Lovers I am fifty-two; I can't even write the number properly in Arabic num- erals, discovered long before I was born. I remember the arrival of the hydrogen bomb, keeping a photograph of the first explosion near my bed, something to tell me stories; it still does. What I remember is always of no consequence; I will die carrying memories, I will carry nothing. But what I will carry, like the plague or permanent virus, is this: That I have had the last of my lovers. I could lie upon the Net, pass myself off as a twenty-four-year-old cock named Kent, but in reality, I'm dead, gone into ashes. I make love hard and constant, better than most, dream of a solid relationship, a partner for the next twenty years or so. But the real intrudes like the heavy lid of a sky, my neuroses, my intensities, edginess, and everyone wants what's safe now, don't they, even safe pain, whatever. I'm not safe, even to myself, don't hope to live that much longer, this world's not worth it. But I could lie upon the Net, pass myself off, this temptation to be a twenty-four-year-old cunt, hard for the asking of it, but in reality, there's not much reality. I have already been discarded, but the truth is that it's an _always already discarded,_ from the moment of birth all the way through the mistakes, to the moment of death. Nothing but the seepage of this link from one to another painful day, something they would churn over on alt.angst or reassure me on some other alt.talk.show made up just for the occasion. You are all my lovers, and none of you are my lovers. My attempt at transformation from wire to real-life failed miserably, always already after the fact, and wasn't that predictable? My last lover was 42, was 24, was 27 and I was forty-nine. My last lover was dark-haired, blond, and wasn't that predictable? I am everyone's mentor, no one's mentor, I am a shell, a fake, organs devouring organs from within, nothing in- trinsic in this body, nothing believed, believing, believable. My last lover would be my first lover, beyond that a dark impenetrable plateau receding into indeterminate distance. I would return there, fall there, fall over there, fall over the cliff of the past, die, fool, die. Amazed that any Net relationships succeed, even for the five minutes of life it might take a bacterium to divide. My work plunges me into my work; without that I'd be lost. I used to imagine myself in prison, learned to think/hold this vile mind together, gaming to stay alive. Now it seems pointess; if I've learned anything even later, it's that intention too dissolves. At 52, I'm dead. ______________________________________________________________________ For my Secret Love The screen stares at me. What does it say. It says little Alan wants to come out and play. It says you haunt me. It says I am prey. The flower is green. The stem too. Slay The contrite edges, the glass. Stay The growth of the grass. Your footsteps may Furrow or cleft so that I follow, at bay What Whitman meant, electric body a day Turned from the night. I am not an easy lay But for you at lunar edge I howl, bray At moon, from terminal depression turned away, My arms akimbo, my legs a split or splay, My voice a neigh upon the sward or ley. This is an image of a world gone clear and grey, Gone queer or gay, gone straight or bent, a ray Turned as well from crazed and lunar night? Nay, The two of us entwined, and happy? Yay!, Of course we are! While sun shines, making hay And overhead amidst the blue, a jay Floats by the sky. It's a lovely time to pray Each of us to us, and in both senses, "fey": Whimsical, disordered, near-death body-flay, Towards beautiful food for us, perhaps cray- Fish or not. We found it sleeping by the quay! Delightedly, each offered the other to pay For this dark morsel launched upon the tray For lunch, now happily returned to sea, a stray Just like ourselves! We're now so far, hooray! From terrors, pains, ennui, the sickness of decay Remains behind. I call you by your true name, Hey! You laugh, toss back to me the pearlescent spray I left with you so long ago. You'll bless and spay Me and I'll die, whistling tensely in the clay, And knowing you lead or follow, this dark way Where we have loved upon deserted paths, ay Dark with memories, black stems no God can fray, Repay, betray, today. _________________________________________________________________________ opera of pain and love pain fell from god's lips like pomegranate seeds there is always a just amount of pain in the world pain slides down god's chin, red and juicy embryonic, we huddle against the papery smooth flesh like a little baby, i love to lick the skin of god we love to lick the pearly pink pearlescent maroons dribbling down our throat dribbling chapped tiny rounded berry heads harsh painfulnesses criss-cross nipples, and o lovely neck so long and longing god "and there is always final longing if only for the music "for here is what it is, opera and oratorio, our spaces those of music "and the blankness of the screen is that no one _sings_ in conversation, opera's built on paradox "and there is always final longing if only for the music "no, what's left the body, left of the body, the haunting the trace or song is what leaves the body, like breath, like soul song like a sneeze when the spirit is expelled so song like death as well, transfiguration, oratorio "and there is always final longing if only for the music the space of the dark screen, the place narcissus where music echos the reverberation of the house of opera what's longing but reverberation, that is what i think "and there is always final longing if only for the music even when we see ourselves, reflected in the screen even when we see ourselves, speaking in the screen "the image dark and dim, words covering ourselves invisible "and there is always final longing if only for the music "and pain fell from god's lips, like pomegranate seeds" ________________________________________________________________________ Eyes Closed and Speaking -x-x- Towards the end of Merlin's prophecy, recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, we read: "A grievous mortality shall sweep away the people, and the walls of cities shall be made desolate. There shall be given for a remedy the city of Claudius, which shall interpose the nurse of the scourger. For she shall bear a dose of medicine, and in a short time the island shall be restored. Then shall two successively sway the sceptre, whom a horned dragon shall serve. One shall come in armour, and shall ride upon a flying serpent. He shall sit upon his back with his naked body, and cast his right hand upon his tail. With his cry shall the seas be moved, and he shall strike terror into the second. The second therefore shall enter into the confederacy with the lion; but a quarrel happening, they shall encounter one another. They shall distress one another, but the courage of the beast shall gain the advantage. Then shall one come with a drum, and appease the rage of the lion. Therefore shall the people of the kingdom be at peace, and provoke the lion to a dose of physic. In his established seat he shall adjust the weights, but shall stretch out his hands into Albania. For which reason the northern provinces shall be grieved, and open the gates of the temples. The sign-bearing wolf shall lead his troops, and surround Cornwall with his tail. He shall be opposed by a soldier in a chariot, who shall transform that people into a boar. The boar shall therefore ravage the provinces, but shall hide his head in the depth of Severn. A man shall embrace a lion in wine, and the dazzling brightness of gold shall blind the eyes of beholders. Silver shall whiten in the circumferance, and torment several wine presses. Men shall be drunk with wine, and, regardless of heaven, shall be intent upon the earth. From them shall the stars turn away their faces, and confound their usual course. Corn will wither at their malign aspects; and there shall fall no dew from heaven. The roots and branches will change their places, and the novelty of the thing shall pass for a miracle. The brightness of the sun shall fade at the amber of Mercury, and horror shall seize the beholders. Stilbon of Arcadia shall change his shield; the helmet of Mars shall call Venus. The helmet of Mars shall make a shadow; and the rage of Mercury pass his bounds. Iron Orion shall unsheath his sword: the marine Phoebus shall torment the clouds; Jupiter shall go out of his lawful paths; and Venus forsake her stated lines." Ending with: "The seas shall rise up in the twinkling of an eye, and the dust of the ancients shall be restored. The winds shall fight together with a dreadful blast, and their sound shall reach the stars." Apparently Merlin "caused in all that were present an admiration at the ambiguity of his expressions." But Vortigern wanted more, and heard his own fate recited. Clara Hielo Internet, back from the northern state of Chihuahua, reports on Merlin's use of compressed narrative, so typical of oracular speech; beyond that, she notes, the symbols clash, drag one another into the clearing: where there is nothing but room, there is no room at all. Men and women closed their eyes and Venus or Mars played upon their eyelids; hysterically affected, they twisted under the onslaught of mute metaphor - a language conjured, sloughed out of the world's things, the first, stum- bling over itself, the assignment of occlusions to desperate or inimical measures. The measure of the eyelid is the measure of the cave or cyberspace, the world always already fallen when it is told so. The _cartoon_ is the sign of the world, the sign's horizon, unreachable debris. The cartoon is the world gone awry in the face of the symbol; the oracle was the first cartoon, which still (Mickey Mouse) carries something (Donald Duck) prophetic (Krazy Kat) about it. This is why cartoons anger us, draw us within their stumbled power. This is why clowns, clawing the world apart, beg us to kill them. _________________________________________________________________________ Merlin Ties the Threads Together -o-o- From Geoffrey of Monmouth again: "Upon this the messengers hastened to the governor of the city and ordered him, in the king's name, to send Merlin and his mother to the king. As soon as the governor understood the occasion of their message, he readily obeyed the order, and sent them to Vortigern to complete his design. When they were introduced into the king's presence, he received the mother in a very respectful manner, on account of her noble birth; and began to inquire of her by what man she had conceived. "'My sovereign lord,' said she, 'by the life of your soul and mine, I know nobody that begot him of me. Only this I know, that as I was once with my companions in our chambers, there appeared to me a person in the shape of a most beautiful young man, who often embraced me eagerly in his arms and kissed me; and when he had stayed a little time, he suddenly vanished out of my sight. But many times after this he would talk with me when I sat alone, without making any visible appearance. When he had a long time haunted me in this manner, he at last lay with me several times in the shape of a man, and left me with child. And I do affirm to you, my sovereign lord, that excepting that young man, I know no body that begot him of me.'" Later, Maugantius explains: "'In the books of our philosophers, and in a great many histories, I have found that several men have had the like original. For, as Apuleius informs us in his book concerning the Demon of Socrates, between the moon and th earth inhabit those spirits, which we will call incubuses. These are of the nature partly of men, and partly of angels, and whenever they please assume human shapes, and lie with women. Perhaps one of them appeared to this woman, and begot that young man of her.'" Now this all occurs mythologically around c.e. 477, but who are we to question the authenticity of what so clearly constitutes a cyber-romance with attendant consequences? As the telecommunications membrane grows across the planet, specters appear (re. Derrida), disappear, repeat them- selves; they carry desire with them, our own reflected through the matrix. It is ourselves we see in the screen, our projections sloughed into cartoon/clown cyberspace (see previous post), entangled in the mythos of Honey, Tiffany, Clara Hielo Internet. We bring Merlin into being through the year c.e. 477, our neighbor. Every year is our neighbor - every year entwines us around its history, which is of our making. What is clear in this account, that the "young man" had a modem. _________________________________________________________________________ The Oracular, Death and Mourning in Cyberspace, Veronica of Truth The speaking of it brings the body close to the things of the earth: It starts and stops with the body. It is never a reproduction, but a touch of yarrow-sticks: "Woe to the red dragon, for his banishment hasteneth on. His lurking holes shall be siezed (sic) by the white dragon, which signifies the Saxons whom you invited over; but the red denotes the British nation, which shall be oppressed by the white. Therefore shall its mountains be levelled as the valleys, and the rivers of the valleys shall run with blood." (Beginning of Merlin's Prophecy in Geoffrey of Monmouth.) The poetic starts and stops with the body; the final run of language is to: Get the _things out of it_! ... If prophecy is already the feed-forward of earth, the will-have-been, then, caught within its skein, the act of mourning for one's own death co-exists with the project of speech itself. I mourn the past of my own death which is brought to me. In prophecy, the future has never been a future; more than an announcement, it forecloses with the expulsion of the body's speech. "The exercise of religion shall be destroyed, and churches be laid open to ruin. At last the oppressed shall prevail, and oppose the cruelty of foreigners. For a boar of Cornwall shall give his assistance, and trample their necks under his feet." Merlin's terms become those of the antiquar- ian, countermanding the terms in which they are stated. A period of incom- prehensible longing sets in, one which sallies forth through Tennyson, Dungeons and Dragons, MUDs and MOOs, into every corner of cyberspace, Doom and doomed, where the voice that whispers is our own. For it is the _prophetic_ that cybermind hears, the always already fragile disappearance of language, our own mortality in the sad and languorous fate of our posts. Each one prophesizes, becomes and represents, _expendi- ture,_ a fiscal economy based on an inert impossible substance existing only within the future recipient. With every post, the death of the writer /death of the reader is announced as a _curlicue_ or diacritical sign, and someday there will be nothing but silence in the midst of broken letters. ("In question is a spectralizing disincarnation. Apparition of the bodi- less body of money: not the lifeless body or the cadaver, but a life without personal life or individual property." Derrida, Specters of Marx.) Merlin knew all of that always already, the vagaries of his words encom- passing the world and its uneasy abutment of objects difficult to swallow. But Merlin has disappeared, like ourselves and our words, and this is nothing more than the _matter_ of the shifting of proper names. ... "Menevia shall put on the pall of the City of Legions, and a preacher of Ireland shall be dumb on account of an infant growing in the womb. It shall reign a shower of blood, and a raging famine shall afflict mankind." ... "There shall be a most grievous punishment of men, that the natives may be restored." The restoration appears through the _agency_ of Search-Engine Veronica,* shape-riding the gophers into the antagonisms of sexuality, allusion, and death. In bull-fighting, "La Veronica": "The Veronicas are always used _for the purpose of calculating the bull's action._ The veronica executed holding the Cape in both hands and bringing the bull to charge close to his body. It is one of the oldest movements of the bull-fight. It can be given with the feet close together or slightly separated; the latter is called "with the open compass." (sic, and "con el compas abierto" - italics mine.) And in bull-fighting, "Media Veronica," half Veronica: "The groups of veronicas performed by the matador are usually ended with a half veronica; it is similar in all to the veronica except in its final tempo in which the hand that guides the bull in his way out, after the charge, gets near the body almost touching the other hand, thus closing the cape which is no longer ready for another veronica." (sic) ("Una Corrida de Toros con fragicas a colores.") The interplay/dance of the Veronica is the calculation of substance/bull and sign/cape, or the torsion between matador/cape/bull, the _calculation_ of the sign in the face of death, the sign already the sign of mourning, the cancellation of the future. The Veronica has the auspices of the portent, the calculation of the chaotic future. The sign outlasts the bull just as signifier and transfiguration outlast death itself. One last cry from the wounded Merlin: "The fox of Kaerdubalem shall take revenge on the lion, and destroy him entirely with her teeth. She shall be encompassed by the adder of Lincoln, who with a horrible hiss shall give notice of his presence to a multitude of dragons. Then shall the dragons encounter, and tear one another to pieces. The winged shall oppress that which wants wings, and fasten its claws into the poisonous cheeks. Others shall come into the quarrel, and kill one another. A fifth shall succeed those that are slain, and by various strategems shall destroy the rest. "He shall get upon the back of one with his sword, and sever his head from his body. Then throwing off his garment, he shall get upon another, and put his right and left hand upon his tail. Thus being naked shall he overcome him, whom when clothed he was not able to deal with." -- *Veronica, an Internet tool which searches gopher directories and data- bases. ________________________________________________________________________ the last whisper a young beautiful boy moves to an island. a young beautiful boy moves to an island. he sees a computer on the island. he sees a computer on the island. the computer says, i don't have long to live. the computer says, i don't have long to live. the boy listens to the computer. the boy listens to the computer. he quietly removes his clothing. he quietly removes his clothing. he will always caress the keyboard. he will always caress the keyboard. he remembers the dying light of the screen. he remembers the dying light of the screen. he remembers the last whisper of the warning tone. he remembers the last whisper of the warning tone. he remembers for the first time watching life drain out. he remembers for the first time watching life drain out. he holds onto the carapace, rocking gently back and forth. he holds onto the carapace, rocking gently back and forth. he rocks back and forth with his death in his hands. he rocks back and forth with his death in his hands. he rocks back and forth. he rocks back and forth. he rocks back and forth. he rocks back and forth. _________________________________________________________________________ Here's Some Really Great Stuff!!!!!! Aphorisms from Friedrich Schlegel, translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms) \my commentary corraled\ (From the Lyceum 1797) 54. There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water, and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite. \The absolute as signifier, token, absorption, nothing more! incredible that GOD becomes a word! Wow!\ (From the Athenaeum 1798) 24. Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin. \Merlin constructs the fragment within the whole; Schlegel constructs the whole within the fragment! German Romanticism begins the fragment under- mining Hegel before _its_ time!!\ 42. Good drama must be drastic. \Yes, Heiner Muller, John Young, Karen Finley, what the times call for!! This is so exciting!!!!\ 77. A dialogue is a chain or a wreath of aphorisms. A correspondence is a dialogue on an enlarged scale, and memorabilia are a system of aphorisms. As yet there is nothing which is aphoristic in matter and form, altogeth- er subjective and individual, simultaneously completely objective, and a necessary part in the system of all sciences. \Unless you can combine the protocol with the post, the machinic with the reception, feeling the wires with the wires themselves!! How I love the wires warped around my naked supine body! Wrapped in chains, a wreath crowning each and every limb!!! You gotta love it!\ (From Ideas, 1799-1800) 20. An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind. \O how I struggle over this one! Forgive the "he/his" for era, but O how otherwise true! Alas, my Mind grows to fill the Fragmentary Real, coming like Drastic Debris towards you as Imminent and Immanent! I am left speechless, O alas!\ __________________________________________________________________________ Texts Receiving _this_ space of reading which is always open, penetrated, a perforated space splayed for reply or deletion and therefore fragile, the space of a membrane, torn-space, there is always _this_ space on the other end/other hand, space of writing which is foreclosed, null after sending, re-articulated in archive or hard-copy. This project which presses against my limbs, a discursive formation, is rooted in the begin- ning of the Internet Text, which is rooted at an unknown measure; I have no record of chronology and the start of distribution, before cybermind and fiction- of-philosophy, possessing only the text's entirety, all fourteen files 1-14, beginning now a second alphabetic set with extended subject matter. If you have followed me so far or are tired of losing me, turning around by the birch (denuded by illness as the species slowly disappears), to retrace the path where the roots begin, you might want to once again examine those sequences of the initial text as prove relevant or summary, in particular the introduction and vocabularies or outlines scattered among the whole. It is in these sections that notions of address, protocol, recognition, spew, emission, uncanny, imaginary, web inversion, violation fabric, indexical embodiment, rewrite, and so forth are developed; and it is these sections which foreground the current texts, which cannot repeat what has gone before, but exist as a twisted birch dying by the side of the path, without the nourishment already given. The following sections of the files are useful for any revival, and may be retrieved through http://www.uio.no/~mwatz/cybermind/texts/sondheim.html --- (In NET1.TXT): All the beginning sections, including the Introduction to the project as a whole, contain useful material. (In NET4.TXT): SUMMARY OF INTERNET TEXT: Brief description of basic concepts. (In NET5.TXT) Partial Summary of Internet Text (from Web Text) (In NET14.TXT): Brief Glossary of Terms from Internet Text --- Surrounding sections contain or portray the aura of this skeleton. A certain _mesmeric_ effect, of course, may be obtained, by reading the whole. ____________________________________________________________________________ Email Oh momma, he is the most beautiful boy you could ever hope to meet. His hair is so dark and he seems so strong. And he has a wild look in his eyes, but I know he will work hard, momma, because he always has. And you know, he is good to me, not like the others. He is always good to me brings me presents, why just the other day he brought me flowers and a small cake, momma, like the kind the bakery has around the corner. And he is going to finish school this fall and set out on his own, and oh I want to go with him so badly. He is so beautiful, you would not believe how the other girls look at him. He is the smartest boy in the world, and I know you will think so to, he is as smart as poppa, and he's so young, and he's mine, he's mine! I love him so! Oh Johnny, she is so wonderful. I can't believe how she looks at me, how her eyes say everything in the world and she has them just for me. And she has such large breasts, she looks incredible in a sweater, and she presses them up against me. I lose my breath when she does this, I can't believe how lucky I am. She is so beautiful that everyone turns around on the street and when we walk together, I'm so proud. And she's smart, too, smarter than anyone I've ever met, the smartest person in the world. I know the two of us will go far, there's nothing like it in the world, oh I can hardly talk. And her legs are strong too, she walks all the time, her hair is long and black just like stars were in it. Every night I dream of her, and she's with me night and day. I can't believe she's mine, that she has eyes for me alone, that she's really mine! I love her so much! ________________________________________________________________________ Oracle, Prophecy, Heterogeneity, Writing In searching through the two volumes of Pritchard's The Ancient Near East, An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, for prophetic literature, I stumbled across the "Akkadian Observations on Life," A Pessimistic Dialogue between Master and Servant, trans. Pfeiffer, some of which bears quoting, particu- larly in relation to writing, prophecy, and space: `(I) ["Servant,] obey me." Yes, my lord, yes. ["Bring me at once the] chariot, hitch it up. I will ride to the palace." [Ride, my lord, ride! All your wishes] will be realized for you. The [king] will be gracious to you. ["No, servant,] I shall not ride [to] the palace." [Do not ride], my lord, do not ride. [To a place...] he will send you. [_In a land which_] you know [not] he will let you be captured. [Day and] night he will let you see trouble.' `(V)... "I will not build a house." You will not build it.' `(VII) "Servant, obey me." Yes, my lord, yes. "I intend to start a rebellion." Do (it), my lord, [do (it)]. If you do not start a rebellion what becomes of your clay? Who will give you (something) to fill your stomach? "No, servant, I shall not do something violent." [Do (it) not, my lord, do (it) not.] The man, doing something violent is killed or [_ill-treated_], or he is maimed, or captured, or cast into prison. (VIII) "Servant, obey me." Yes, my lord yes. "A woman will I love." Yes, love, my lord, love. The man who loves a woman forgets pain and trouble. "No, servant, a woman I shall not love." [Do not love,] my lord, do not [love]. Woman is a well, woman is an iron dagger - a sharp one! - which cuts a man's neck. (IX) "Servant, obey me." Yes, my lord, yes. "Bring me at once water for my hands, and give it to me; i will offer a sacrifice to my god." Offer, my lord, offer. A man offering sacrifice to his god is happy, loan upon loan he makes. "No, servant, a sacrifice to my god will I not offer." Do not offer (it), my lord, do not offer (it). You may teach a god to trot after you like a dog when he requires of you, (saying), "Celebrate) my ritual" or "do not inquire (by requesting an oracle)" or anything else.' `(XI) "Servant, obey me." Yes, my lord, yes. "I will do something helpful for my country." Do (it), my lord, do (it). The man who does something helpful for his country, - his helpful deed is placed in the bowl of Marduk. "No, servant, I will not do something helpful for my country." Do it not, my lord, do it not. Climb the mounds of ancient ruins and walk about: look at the skulls of late and early (men); who (among them) is an evildoer, who a public benefactor? (XII) "Servant, obey me." Yes, my lord, yes. "Now, what is good? To break my neck, your neck, throw (both) into the river - (that) is good." Who is tall enough to ascend to heaven? Who is broad enough to embrace the earth?" "No, servant, I shall kill you and send you ahead of me." (Then) would my lord (wish to) live even three days after me? (Colophon) Written according to the original and collated.' (2334-2279 b.c.e.) ________________________________________________________________________ Things that Could have Gone no Farther The Lyman alpha forest absorption spectral lines charting, coagulating, the distant quasars, the Lyman alpha galaxies at the edge of the known universe themselves, chaotic lines and redshifts from a trillion stars smudged or stained across an inconceivable plate or ccd receptor made from empty space. Silenced by compression of fifteen billion years to the universal edge and violation fabric membrane collapses by forced Clara Hielo Internet not a name mentioned. The lid on the cambrian catastrophic bends planetary rubble nowhere but petrifies a tear formed from the tiniest thing as space distends the body, breasts blows them apart. Swallow my seed before another web crawls its way across the glass. Pull my nipples into filaments gone across Centaurus Cluster Virgo Cluster gone towards Great Attractor. Lost in Lyman forest Virgil would kill himself, Dante, Florence, Italy, Europe, each and every continent; lost in Lyman forest time slices and reverses the eye. Look at myself don't like what I see, check out 3400-3700 Angstroms for the remnants of truth. The farthest the universe goes is a mark that gnaws past the plate or ccd, erodes the sign just when signifying, Kantian sublime disappearing in magma turned plasma, 400 neutrinos to the cubic centimenter but I ask you only one nucleon to the cubic meter? What does space say when space comes out to play. It says nothing. Its cunt is stitched shut, its cock torn from the moorings. And me, I say to you, kill yourself, descend into the matter with the matter what's the matter. The farthest thing is something you say, spit, swallow, vomit. Vegetation, animals, rocks confounded. Flaubert knew this in La tentation de Saint Antoine. It's the end of the book. The world vibrates, heads towards pure mass. Delirious Antoine: "O bonheur! bonheur! j'ai vu naitre la vie, j'ai vue le mouvement commencer. Le sang de mes veines bat si fort qu'il va les rompre. J'ai envie de voler, de nager, d'aboyer, de beugler, de hurler. Je voudrais avoir dea ailes, une carapace, une excorce, souffler de la fumee, porter une trompe, tordre mon corps, me diviser partout, etre en tout, m'emaner avec les odeurs, me developper comme les plantes, couler comme l'eau, vibrer comme le son, briller comme la lumiere, me blottir sur toutes les formes, penetrer chaque atome, descendre jusqu'au fond de la mateirere, - etre la matiere!" The penetration-descent into the primordial, complete with carapace, the crystallization of the body, petrification of the cock and cunt into a singularity! But the truth wasn't enough! The truth wasn't enough! Flaubert has the dawn appear, the sky, the whole bloody works! Everything designed for _Man_! And in the middle of the sun, the face of Jesus Christ himself! The corroded signifier, the Mother of all signifiers, as Antoine coagulates back into Antoine, even remembers his name I suppose. Antoine does what? At the very end, makes the _sign_ of the cross and returns to his prayers. The sign's sucked out by the sun, nearby star, where we don't have to worry about the Lyman alpha forest, everything neatly organized, temperature a balmy 72 degrees fahrenheit of delightful bandwith. The hell with it! Antoine could have gone farther, succumbed. That would have been the first sign of truth in the world, petrified, obdurate truth. Returned to language, the stupid muttering of prayer, nothing was left. The book ended and Flaubert should have killed himself. He didn't but returned himself to write and write and write. __________________________________________________________________________ Bad Writing Work Wet Dream of Fear and Truth No time is good for birth. Nothing is ever unborn haha. I say what there is, and I say what there isn't haha. And what there isn't, always is, and what there isn't, remains and reminds us. And what remains and reminds corrodes by the catalyst: The trapped corrosion of love and desire, the trapped corrosion of the violence of thought come to the presence of the written deed. Of the written deed of the written dead haha. My tongue's coated with rock-hard paint, the color of you, the color of you haha. I have been chewed by women spat out by men. I say what there is and I say what there isn't haha. I have done damage, deserve to be punished in a _tendency._ I write myself into existence, write myself out of existence. Love, I write myself in and out of you haha. I'm suffocating, torn and ravaged by dismembered mother boards harnassing the heat of the interior. I'm surrounded by capacitors, leaked blood across skin lined with text writing me, me-me haha. Leaking the desire of all things decathect-decathect. The universe writes and writes - the trees write cars write highways scatter bodies across my chest my arms my legs - the bodies write haha - Nothing penetrates the throat which closes speech; the word sloughs mold, my tongue's coated with rock-hard paint - My breasts are jealous of your milk, my nipples jealous of your teeth - My speech fills with vowels spanning empty space, my lids are stitched shut, slits cut through into a masquerade of light - O light I say I see the light O light I say - My existence salutes you haha - Nothing remains out of the whole cloth but the whole cloth - Remember the salute haha - My existence salutes haha - _________________________________________________________________________ Doubling ( The Fanning of Extreme Distances ) From Jean Duvignaud, Change at Shebika, Report from a North African Village: In the South night does not fall, it comes up out of the earth, creeping like a fog over the desert. A last remnant of day still lingers at the hour of prayer, a prayer which she has not said for a long time and which the others barely murmur. Nothing has much meaning at Shebika, now that they have been told that everything must change, even if as yet the change is invisible. People have no respect, any more, for tradition, that is true. Marriages are haphazard affairs, holidays are celebrated with indecent haste, hardly any money is given for the marabout of Sidi Sultan, and the young people talk of nothing but the city. Yet nothing new has happened. Everything goes on, but not the way it did before. There is very little doing these days at Shebika. Once upon a time, there were the religious holidays, and the marriage rites, and even a tradition- al way of working. Now the women stay in the courtyards, occasionally dancing, and the men sleep on the square. They are waiting for they know not what. The radio says they must wait, that everything is going to change. Surely the voice from afar is not mistaken. From Rainer Maria Rilke, beginning of the fourth Duino Elegy (trans. Spender): O trees of life, when will your winter come? We're never single-minded, unperplexed, like migratory birds. Outsript and late, we suddenly thrust into the wind, and fall into unfeeling ponds. We comprehend flowering and fading simultaneously. And somewhere lions still roam, all unaware, in being magnificent, of any weakness. ________________________________________________________________________ Let me Be for You, Let you Post on Me Listening to Hole thinking _I slashed mine_ legs spread wide apart red and blue scarves rippling from the bedposts, I can't move _suck it up baby_ as body turns stain and I can't complain sheet of color page you inscribe yourself _I been here_ you write _I got here_ you write post on me post on me There's no address you can take with you walk across the street get a bite to eat. There's no protocol make you listen hard to Hole _help me I'm withering_ Tiffany post on me Tiffany post on me Listening to Bikini Kill thinking _punk rockers ask for it_ on my stomach holding death away this very night slides into day, way away from the skin of it, body torn from the war of it I call your name you're not around I call your name there's not a sound Girl girl post on me Girl girl post on me _This is not a test_ you got me at my very best, _when you get right down to the heart of the matter_ you gotta right me, sight me, you gotta take me, set me up, make me up, take me in your arms, giving you a hint take me in your arms, make me in your print Tiffany post on me Tiffany post on me Listening to the Breeders thinking _summer is ready when you are,_ Tibetan ghost scarves fluttering around my ankles, musk filling the air, ribbons in my hair, Tiffany I need you don't need you need you don't need you Let me read for you, let me be for you Like I always do, like I always do Tiffany post on me Tiffany post on me need you feed you post on me ________________________________________________________________________ The Calling of Weber, Future Capital You're the boy, I'm the girl. You're even, I'm odd, throw one and one you won, throw two and two, you too. Throw one and two, I won, throw two and one, I too. Paper scissors rock, beginning of the endless cycle, stopping off after destruction, absence, lack. Rock smashes scissors; scissors resurrect, the return of the repressed, cutting/frameworking against the dream-screen of the page. Scissors in fact divides paper into part-objects, incipient ego coagulation. Paper slips out from rock: unheralded, the beginning of the chora, just as the signifier slips from substrate itself. Or page covers rock: simulacrum, only for rock to emerge once again, smashing scissors, saving the signifier. Rock has nothing against paper; paper lovingly co- vers rock - it's a caress of sorts, kindness. Only rock escapes unscathed, its darkening momentary at best as paper slips from the surface. But a rock is a rock of no significance. You're the girl, I'm the boy. Girl is even: multiple, feminin-ecriture, frisson, repetition, duplication (boy says duplicity), zero or two. (And zero is two: zero/nought as well.) Boy is odd: stick, unmirrored, barren (girl says phallicity). If the throw is one or two, girl is two or four, framework harboring the intensity if recursion. If the throw is zero or one, girl is chora, the uneasy paper covering rock, smashing scissors' edge through transitional object, go rock. (Everything is odd in the world, nothing is that even. Or everything evens out in the world, even the odd.) And boy? Boy is one and three, the former anomic-catatonic as the finger fingers itself in the exchange. The latter, a phallic trinity for the rock-cradle rocking, one-three-bough breaking. Or boy is two and four, the completion coming from single digits, girl one and three, which boy knows all along. Boy is invited into the human, or not. Cyclical games, over and over again, games of destruction and resurrec- tion, neurotic-compulsive games played on every planet up to redshift 5. Games of frameworks and intrusions, games of chora and entity, games emptied of all content, visitations of games. Games dreamed in the midst of their cycles, the scissors slipping out from the rock cut by paper bearing boy covered by girl. Games of the manufacture of odd and even capital. Games called on account of rain covering games, covering girl and boy. _________________________________________________________________________ Tiffany and Redshift 5 Tiffay returns to speak to me, and it is wonderful, all other silences flooding in distant wavelets, solitons, turbulent steady-states, what rapture. Tiffany whispers the rapture of new birth, and you must whisper too, in order to hear these lines, and I can almost bear the rest, the news brought from the Lyman alpha forest at the edge of the universe, known and unknown Tiffany says at redshift 5 we confront our own death, not that of bleak eternity or annihilation, nor the heat death of the universe, nor the dissolution of the body But Tiffany says at redshift 5 we confront the splayed and irrevocable beginning of everything, the forgotten bone and gristle of us, the proper names held, Tiffany says, in a skein of words and fabric And Tiffany says, and you can almost hear the leaves growing as she speaks, in so quiet a murmur, the world murmuring at the distant three kelvin degrees with those slight imperfections, birthmarks of the universe - she says o cosmology ingests death, this death-in-birth at the limit, pervades it - the universe bears the burden of death, the hand arcs to the sky, the finger-tip vector never ending but in chaotic circulation Tiffany says life is always already residual, a glancing blow stained with decreasing temperature and the slow release of information into orbits encrusted with stochastic barnacles, inconceivable ocean whose language ourselves is under erasure She whispers, we have nothing else to remember. She whispers, we have nothing else to remember. We are forced to remember We live together with ourselves, a temporary arrangement of birth, death, a temporary arrangement of desire at redshift 5. At redshift 5 Tiffany's voice grows louder and longing but o so far away. At redshift five the fog darkens and lifts Tiffany says, annihilation is the only truth, but dead carries with it no realization, and she says that we remain alive to carry the falsehood of the experience of death. Slowly speaking, the wave cuts the prow of an absent ocean soliton, tsunami splashing against universal origins. Within the quasar, the noise is monstrous silenced elsewhere, the barrier of virtual vacuum, virtual space So slowly speaking, that Tiffany speaks of slowly speaking, giving weight to the words which are pillars of a longhouse buried one-hundred-thousand years on the banks of the French Mediterranean, and this is not at red- shift, not at redshift at all O we contort, Tiffany whom I love before all others, we flail uselessly at the barrier of the other, desperate in the eyes for recognition of the name which haunts us constantly in its absence, unsounded always already at redshift 5. Tiffany says we melt within the useless passion of her body, and that language too is a game mouthing itself at our expense, expenditure, the relative cost of nothing on a universal scale (I listen to Tiffany forever. As long as I am alive, and as long as Tiffany will speak, I will listen. I swear it.) _________________________________________________________________________ Caught in the Meshes of my Stockings "Anamorphis and the discourse of the analysand as a kind of hiding: some- thing, which will only be revealed to the subject if he shifts his posi- tion, is hidden from him - hence his discomfort. The subject is implicated in the reading of the spectacle, the deciphering of discourse, precisely because the thing he is not at first able to hear or see concerns him directly in his capacity as subject." (Severo Sarduy, Written on a Body) The _sleazy_ leaks from any framing-device, even bandwidth itself, a refusal of categoricity, and _cybersleaze_ categorizes cyberspace to the extent that the sleazy occurs on the margins of the _illuminated body._ Sleaze appears in the fullness of the night, the night of subterfuge, of torn or hallucinated clothing, revealing the sheen of flesh by virtue of the bearer of the flesh. Sleaze appears in clubs, in the half-measures of culture, shifty deals, the margins of the law, gender, cult. Torn clothing reveals the organs of the body protruding, distended, at every turn of the subject, movement producing jewels. The images are screen images, exposed by virtue of the light which is always artificial night, obsessive images, cathected and inflated with the melding desires of voyeur and exhibitionist, obscene couplings where truth no longer has its tables. Cybermind is sleazy, the body as hysterical enchantment, embodiment flapped open by scarred text, unexpected revelations, illuminated by screen light, by what I write you, what you read. Cybermind is half- light, frisson of the body, trembling of half-eyes and their dreamings. Electric women, men, others, stumble through self-descriptions in the narcissistic realm; text no longer mediates, becomes organs grappling for presence on the dream-screen itself. Ghosts are always sleazy, sneaking up on one unexpectedly, disobeying basic etiquette in half-spaces trapped in the _hauntology_ of repetition, the mouth of the body splayed open to the keyboard, ear of the body splayed to the terminal labia themselves. Subterfuge is half-light existence here; we hover, beg for pleasure as the wires freeze, packets stutter in their own darkness, the territory of _exactitude,_ protocols, recognitions, addresses. On the surface, emis- sions coat and define their bodies, the belly of cyberspace always conval- escent, always convulsant. Is always outside the law, in the Pale of it, Bey's TAZ the confluence of subjectivities, organs: For here, our totality is threatened - for here, we are always lonely in cyberspace - for here, we are told we do not exist - for here, we illuminate with dreadful acumen - for here, we do not recognize the other we have become - for here, we hold on desperately to a life lost long ago - for here, we are all club kids, denizens of night-time petty-larceny, small-town punks on a rampage, knocked-up and crying, ignorant of the face staring back in the mirror, torn stockings, shaved body, nipples pierced with the wires of everything we have ever ever said. "The transvestite does not copy; he simulates, since there is no norm to invite and magnetize his transformation, to determine his metaphor; instead, it is the non-existence of the worshipped being that constitutes the space, the region, or the support of his simulation, of his methodical imposture between laughter and death." (Sarduy, Written on a Body) __________________________________________________________________________ When I'm In Love When I'm in love I gotta write better than ever before because I wanna be with the woman I love and want her to know in all that I do how much I love her too. When I'm in love I gotta write so well that my words fill the earth the air the ocean, the wires gotta sing and the birds gotta cheep. When I'm in love her beauty smile comes and visits in my dreams and my eyes travel the world in search of that certain smile, I gotta see that certain smile. When I'm in love I lie all twisted with her body curled up with nothing but glass and that smile between us. When I'm in love I wanna touch that body wanna touch that body wanna be that body wanna be that body's touch. When I'm in love the fish gotta sing and the birds gotta fly, the dogs gotta howl and the cats gotta cry. When I'm in love I gotta wanna be with you, when I'm in love I'm naked and new. When I'm in love I wanna be with you, when you're in love, I wanna see you naked too. _________________________________________________________________________ existential anxiety of being in love in cybermind the anxiety of _being_ simultaneously _being otherwise_ as in _being-in- love,_ always this dread appears, a reversed emission from the rimless hole: this is what appears out of cyberspace, the challenge of loving against an absence of barriers, each and every barrier sick of the spirit, sick of the heart, heart-sickness, twisted by the non-being, the absence of sound for most of us in this realm of twisted text: this is what is forthcoming, illuminating the body of the other only through sight, intention, perspective, the deciphering of alphabet upon the screen into language, into the presence and grain of the voice, flesh, taste, touch, smell the sickness unto death, cauterized self against an unhappy horizon granted as death itself is granted, what is touched is never ever other: this is the pull of the syrupy abyss, the dulled coating of the wooden tongue clattering its name into the void the gilded headdress, suffocating, immobilized, suspending the head in the midst of chaos, the torn creature of the neck: this is the sugar of language, photograph, lock of hair, brush of the cheek against a page emptied of all other, this is the missive and its invisible arrival the anxiety of _being_ the anxiety of the mater/matrix, the framework of the legitimizing other, just as it is the _other_ who tickles, massages, caresses, envelops, binds, decathects: this is cohesion of imminence recuperating text as cries and whispers, the murmuring of the fullness of the world murmuring of the sound of the fullness of the world romance in cyberspace producing the perforated body, awash in the sym- bolic: this is the projective surface of fantasies, imaginary dreaming, uncanny tears coating the lavender of the suspended neck, the swift sureness of the sugary abyss the miniscule body suspended seen out-of-body, viewpoint somewhere near the ceiling or corner of the room, the whirl of symbols like jeweled bees surrounding the night-time illuminated face with wide-open eyes: this is the reward of love, longing and waiting for the first and always already final meeting always already meeting, the reward of love ________________________________________________________________________ Mayakovsky and Lili in Love ... April 1918, Mayakovsky to Lili Dear but hardly sweet to me Lilik! Why don't you write me a single word? I've sent you three letters and I haven't had a line in reply. Is four hundred miles really so much? You shouldn't do this, my child. It doesn't suit you! Please write, I get up every day with the melancholy thought: "What's up with Lilya?" Don't forget that besides you I don't need anything and nothing interests me. I love you. I escape in the kinemo. I've put an awful lot of effort inti it. My eyes ache, the scum. Next Monday I'm going in for an operation. They're going to cut my nose and throat. When (if!) you see me, I'll be all neat and clean and newly repaired. A steam-engine straight out of the shed! The cinematograph people say my acting skill is unprecedented. They tempt me with speeches, glory and money. If you don't write me again it'll be clear that as far as you're concerned I've croaked, and I'll start getting myself kitted out with a little grave and some worms. So write! I kiss you your Volodya I kiss Osya! Regards to Shura and Jacques. April 1918, Lili to Mayakovsky Dear little puppy, I haven't forgotten you. I miss you terribly and I want to see you. I'm ill: every day I have a temperature of 38; my lungs are ruined. The weather's very good and I go out a lot. I'm envious of you with your filming - Yakov Lvovich promised to get me into the cinematograph too. I've got some very pretty new things. I've papered my room with black and gold wallpaper; I've put a red damask curtain on the door. This all sounds luxurious, and it really is rather pretty. I'm in a dreadful mood because of my health. To cheer myself up I've bought some red stockings, and I put them on when no one can see - very jolly!! After the operation, if you feel all right and if you want to - come and visit. You can stay with us. I terribly love getting your letters, and I terribly love you. I never take your ring off, and I've hung up your photograph in a frame. Write to me and come and visit, only don't put your operation off in order to do so. I embrace you, Volodenka, my child, and I kiss you Lilya ( Vladimir Mayakovsky, Love is the Heart of Everything, Correspondence between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik 1915-1930, ed. Jangfeldt ) _____________________________ Waiting _attente_/ writing Tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being, subject to trivial delays (rendezvous, letters, telephone calls, returns). 1. I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign. This can be futile, or immensely pathetic: in _Erwartung (Waiting),_ a woman waits for her lover, at night, in the forest; I am waiting for no more than a telephone call, but the anxiety is the same. Everything is solemn: I have no sense of _proportions._ ( From Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, Fragments, trans. Howard ) _____________________________ In this regard, I only want to point out the matrix of the _solemnity_ of theory, as the discourse itself scatters a world simultaneously jolly and miserable. Our lives, made up of small effects, wait upon the telephone or modem with joy and terror, breathing the world undone. _________________________________________________________________________ Cipher I am in love with someone for whom I will be an empty cipher. Ciphers develop like cancers on the biographies of men and women everywhere. Loops are formed holding taut against the neck or constriction of events which slip through. In the mid-nineteenth century a child was born to a woman outside of Scranton Pennsylvania. The foreclosure of love upon the body is terrifying. There is no inheritence. Writing is out of control. Stars form pinwheels in the snow beneath our feet. The animals are here, are not the animals that were. The cipher is in the middle of _o_, _or._ I want her memory to continue forever. The _o_ begins expansion, opens up carries impossible charges. The rim spins out beyond the orbit of the farthest planet. The rim dissolves within a typical quasar illuminating the galactic cluster. Her name is written on the rim, her name is written everywhere, I know, I wrote it. It spins maybe out of control, it occupies the clusters of space, it sings nowhere and everywhere at all, but I do not know this, I do forgo this, I am gone, empty cipher, long long gone. ________________________________________________________________________ A Cloud in Trousers (Mayakovsky) You drench me across steppe and wolf, Fallowed birches hallowed while I Thighs like Pillars of Maldoror Caress Peninsular Eddies I am a MAN a cloud in trousers virga poured forth through every foreign pore closed to all takes, ah... I come to you Maldoror wrapped around the wounded heal Baldur sinking in the sea ! Cumulonimbus and shear zone Hail fluttering around your cunt I Inhale a shear zone I saturated accumulated / Eisenstein ! graupel soft hail tongued by Lulu tongued by Berg tongued by Wedekind \ Lili-Maria mon ange MOSCOW wheel-spoken four cart thrust down-stairs childhood's absence Meyerhold walked ! I trampled lay down attic ! infested sewers of Paris I lay broad with Lili-Maria thrust flag wet with Blood of Baldur ankles against the sea Odin I pull runes for you, crucify myself forgone tailors suited lightning crashes from my cock hands throat ! fire spews from my cannon's roar cart-rolled of capital formation I call LILI-MARIA mon ange call car-told of silver gold coffers open in the streets ! Virga pours from me dies towards earth ! Virga pours from me dies towards mother earth VIRGA POURS from me dies I call opened in Vein, ( ah, you think this poem is about you ! ) MOSCOW's arteries gather carts gather eddies of wind and whirling gather umbrellas and sewing-machines flown on aeroplane gather work-men and -women Decembrists barricading LILI-MARIA mon ange violent with love and Revolution joined with fierce resolve you shear resolve, stare, start That Cloud ! That Cloud in Trousers Rain will never come ! - 1915 _______________________________________________________________________ For Ah... Prophecy of Cybermind, Disorders of the Real, 1988 Alan Sondheim Alan Sondheim lives in another world, just like our own. He could not tell one from the other. He was sure they were joined at the horizon. Alan Sondheim saw the world was his. He'd say, "Hi, world!" He saw the world in a mirror, except for a corner, a hinge. He couldn't move in that close. There was always the mirror to contend with. Alan Sondheim would listen to you speaking and would listen to Alan Sondheim listening to you speaking. Sometimes he would miss a sentence or two. He would catchup when he stopped listening. Alan Sondheim knew that the world was doubled. He saw that it was halved. He had half of everything but he could always skip a line. He had half of everything but nothing puckered. It puckered where everything was. Alan Sondheim would watch it burst, but it would burst in one world and not the other, not even fragments would burst from one world to the other. Alan Sondheim was not joined at the horizon. He did not hear or see so well. He heard his own heartbeat when he could make everything quiet. He could make everything quiet and even his own death quiet. He would see the stuffing of the world first and then the world. Alan Sondheim would hardly hear because of the stuffing of the world. He could hardly see, either. ________________________________________________________________________ I love you so much it hurts through the looking-glass! Puppy love when your stomach dissolves and your beloved stretches across the sky, slowly floating down to earth, a silk feather, even in this space of "silk feather" floating across the streaked summer storm Breasts, breasts I've got butterflies there, I've got blueballs, I gotta bang come the rain come the thunder, gotta tie me up hold me down spread me open, gotta dress the dress Gotta dress the wound gotta bandage the sky, honey, baby, lover, babe, Al, big Al, cutie-pie, snooky, roonie, Alwie, big guy The territory of the signifier is _marked off._ Period. From the Pirke Avot: Make a hedge around the Torah. The intensification of the signifier, elsewhere, its dissolution. Period Puppy love spread your legs, gotta suck you now, tongue your menses, transfusion of worlds upon worlds, Shekinah slowly floating down to earth, drenched silks everywhere I wail and beat my little hands against the pillow, my tears flow like rivers I'm crying you sailing upon alone on a skiff, sucking my tit with my little mouth, sucking my nipple blue-black Hold tight to the peepee, nothing will take me away from taking me away: The sails fill, rudder turns, bow rises, motor hums, captain sings, first mate smiles, second mate walks the plank I'm not innocent! I'm not innocent! I cry, I've killed everyone! I've killed everyone! All the little butterflies! _________________________________________________________________________ Double Rotation and None at All From various sources it became clear to me that the body itself presents paradoxes difficult to portray in cyberspace. In particular, there is the "plate trick" related to the "spinor spanner" it is here that a quantum- mechanical property touches on the macro-world, RL, in an easy demonstra- tion. If I hold a plate on my palm, I can rotate the plate 720 degrees, during which my arm returns to the original position. From Francis, A Topological Picturebook: "Half way, your arm will have one full twist in it, which disappears, as you continue twisting your arm in the same way. Another version of this phenomenon was popularized by Dirac and explained by M.H.A. Newman with the help of braids. Dirac used it to illustrate how the Lie group SO(3) of rotations in 3-space is doubly covered by the group S^3 of unit length quaternions." And in Silverman, More than One Mystery, Explorations in Quantum Interference, "All physicists at some time during their study of the quantum theory of angular momentum undoubtedly encounter the seemingly peculiar property of spinors that a rotation of 4pi, rather than 2pi, radians is required to return them to their original state. A rotation of 2pi radians [a full turn (A.S.)], which intuitively ought to correspond to no rotation at all, multiplies the spinor wave function by -1, or equivalently by the phase factor e^(i*pi)." I don't claim to understand all of this, but am disturbed and fascinated that the plate trick results in a _continuous rotational motion_ of the plate in the same direction, while the arm returns to the resting state over and over again. This defies "common sense," which insists that, with the plate held securely, it could only rotate a slight amount before the arm becomes hopelessly twisted. In fact this 720 degrees or 4pi revolution is a fundamental property of space related to the quaternions, a system of "imaginary numbers" which interlock beautifully. You will find much on this in Kauffman's Knots and Physics, as well as his On Knots, which is somewhat simpler; at least I can follow most of it. Still what's amazing is, to use that word again, the _obdurate_ nature of the trick, defying common-sense logic, and revealing a property of funda- mental particles. Dirac's spinor spannor is a similar demonstration, connecting a spanner tool with three cords to two parallel walls; it is possible to create a continuous rotation of the tool without the cords becoming increasingly tangled. Silverman's book shows a nice diagram of a neutron beam with the required 4pi property, contributing to our sense of eeriness of lived space, that all is not quite what it seems to be... _________________________________________________________________________ Disturbance of Body in cybermind, cock jewel, shaft of braided gold Sheathed up in cyberspace, melancholic warriors; the Norwegian Runic Poem speaks of armored warriors, objects and encrustations: Ur er af illu jarne; Dross comes from bad iron; opt l0ypr raeinn a hjarne oft runs the raindeer on frozen snow. ... Oss er flaestra faertha Estuary is the way of most journeys; for; en skalpr er svaertha a scabbard of swords. Raeith kvetha rossom vaesta; Riding's the worst for horses; Reginn slo svaerthet baezta Regin forged the finest sword. ... Tyr er asinendr asa; Tyr is one-handed god; opt vaerthr smithr blasa often must the smith blow. ... Logr er, faellr or fjalle Waterfall falls from the mountain-side foss; en gull ero nosser Ornaments are of gold. Taliesin as well (In Praise of Cynan, trans. Clancy): Cynan, war's bulwark, Poured on me prizes, For his fame is not false, Manor's great master. A hundred swift steeds, Silver their trappings, Hundred heather-hued cloaks Cut equally long, Hundred armlets in my lap And fifty brooches, A sword, jewelled sheath, Gold-hilted, none better: These came from Cynan; No wrath could one see! ... And in Sarduy's Written on a Body, Giancarlo Marmori's Storia di Vous is described. "As Francois Wahl explains, Vous, the protagonist, is 'pro- gressively dispossessed of her body, which is transformed little by little into a _thing_ by the strange ornaments that are gradually encrusted on it, making it impossible for her to move at all.'" Sarduy states, "The officiants, the goldsmiths, will keep adorning, encrusting her with strange jewels, setting her with stones and metals, until she is immobile, asphyxiated. The ceremony has no meaning other than the horror of the void, the confused proliferation of signs, the reduction of a body to a baroque fetish"... Glittering jewels, monstrance, chalice, simultaneous profusion and disso- lution of inscriptions, carvings into the flesh soldered in the form of tourmaline crystals, spelling out the name of Clara Hielo Internet: The chalice of Antioch in fact. Everywhere the body is sutured, covered with language, scars, penetrations, burnt flesh where the sword tips in, bleeding cock where the sword comes out. The surface is frozen, brilliant, _brilliant,_ reflecting and splintering the universe within redshift 5: EVERYTHING DRIFTS. Me, I lie naked, shaved and splayed, the last fringe of hair razored from the text, last shadow gone from the body like the body's shade; dully, I glisten white and wide beneath the full moon, coming to you with a dull translucency of being melted against matter's hardness. You read me, unornamented at last, my holes and crevices, the first and last opening into the return of speech (like the return of the repressed) to the inchoate. The tubes into me, mouth, nose, penis, anus, become a library of decodings; my face remains on the outside of the hollows, tipping towards the void. I can't see into me and I can't be me. _I can't see into me and I can't be me._ It is the _primordial history of flesh,_ the loss of time like a loss of money, the lurid distended into the last text, read with rigour mortis: I am your sheathe, your gold come from bad-iron. I no longer speak in this space, mouth pierced with swords, body rendered from itself: _I signify._ "When I burnt the bodies, Shelley's heart was not consumed when other portions of the body were. In drowning, the blood rushes to the heart; and the heart of Shelley was gorged with blood, so it was no miracle that it would not burn. Ultimately I gave the heart to his wife, and she inconsiderately gave it to Leigh Hunt, and some years ago it was given to Sir Percy Shelley by the Hunts. Mr Barnett Smith says the heart was buried in Rome. It never was in Rome, and it is now at Boscombe, and, for any- thing I know to the contrary, in an ornamental urn on the mantel-shelf." (Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author) _________________________________________________________________________ Having Moored, Having been Moored I can't ever come to grips in being in love in this medium; I don't know how you do it. I feel tears and laughter, feel the world give out from under me, sleep dreaming of a face I have never seen. I am surrounded by vaginal walls pulsating with secret codes I can never decipher; when I want to be silent, I am forced to speak, to continue to speak, to express silence. And you are always so far away, as if I am contaminated within a circle with a radius of 500 miles; nothing is within shouting distance. Further, there is always the Other, as if you could never love me, were you completely detached, emptied of commitments, available as they say. So I surmise you come to me out of boredom, dissatisfaction, something twisted in your life and in mine, and what could emerge from that but more pain, more twisting, among the three of us? It is not as if I lived across the street in a wooden apartment, comfortable with myself, excited to see the lights go on in your flat when you arrive. I'm an absent wit- ness, nothing more than that, a voice, a witticism. I am no help to you; your lover or husband or ex-lover arrives, turns over in his sleep, calls your name concretely within hearing distance; no matter what, your hand reaches out in return, perhaps dead skin against dead skin, but the pressure is there and the memory of pleasure. What do I have to offer you against that? Nothing but voices, whispers of commitment, promises given alone in cold rooms facing glass screens, the harboring of reality being just that, peninsular. I am no force, no matter how much love is exchanged, how many promises. I am nothing to you but a presentiment; I can't be anything else, and surely, you say, I cannot expect you to act simply on the tenor of a voice? Falling towards the ocean, I become more entangled, a Sargasso sea lost in its absence of moorings. Five hundred miles away, I imagine you with your lover, a small white sailboat with clean sails bobbing in the waves. Or that even the boat is drowning, lost forever, sinking like volcanic ash obliterating everything before it, it matters little; there is no between for the two of us, nothing but waves, not even the ruins of death. It is safe for you at five hundred miles, safe to be vulnerable, safe to open and close yourself in the midst of an epistolary novel. I am weakened, lost. There is no other other. There is nothing in my life that has ever happened, and there is nothing that will ever happen. All your life you have happened without me, and will for all of your life. I am no longer in the sea, but of the sea, drowning in itself. I have no names for this, no names for you, returning, having never left. Antigone, I bury myself. _________________________________________________________________________ Eternal Love in Cybermind How can I write you before I write you? I think only of telling truth, disbelieving its inchoate impossibility. Our life together has covered our bodies with language, sharp daggers of sex, constriction of the shaft, the nipple, clitoris; everything defines by lag, deferrment, manumission. My words obey your words, my fingers your fingers. Do you write a story or displacement of organs, the linking of knots, and cybermind is a borromean structure, any ring undoing the w/hole. Those images that appear, appear constantly, and they inhabit love; narcis- sistic at the core, they reflect the body's longing for itself made w/hole again. (Being your hole, being whole.) The phenomenology of cyberspace is not one-hand jerking, not dirty words - those, too, but the uncanny body-double conjuring love out of thin and dirtied air, full tawdry histories. Mutually, we control each other's fantasies of masturbation, bringing the dominance and freedom of the other, the contractual, the borromean into play. _There are no safe words and each and every word is a safe word,_ shattering contract if necessary, unravelling what we have agreed to ravel. There is always a _binding_ in cybermind, the hieroglyphic of the body asserting itself through the addition of a new symbol/ic, a grapheme withdrawn from the continuous production of text. For text in cybersex is always one of dissolution, collapse, speaking the debris, materia ejecta, which corrodes every symbolic. It is the closest one can com/e to langue, to tongue, a movement always in escape in abeyance, feminin ecriture, mouths and labia touching, opening to one another. As long as we speak, our breath is closing in, we fasten/ate, devour each other, the immediacy of words transformed into sound. Through text, my cock is silent speaking, through text, your cunt is breathed reply. (This is the edge of every text, one-hand jerking on the keys.) --- How can I know you intimately, that scar on your clitoris, the exact shape of your nipples, and you in return familiar with the exact contours of the ridge between my penis and anus? The appearance of love blossoms in the secrecy of revelation, the intensification of nodes between the two of us, yet we do not know each other's taste and smell, middle names, the flick of light on a shoulder as the sun comes in the early-morning window. We are trapped in our longing, the mesmeric qual- ity of this space, we are drowned in it. Typing to you late at night, I am tied to you, obeying your every word. Typing to you late at night, I am distended, ferocious, obsequious, an actor in a play desperate to write his lines upon her body in his mind. Unravelling me, you shall never see the results inscribed in lines of sweat, claw-marks across my breasts, liquid everywhere across my body. And typing to you late at night, we are always already returning to ourselves, and out of the true appearance of loneliness we construct the semblance of eternal love. ________________________________________________________________________