of shaved heads and saffron robes, away from the tea saucers flying into the walls of the living room like UFOs in a bad 1950’s horror movie, but without the wires, away from the wooden spatula broken into a spike and held at my throat like a knife.