Kyberspace ii What's the relationship between the surface and the depths? There isn't any. There isn't any necessary contingent. Roots and tendrils intertwine; emergence may be the best we can hope for, emergence and random genera- tion. Mappings break down between upper and lower. The fault is in the stars. Nothing is driven by the chaotic, but since at least the 1970s it's been known that traceback is impossible; given component [x] of a system, there's no discrete way to determine its state at a specified instant, given a reasonably complex program. Add internetworking, and the same ap- plies, I'd imagine, to larger elements. There's a crude Heisenbergian par- allel here; the greater the sophistication of the machinery, the more it approaches the problems of translation between mind and brain in neuro- physiology. But it's clear from Kyberspace i that more is at stake, that the very top- ography of the surface may bear little relation to the depths, even the depths which generate the surface. The parallelism within a naive pheno- menology - the processing that constructs the parallelism and the inten- tionality/functionalism that acts accordingly - is missing here. It is for this reason that I've considered the relationship between on-line and psy- chosis, the production of a semi-reflexive sememe cauterized from the real, operational within it. ( Just about _any_ examples will do; the mouse clicks on nothing; windows aren't windows, and the interface on the Mac as well is sprayed electronic color. The shadows of html forms are carefully calculated. Our own forms develop rigor mortis on the MOOs. Ytalk appears the most raw, since the words sputter or spew across the screen, apparently in relation to the stumbled movements of fingers on this or the other end. Ytalk comes the closest to breath, and breathing is still a long ways off. ) ___________________________________________________________________________ Kyberspace iii: Hidden Radiotransmission of Carriage Returns # -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kyberspace iv: ## --So what produces it? --And you're sure as you read this, you're writing this? --I'm saying what I'm saying. This was written altogether, I'm sure, the two of us entwined like lovers. Said in one breath by one person. Unsaid by the reader, said by the writer, read by the reader, written by the writer. --Technique, always you quote technique, these letters refreshed at the least thirty times a second, most likely twice that. Those that are pre- sent. Those that are accounted for. As you write them, one by one. --The mastery of programming, it doesn't exist. These are just words; it's as if they've fallen, they fell from somewhere. I turn to you, I fasten myself upon you. --I fascinate you, turn myself inside-out, turn myself in to you. The reader overhears us. We've spoken these words already; we've spoken them long ago. --I love you. --And I am glad, I am glad for you. kb-bash.tf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 11 Apr 25 04:31 bind-emacs.tf -> kb-emacs.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 757 Jan 29 1996 changes.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1571 Jan 29 1996 color.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 8278 Jan 29 1996 complete.tf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 11 Apr 25 04:31 completion.tf -> complete.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 10771 Jan 29 1996 examples.old -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 688 Jan 29 1996 factoral.tf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 11 Apr 25 04:31 factorial.tf -> factoral.tf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 11 Apr 25 04:31 file-xfer.tf -> filexfer.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1714 Jan 29 1996 filexfer.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 976 Jan 29 1996 finger.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 728 Jan 29 1996 hanoi.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1668 Jan 29 1996 kb-bash.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1097 Jan 29 1996 kb-emacs.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1380 Jan 29 1996 kb-os2.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 2250 Jan 29 1996 kbbind.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 3729 Jan 29 1996 kbfunc.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1264 Jan 29 1996 kbregion.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 950 Jan 29 1996 kbstack.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1218 Jan 29 1996 lisp.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1485 Jan 29 1996 local-eg.tf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 11 Apr 25 04:31 local.tf.sample -> local-eg.tf -rw------- 1 sondheim 238 May 7 00:49 macros -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 2355 Jan 29 1996 map.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 925 Jan 29 1996 pcmd.tf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 6 Apr 25 04:31 pref-shell.tf -> psh.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 583 Jan 29 1996 psh.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1803 Jan 29 1996 quoter.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 393 Jan 29 1996 relog.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 610 Jan 29 1996 replace.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 927 Jan 29 1996 rwho.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 314 Jan 29 1996 self.tf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 11 Apr 25 04:31 space_page.tf -> spc-page.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 579 Jan 29 1996 spc-page.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1917 Jan 29 1996 spedwalk.tf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 11 Apr 25 04:31 speedwalk.tf -> spedwalk.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 472 Jan 29 1996 spell.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 686 Jan 29 1996 stack-q.tf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 10 Apr 25 04:31 stack_queue.tf -> stack-q.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 15398 Jan 29 1996 stdlib.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 198678 Jan 29 1996 tf-help -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 9522 Jan 29 1996 tf-help.idx -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1167 Jan 29 1996 tfrc -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1216 Jan 29 1996 tick.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 2569 Jan 29 1996 tintin.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 780 Jan 29 1996 tools.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 785 Jan 29 1996 tr.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 838 Jan 29 1996 watch.tf -r--r--r-- 1 sondheim 1546 Jan 29 1996 world-q.tf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 10 Apr 25 04:31 worldqueue.tf -> world-q.tf ________________________________________________________________________ Kyberspace: You didn't read this here: "I insist that words are totally absent from my mind when I really think and I shall completely align my case with Galton's in the sense that even after reading or hearing a question, every word disappears at the very moment I am beginning to think it over; words to not reappear in my con- sciousness before I have accomplished or given up the research, just as happened to Galton; and I fully agree with Schopenhauer when he writes, 'Thoughts die the moment they are embodied by words.'" (From Jacques Ha- damard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field.) Come _to think of it,_ in the writing of this, the ideas formed function- ally before their production against the writing of this, _frisson_ to be sure, as if I had succeeded in conveying something to you? Does _differ- ance_ return to difference, absolute or nearly decomposable? The left ear does not know what the right eye does. I've been _following_ these determinations, remaining behind, slouched be- neath the streetlight on the corner - you can look out, see me from your second-story window... _________________________________________________________________________ Kyberspace: vi: the figure when we make assumptions tendrils crawl down or off the placement of mind down where ground is inscribed with triangle Archimedes, looking up at Roman soldiers' tendrils from another tribe which wrote themselves as Romans would write themselves just like this Greek bathed in words of tendrils like a circle like a square but "he did it" because of cause ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Kyberspace vii: the figure ii: She woke in the morning. She did not know her strength. She measured her strength and added it to the caloric machine. She looked around. I loved her more than words conveyed. I thought of her during these moments. You know I thought as follows: She breakfasted, moved quickly, flexed her muscles. She combed her beautiful hair, her dark intense eyes shined just the way I would like to think of them. She typed and I would hang on every word of hers; you know that. You also knew that I would lie back, eyes half-shut, dreaming of her. She would rise from the computer, brush the tears away from her eyes, smile from her mouth, face the window. She would open the window. Weather would enter. I would think of her eyes, seeing as many miles as the distance allowed. I would feel suddenly shy, as if I were being watched, talked about. You wrote me that I was one of the very few people you admired, you loved my eyes. You knew I would believe you, my heart bursting with joy, turning momentarily away from her. She would turn away from the window, dress quickly (did I mention this), her body hidden for the struggles of the day. Her strength would follow her into the air. She shielded her voice forever. Her eyes. She thought lovingly of me and I began to stir slightly, open-eyed, my limbs hardening, coming close to existence. As you would say, brushing my hair back, she had an effect, and I was that effect. _________________________________________________________________________ A Report on Older The HP 110 worked with a small AC power supply at 780 milliamps and 9 volts; it went on as if it had run for the past twelve years without a hitch. I was able to set the terminal program, log into Panix at 300 baud, and use a bizarrely configured vt100 emulation on all 16 lines of the screen. Pine was usable, but slowly refreshed; it was clear that other mail read- ers would be better at the speed. SMTP seemed the easiest way to send. Tiny Fugue ran with total havoc - characters were unreadable, and I wasn't able to page anyone; it was hard enough to back out of the application (control-c and the kill everything did it). 300 baud turns out to be a fast human reading speed - nothing much is lost. Still, Pine insisted on redrawing line-by-line; the time wasted is absurd, with constant full-screen redraws. But there's more: Control-v doesn't work in Pico - either does control-y (upper or lower cases) - or control-wy or control-wv. So there's no paging up and down; the screen is useless. I couldn't write on-line with it at all. In IRC, the connect time was about twenty minutes with the Phoenix program and the text didn't scroll - only the line above the bar changed at all. Nice ASCII art disappeared the same way everything else did. I gave up. At the prompt, control-c would pull me out of a slow readout, but in Pine, the full-refresh wouldn't allow it - I had to wait until the end of one sorry sequence after another. There is an upload and download application built-in, but I have no idea what the on-line commands should be - surely not xmodem, kermit, or any- thing other current standard. I need "primitive transfer _x_" - whatever that may be. After logging out, I tried the memo writer, which seemed usable, and there were two drives, with a total of 272k distributed among the virtual RAM disks. There was Lotus 123 as well. I could save to file (slave to file was more like it) but with a totally dead battery, all the configurations disappeared, of course, when I closed down. The keyboard was stiff but robust; the design, excellent, and the power drain unbelievably small - the unit would run for 16 hours when new, with a good battery. The screen isn't backlit, and without drive motors, there's not much that uses electricity. All this from 1984, when the Big Brother was supposed to once again take over the Holding Company - who know it was Microsoft at the time... _________________________________________________________________________ AMA AM (aleph 'aa' mem), mother, matriarch, metropolis, later womb AM (aleph 'ee' mem), if, whether, when, conditional AMA (aleph 'ee' mem 'a' aleph) mother, mama, mommy AMH (aleph 'ee' mem 'a' hay) matrix (printing) Y'M (ayin 'a' mem) nation, people, relative, clan Y'M (ayin 'ee' mem), with, while, as long as Y'MH (ayin-mem-hay), to be dark, dim, weak * in the weak city, the people in the weak womb of the mother, the clan, the relative darkened in the matrix of the web, the mother-matriarch dimmed with the nation, or the beginning of the nation whether and if a nation, whether or not the matrix and if, or not the web, dark, dim, and cool -----------------------------------------------------------| * Most from Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English. __________________________________________________________________________ Subject: Enormous difficulty of 300 baud this is a demonstration of the difficultty of 300 baud. I am writing in PINE and it is clear that the Net is linear at this level. the screencontinually refreshes - everything is a mess in terms of redrawing materials overand over again. I can't- or could, but incredibly slowly - go back in and change things around - theslightest movement up and down of he cursor results in heneed for redrawing again. the backspaceisn't configuredfor delete; deleteisn'tconfiguredfor anything.. on occasion, the spacebar is awkward, butit's hard to know when - especially if one is typinga high speed. but it is the rdrawing that fascinates, over and over again - the redrawing that backsup on theline orparagraph or menu commands now below-that jumpsback and forth onthe page over and over agai.. rightnow,thescreenis so slow that the iage issplit -thatIdonoknowwhich part ofthepostisbeingtypedupon. it must have been incredibly difficult atthe beginning ofwriting on linetocompose longerormmore complex texts. Ortherewould have been a slowermode of thinking, movingjust about out of the mechanical age. because the letters spew forth alost one by one by one and it's hard to trackthem otherwise,thought curling in upon itself -and thisafterfor example theIBM Selectric hadalready (at leastwith me) reached speeds of about 100 wps on a good day... so I am current/antiqque and this is a way of thinking about the Netand thepackets emerging one by one by one... this is theur-net, and for thosed whowereonsayin theearly 1980s- orbefore- HOW DID YOU DO IT? any storieswould be greatly appreciated!!! Alan(by the way sig redrawing takes a huge amount oftime....) http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ 4 GIN 1/3 SA KUG. BABBAR ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Re: Enormous difficulty of 300 baud Which (musing further) leads me to believe that by the time pine, tin, Phoenix IRC, etc. were developed, baudrate had sped up sufficiently so that redraws weren't a problem. Which means there are still ways to make the applications leaner just as SMTP is leaner than Columbia mail which is leaner than elm which is leaner than Pine which is far leaner than Eudora and we can just continue upwards in the spiral outwards. I wonder if there were .sigs in 300 baud days and how they were handled - the constant redraw slowed things up at least 50%. In other words, if there's a .sig in a post, then all text above it is an _insert_ and each new line of text moves the .sig down one, which has to be redrawn... And I still can't figure out the download mode, except that it seems to call up awk for some reason at the Unix prompt! Next stop, the abacus (I've written, by the way, on the abacus, somewhere in the earlier parts of the Internet text, .sig below, having used both Japanese and Chinese variants) ... Alan http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ 4 GIN 1/3 SA KUG. BABBAR _________________________________________________________________________ - Welcome to Hell: This is the current listing on panix.com for the newsgroup alt.adjective.- noun.verb.verb.verb, which has been one of the most creative on Usenet. And what has happened here is so typical - it's as if only the hard-core groups - those that have existed for years within the comp./ hierarchy, for example, have any chances of survival. Creativity has gone to hell be- cause the creative areas are less moderated. For those who aren't familiar with this group, it's based on wild alt./ hierarchy newsgroup names; the idea is to post in such a way that every sentence replicates the syntax. Forget gopher! Forget archie! Forget Usenet! Browsers are kewl! alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb (29T 39A 0K 0H R) h=help 1 + 3 Here is what you want!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Rich Maher 2 + (no subject) Jigsaw 3 + Free Money!!! Mike@Internet.Dire 4 + 2 FUCK SCHEMERS Mathieu 5 + alt.relaxed.animals.envy.envy.envy Red4Stone 6 + Tell spammer Todd Macdonald what you think of PRAR 7 + $ Jeff 8 + ??? Need Money Now ??? bird@csra.net 9 + 3 alt.new.member.help.help.help Jack & Kait Marden 10 + READ THIS NOW!!! Patrick 11 + alt.despicable.spammers.fuck.screw.sodomise Miss Lane 12 + alt.longtime.fan.delurks.smiles.posts Cindyrelly 13 + XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Eric Johnson 14 + Make $50,000 Fast! Make Money Fast 15 + 3 ALT.SENSATIONAL.MONEY.MAKING.SCHEME.TOTALLY E SHUR1 16 + Investment/Debt Reduction gth 17 + 3 alt.aanvvv.posters.rest.work.play Mary Lojkine 18 + alt.informative.FAQ.surfed.downloaded.posted Cavuto 19 + Trying To get By 20 + NEED FAST CASH?, HERE IT IS! - moneyt~1.txt ( hulsbeek@telebyte. 21 + ywca of portland,me girls basketball FMSHEP 22 + "IF YOU'RE IN DEBT, READ THIS NOW!!" Ray 23 + MAKE CASH FAST! Ryan Korstanje 24 + Unlimited Internet Access ONLY $19.95 small2@erthlink.ne 25 + READ ME IF YOU COULD USE CA$H! Bri 26 + Quick Money jbc@in.net 27 + 2 Need Fast Cash?? Here it is! David La Favre 28 + VIRUS ALERT! PC USERS PLEASE READ AV - Detection 29 + --->Kurt-IN-CyberSpace, A WONDERFUL NEW SITE Ak-Kurt _______________________________________________________________________ - [Wryting in Mail/mail at 300 baud: To Be] T-Bone showed me the ways of composition at 300 using the old Unix mail system. There is no visible interface here, only characters coming into existence on the screen, one after the other, line by line. It's now the duty of the keyboard itself to track everything, and _this_ keyboard (HP 110 laptop again) is difficult to the touch... Is it the case, then (in the sense: The world is all the case.) - that interface is always already scan, that the visible is a particular kind of construct here? Even interlaced, the screen is not the result of parallel processing, but a sequential production. Anything beyond that in fact re- verberates with the necessity to return over and over again to the begin- ning, top or bottom of the buffer, because what is visible is a prior frame; nothing is outside the frame, and the frame is _generated._ So the phenomenological real is a construct (nothing new here); there are processes and protocols involved. And the earlier Unix programs such as mail come closest to _pure_ text, nothing else on the screen, no framework but that occupied by the text itself. So that, elsewhere, where I speak of the _ascii unconscious,_ surely not talking about Pine, Elm, Pico - the editor which in MOO is known simply as _enter_ comes closest. _Enter_ the text or its diegesis. Write oneself into and out of existence. _To be._ ___________________________________________________________________________ - BEWARE: MOOs, Revisited With all the recent problems on CM-MOO and now PMC2; with the bad politics a while ago over the move from PMC to PMC2; with my own experience as a wizard on Kyoto MOO and CM-MOO; and with rethinking MOO structures in gen- eral, I want consider, again, their potential for general communications. I find the MOO core and database themselves so flawed that only a rigid framework seems possibly secure - such as one might find in a research MOO, k12 MOO, or even an on-line teaching MOO. In all of these, users come on for specific engagements - including meetings, structured learning experiences, and so forth. Characters are highly limited. The wizards are primarily administrators or "officials." On open MOOs, however, there are two problems. One, which applies every- where, is that of the phenomenology and seduction of an emotionally- charged textual domain, which tends towards fore/closure, and even psy- chosis (not that characters are psychotic, but that the framework becomes symptomatic) - interior and exterior worlds merge with a combination of inner speech (Vygotsky) and what I've called the "ascii unconscious." The second is that of the _completely unrestrained power of the wizards._ Consider _any_ text-based virtual environment residing on a machine. Sup- pose that x sends y private email within it. Then, unless that email is encrypted (and it isn't in 99.99% of the cases - in general there aren't even routines for this), the email resides _somewhere_ in the closure of the database - somewhere in the MOO/MUD/talker etc. directories. It may reside within the MOO db as a whole, or in a separate file on an lpmud - but it's _there._ And because it's there, there are a always sysadmins who have total access to it - who have root access to the machine, or wizard ownership on a MOO, etc. _It's readable._ And more to the point, _it's read._ On some applications there is even an @snoop or .snoop or /snoop function that allows a wizard/sysadmin/god to listen in on any private conversa- tion. On some applications, wizards (I'll use this as generic) may move about invisibly, without announcing their presence. On the MOO, a wizard can read anyone's mail, change anyone's password (in- cluding the password of another wizard - locking hir out), change anyone's description, rewrite anyone's objects or take them for hir own, and even, I believe, forge email - forging is also relatively easy to do on a talk- er. (Ironically, IRC, with all its faults, seems safest with /msg and dcc communications. There are obviously tradeoffs.) Before I was wizard/god etc. on various applications, I didn't realize, as well, the _ease_ with which these things can be done. They're simple ad- ministrative tasks/commands - they don't take programming. As a result, the MOO has appeared increasingly leaky to me - I would not trust anyone on one, and certainly would not trust any private email, email list, or talking/paging/whispering, etc., in any sort of space, no matter how pri- vate it seems to be. _It all depends on the good will of the wizards_ - and that hardly provides for security. A MOO, for example, would be one of the last places one would want to transact business. For research purposes, or k12, MOOs are excellent - they work well as a distance learning environment. In all of these cases, it doesn't matter if anything is overheard - in fact, monitoring might be an integral part of a k12 diorama display for example. But these are extremely narrowed catego- ries, oddly against the grain of the expansive programming/routines inher- ent to the MOO. Finally, the Cybermind conference MOO (CM-MOO) - for me, all the difficul- ties there have made the above clearer than ever. Text-alone does its own damage; the hierarchical structure of the MOO (who has access to #2? to the root? who has wizard status? programming status? who determines the overall look of the space? who organizes the email lists? and so forth) does the rest. Is it possible, in fact, to have a functional and user- friendly conference MOO, where the conference itself is not strictly aca- demic? I want to conclude by mentioning talkers again - which have, after the basic level of the organizer/sysadmin - a much more level playing field. Have one sysadmin, no other gods or wizards - and the site is more or less secure. Others could still add rooms _by sending them to the sysadmin as ASCII files for inclusion_ - but they would not have access to the data- base. The political hierarchy would consist of a single node - the sysad- min - and "the rest." If the sysadmin was a conference organizer, I think the application would run smoothly. Nonetheless, even with a talker, all private communications among parti- cipants would be immediately accessible to hir... --------------------------------------------------| ( See Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, Cambridge, 1986. There are a number of sources on Net security as a whole, of course. I don't know of anything specifically referencing MOOs or talk- ers.) _________________________________________________________________________ - Avi When you walk naked through the door of the camera in the wall on my machine in Windows opening only to that door where the camera is against the wall, then you repeat that walk You repeat that walk until it glows over and over again, until the act of walking naked doesn't stop but continues through our naked bodies watching here on the other side They shudder because there is no side to the other, and the other is a shudder, and because memory remains, that of your body and every inch beneath the breast and legs open in an eye Which is a book of ordinary and your limbs break glass in Windows on my machine from your machine, and your joining us before us like an altar or table is just what one would like Those thick files flying, your walk unencountered, and then that walk, then you repeat that walk ________________________________________________________________________ (From Robbed Texts / Immobilizations, Fort-Da, 2000): _The Signifier's Wet, Spit out the Signifier! I Exist_ Excess or supplement of the signifier, dripping off the edge of the graph- eme - or smearing, diapers, ink - shit everywhere - pissed books _(drag shadows)_ - absolute as projective language - develops an anemia - thinned blood - pushes the rim of the asshole out - paste smeared upon the supine body of the young girl or young boy _(crash drugs)_ - diffusion of violence - perfect breasts, milk and blood between them, bet- ween one and the other - the man or woman harbors both _(capacitance)_ - diffusion of place, placelessness - machinery searching for a site - in- side the cunt, against the wall motherfucker - swelling the anemic prick - almost catastrophic - it can't hold on, can't hold itself _(heads blown)_ - one, two, a million Oedipals - piss runs from my panties, cracks and cre- vices, I suck your obdurate foot, your weight upon it - your stump, path- way into cunt - I can smell it - step on me - sucking toes, the arch of it - swallow _(nothing)_ - absolute drawing the text out of itself - text leaks onto the floor - wipe your ass with it, eat it - taste of your hole - your piss filling me - I say whatever you want me to - I repeat myself, repeat you - say I exist - say anything - whatever you want _(nothing)_ - panties fissuring - break me open - you can see the walls of my hole - stalagmites, stalactites - something's written there - illegible - you make me read it - I exit _(drag shadows)_ - embarrassment resulting in speechlessness - you watch me - I stink in your eyes - your foot in my mouth, deeper - can hardly breathe - covered with your shit - my breasts are bruised, torn _(drag shadow biotech)_ - self-censoring - can't imagine saying anything - mouth filled with piss - hose disconnects, repeats itself - the cycle continues - sixty cycles a second _(crash drugs hard)_ - exploitation of the secret life - optical disk transference - I exist - leaked out onto the floor - beneath the table - in the hole _(crash drugs. nothing)_ - in the groundfloor of normalcy _(drug shadows. hard.)_ - ________________________________________________________________________ - C La obra completa de Tintoretto 1518-1594, part of Maestros de la Pintura, was purchased in Madrid, after Margaret and I walked across the city to the Prado on a hot summer day. She was ill; I was in Spain for a week visiting her, terribly in love. Today she is a fairly well-known painter living here in New York and we are untogether. When we went to the city. When we went to the Prado, I learned to C for the first time, spending hours in front of El Rapto de Helena, for example, until the violence of the work manifest itself, beyond the usual play of foreground/background - loved by looking within the confines of the frame. The bulbous escaped and I _saw_ it, leaking, just as the chalked boat leaked, the image refusing resolution. When we went there, it was to and from Margaret being sick, confined at times, but the chalk also sickened, deliberately, and Tintor- etto become incomprehensible, fierce burning of Greek fire and interpre- tations across the waters. I brought nothing to him. Neither context, nor plateaus/centuries (millennia b.c. interpreted by Homer, transfused in 16th century a.d., recuperated by myself through representations of millennia b.c. interpreted by representations of Homer, transfused by interpretations of 16th century a.d...): something _inert,_ on the order of _salvage,_ remained: X drew and _presumably_ saw what he drew. C-saw. Here, in what was formerly known as _cyberspace,_ speech, C-ing, is _by virtue of permissions_ - echos are written into systems: _because someone has set something to echo_ - because labor has occurred. The other is visible to you by virtue of an other. _These words are an occurrence_ or plateau, continually refreshed. _The screen is not still._ The screen comes and goes like Tintoretto. Today I buy a ragged copy of Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind, The Self- Portrait and Other Ruins. Because it is ragged, I take it to the store manager, who reduces its price. This book of the Blind does not appear well to the cited; it has been excessively handled, _touched_ repeatedly; there are marks on the page-edges, stesses and strains on the cover. I could not pay full price and I am tempted to talk about the political economy of the perfectly-cited; I cannot cite myself, wearing thick glasses to move the day along. And poor. Day and night poor. In cyberspace once again, with Derrida speaking of the Medusa, Perseus, others: "Each time, then, there is the ruse of an oblique or indirect gaze. A ruse that consists in sidestepping rather than meeting head-on the death that comes through the eyes." One C's in cyberspace by virtue of the gaze _askew_ (just as C coding garners or discredits invisibility), and it is precisely this skewing or dimensional shoving, that results, annihil- ates the death or negation/annihilation centered in real-life alterity. Here, with ME (Sumerian ME: attribute/inculcation), does not death also come through the touch of the hand, the eyes, the mouth, the tongue, the penis, the vagina, the _flesh_ of the thing, brilliant death - just as negation in cyberspace is always already the shadowing of the eyes, kohl, a certain perseverance, _darkening of the brow?_ I remember Margaret frow- ning; I was blinded by love. But here, an other shadowing, one lives forever, read. _________________________________________________________________________ - Rave-Time written at 300 Baud i 300 baud: is a form of meditation, forced to use primitive programs without screen redraws, simplified commands -- as if each word were to present itself alone on the screen for contemplation or that a word would exist within a breath or the breath of a phrase thus breathing the language because the speed of the machine is now identical to the speed of reading and writing upon the machine because the machine is slowed in its veins and forms of platelet communications, blood streams of packets slowed for sounding out because the screen is breast, and cursor nipple, and my body presses tight against its rhythm of ejaculation as it speaks for and against, thus the one in return and the other as it races along the anarchic sputtering of wires heated exactly in the midst of the procession of the human: no wonder the boards freeze shut with organic secretions from the dreams of a million hackers no wonder I clasp the remaining syllables to my chest, erect teats flooding the world with my murmuring it is this speed, like the speed of the rave: that's it, exactly! the machine has become rave-speed; reduced to its origins, it has become one of us! its juices flow as impulses stutter to the depth of a womb, length of a distended penis! 300 baud: I read and write you _exactly_! for the first and last, this is my body breathing _for you_ and _in your space._ nothing has fucked me like the machine! nothing has loved me like it either! ------------------------------------------------------| ii In the form of a query: The Internet arose in the midst of 300 baud com- munication, a speed which parallels that of human reading and very very fast typing. At this rate, the machine appears to _breathe_ the human; and at this speed, the anarcho-libertarian ethos of the early hackers arose. Is there a relationship between the two - the apparent vulnerabi- lity and organicism of the slow machine on one hand, and the loving care applied by hackers on the other? __________________________________________________________________________ Face in Cyberspace Lucan, Civil War, trans. Susan Braund: [...] From heaven birds fell down with sudden weight, the beasts were fastened to their rocks, entire tribes of Ethiopians, living near, grew stiff in marble. No living thing could undergo the sight of her; the snakes themselves attempt to avoid the Gorgon's face by stretching backwards. She turned to stone the Titan, Atlas, who stood beneath the Pillars of the West; and long ago, when heaven feared the Giants supported on Phlegraean snakes, she raised them up as mountains and the Gorgon on the centre of Pallas' breast concluded the frightful battle of the gods. [...] Even Pallas could not watch, and though Perseus looked away his features would have frozen had Tritonia not spread out the dense tresses and veiled the face with snakes. In this way the winged hero seized the Gorgon and flew into the sky. He in fact was shortening his path and passing through the air on a nearer course if he cut right across Europe's cities: Pallas told him not to harm the fruitful lands, to spare the nations. For who would not look up to see the ether at such a mighty flyer? With the Zephyr the winged one turns his course and travels over Libya which, sown with no cultivation, it opens to the stars and Phoebus: the orbit of the sun afflicts and burns the soil; and in no other land does night fall into sky more loftily and block the path of the moon if she forgets her wandering swerve and runs straight through the constellations, without fleeing north or south to avoid the shadow. Yet that barren land and fields productive of no good catch the venom from the gore of dripping Medusa, a hideous dew from wild blood which heat promotes and boils in the crumbling sand. [...] Between the chiasm of Medusa and menstruation; between phallocentrism and defuge/flooding, cyberspace falters and topples in the sand/granularity of an elsewhere real. (Just as "cyberspace" already turns tentative, as its Gibsonian depths are flattened by the VRML of the World Wide Web. Penis/Vagina: the closed sys- tem refuses outlet. Links characterize by different. World short-circuits, not even boils in the crumbling sand/granularity of an elsewhere real.) __________________________________________________________________________ Brief note While I'm on no mail, besides contemplating the vagaries of James Ellroy, I've been thinking about books like Herz' Surfing on the Net, Sullivan's and Bornstein's Nearly Roadkill, Sirius and St. Jude's How to Mutate..., etc. I am amazed at the logic, passing for radicality, in all of these works. I am amazed at the presence of the _same_ ideological structures in all of them - as well as in Wired magazine itself. These are harbingers of a new dulled prose, a prose in which working and reworking, beating to death, frameworks such as chat or email seems suf- ficient to give a glow of literary edginess. (I'd place Saarinen's and Taylor's Imagologies - still in print! - in this category as well.) Hypertext wouldn't save these; what's missing is the _language_ - we're at the dawn of the millennium, of new and virtual subjectivities, and we're rewarded with all the baggage of modernist rationalism in sentence structure, fragmented plot, etc. etc. No wonder Burroughs and Joyce are held in such high esteem! And Sterne's almost forgotten! It's as if Irigaray, Cixous, Jabes, Celan, Blanchot, Wittig, Kristeva, the Barthes of Lover's Discourse, were writing in pure absence - it's as if we've got to take America: Love it or Leave It! everywhere on the Info Highway, also called Infobahn as a slight bow to Europeans who want a piece of the action! There has to be more! Literature isn't composed of a shoving match to see who can adopt to the new forms (yes, even formalisms!) first! As if inter- iors no longer counted! - as if the forms themselves had no _effect._ It's too easy to skitter across these surfaces ______________________________________________________________________ - Drugs 4 r k:11> ping -s 128.143.200.59 PING 128.143.200.59: 56 data bytes ^C ----128.143.200.59 PING Statistics---- 12 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss k:12> ping -s 134.7.170.170 PING 134.7.170.170: 56 data bytes ^C ----134.7.170.170 PING Statistics---- 14 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss So the PMC2-MOO and CM-MOO are down. So there is no way into community. Straddling the fence: set Cybermind nomail / set FOP-l nomail: posts be- come a form of _injection_ just as downed sites become _expulsions._ So if injections, then are lists _addicted_ - not, for example, is one _addicted to the lists,_ but are the lists themselves _addicts_ - and what would that entail, if not death without infusion, the identical collapse of space that occurs if speech is proscribed? Whether or not I exist in physical reality (and like Julia, I don't), ex- istence here (as has often been asserted) is equivalent to enunciation; one entails the other. There are downed sites, sites with dead email lists, useless subscriber bases, message bases, forgotten; who would know, for example, if I were still subscribed to *Ontology, were it not for the fact that it was killed off months ago, in a purging or cleansing of a particular site? The list depends, _hangs from,_ a witness at its own hanging, posts, in- jections from outside which constitute its episteme. What vibrates here is a phenomenon, just as I, Julia, write from outside the world itself. Clearly the cursor parallels the needle, tracing marks on the flesh of the screen, linear veins tapped, scrolled down across the body. My speech _lists_ to one side or another, speech _of the list._ Fallen, I am irre- trievable. The lists are constituted, flesh raked by flesh, flesh's dominion. Just as I am fixed, they are configured; text devours text as there's no per- fect drug that doesn't need consumption. __________________________________________________________________________ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Space of Wonder and Consolation on the Cybermine Talker * Room: ill-logic Broken forms, ragged edges, fragments, languages, scrolls. Come here when the words tangle in your throat, when sounds from nowhere murmur and cry, when you feel the problem in your stomach, the solution in your womb, insoluble. You are all alone here. Current topic: Wonder *** The ill-logic message board *** When things are difficult and there is no beginning And there is no ending to their difficulty And they lie entwined like lovers speaking for the last time About the nature of _things_ and _things_ are in the way Of things and lovers; then appear in this space once and forever To heal, ascertain, overcome, measure their beginning Of everything and all; you will heal, wounds turned deep, and scars From wounds and no more, and thus you will a woman be, or man Or gender-free, the sullen flesh expanded into ecstasy For you, for me, and ease will rule the stars. ---------------------------| * all my thanks to Paula Davidson __________________________________________________________________________ - Untitled I do not know, but that I identify with the life of Vaslav Nijinsky. It is not a question of madness, but of a body perfectly attuned to _becoming_ in all domains, thus a body freed of the technological, downed by its own impulses. I imagine him dancing, sparks shunted from the nipples, glows in the ground itself. Dance does move the body with nothing and dance contains the connec- tion of the body with the body. An arm does not emerge from a leg, nor does a nipple sprout a finger. But a neck turns beneath the arms, and the organs of the face thrust themselves close to ground or be- neath the throat. It is so silent that it is not a language of its own. Nijinsky opens to impossibilities. He says, nothing remains when the ground's cleared for planting. He says, it is not a question of seeds. Who is this Bro- nislava Nijinska who dances in the Diaghilev Ballet? Here, the fingers dance deliberate their moment of damnation, black re- petitions going nowhere, drowned figures washed up on violent shores. There, the body is a rediscovery, mobile shoals strewn across inert and silent islands - continuously born until three decades have passed, then uncanny and passing for wraith. ________________________________________________________________________ Final Notes On Slow Entry (HP 110 laptop) - 1. That cat slows down sufficiently at 300 baud - cat spills a file to the screen; at 300 baud, it's readable without using more or less. 2. That raw telnet works with talkers reasonably well - the only real pro- blem is that of the login-screen, or the .rev (review) command, which loads and replays the last 25 lines of dialog - takes quite a whle. 3. That Mail permits fairly rapid replies - Mail (Unix mail) works well, but insists on loading almost the entire header; replies are quick, how- ever. 4. I did manage to download, oddly enough, by using the vi com- mand - it managed to make it onto the laptop for at least parts of files. I imagine upload might work the same way. I had to turn off the HP 110's protocols, however; it was raw ASCII. (I'd like to know more about this, since some situations might not have x-y-z-modem/kermit available.) 5. Any program such as Pico that needs screen refreshing - or complex clients such as tiny fugue - just don't work properly; the key commands seem inoperable (no matter how they're set on the 110). Why is this of interest? Because this is one of the narrowest bandwidths still possible; because it shows what might be done under relatively poor Net conditions; because it's a good way to learn fundamental Unix pro- grams, and because the relatively slow rate brings all sorts of things to the surface, believe it or not (particularly on talkers) that appear too quickly at current normal speeds to be read, or even noticed. ________________________________________________________________________ - MY WORLD! All the current objects on CM-MOO descended from the Root Class - and thanks to Suzy_Bandwidth for the command ;$object_utils:descendants(#1): #3, #0 (THE KNOWN UNIVERSE!), #5, #6, #7, #45, #44, #81, #37, #31, #16, #71, #19, #13, #12, #10, #66, #67, #70, #73, #78, #80, #101, #103, #49, #111, #112, #117, #118, #122, #125, #129, #130, #150, #160, #162, #170, #149, #151 (MY HOME!), #184, #187, #168, #203, #210, #221, #222, #196, #216, #235, #252, #254, #256, #258, #260, #262, #264, #268, #271, #276, #282, #284, #285, #289, #48, #47, #46, #110, #11, #193, #8, #9, #61, #72, #100, #106, #105, #104, #109, #152, #197 (MY SHORT-WAVE RADIO!), #207, #209, #153, #218, #220, #191, #231 (A SIGN I MADE!), #234, #244, #228, #283, #287 (MY CHINESE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT!), #84, #108, #148, #206, #286, #53, #85, #198, #223, #281, #116, #155, #156, #107, #90, #93, #95, #212, #242, #246, #161, #238, #38, #32, #4, #126, #128, #135, #136, #137, #143, #144, #145, #158, #159, #165, #178, #182, #185, #186, #189, #177, #194, #202, #211, #213, #214, #217, #224, #229, #232, #233, #237, #239, #241, #243, #121, #277, #279, #280, #288, #291, #89, #174, #175, #96, #97, #57, #36, #69, #83, #56, #99, #120, #127, #146, #141, #154, #166, #181, #173, #195, #200, #140, #219, #208, #199, #124, #176, #240, #230, #245, #247, #248, #275, #278, #2, #147, #115, #139 (ME!), #142, #92, #94, #113, #114, #131, #132, #133, #134, #163, #164, #171, #172, #179, #180, #183, #188, #190, #167, #201, #205, #204, #192, #225, #226, #227, #236, #123, #249, #250, #251, #119, #253, #255, #257, #259, #261, #263, #265, #267, #266, #269, #270, #272, #273, #274, #290, #34, #30, #15, #68, #60, #138, #169, #157, #215, #18, #35, #39, #26, #17, #77, #102, #59, #43, #29, #24, #23, #22, #63, #64, #76, #75, #65, #88, #20, #54, #25, #28, #40, #27, #41, #50, #51, #52, #55, #58, #42, #21, #33, #14, #74, #82, #79, #86, #91, #87, #98 _________________________________________________________________________ - Uboat Tap-tapping away, the Joe Jack worked his audience. She stood in the door, her red dress slit up to where only I was allowed to go. Her cigarette dangled from her ruby lips, spitting ash onto the floor. Babe, I says. Her left hand rubs up against the jam, leans hard near where the ceiling thought to be. Rooms always bent to her; you knew when she walked in - that the contest was lost, that there wasn't even a contest to begin with. The hell with the key. Morse could wait. Ships were sunk at sea for less. In my mind the transmitter went cold, I went hot, and the world went cra- zy. Babe, I says, Babe, Babe. She responded like a monsoon on a desert island. The Krauts had hit a ves- sel of ours, I was sure of us. The transmitter chattered like a madman, and I could hear it, and in that very moment I betrayed my country. __________________________________________________________________________ - MUD Lore: Ever put your fingers in a fan? * Iron blades man cut like zingers can. Plastic wingers shut shades for swinger's whores, man. Stun fun, I'm slut, but raids linger more, can rut. Type done, cat file, ** store while hype runs. Bores gripe, I'm hung. Sever shut sour zinger's been, so LAN? Bryon's maids can slut, hike, sing or scan. Spastic swingers rut, laid, for wings stored, WAN. Run, gun, slime mutt! cuts fade, finger whores, ban guts: type won. MUD Hunned, stun-gun dud. Hype: Crime stores! Raid, fans, juts! Lore! ----------------------------- * of or owned by Madonna ** three-hundred bawd ___________________________________________________________________________ - Resistance Of course it is the resistance _to end._ What I need to say here resists, in a manner of speaking, a manner of typing, that is to say, a resistance to speaking: the implacable use of the keyboard, the resistance of the keys themselves, the necessity of continuous checking of the textual domain - its appearance, spelling, punctuation... A resistance which is also a form of organization of course, an organization-coursing through/emblematic of, thought, as it is constrained, framed by the text - it is this framing that _naturally_ constitutes the transmission or domain of thought, its reification. Which is not _thought,_ or thought thought, but an articulation or pro- tocol, thinking channeled into specific linguistic structures. It is also the appearance of the _thing,_ of the paragraph, spacing, that can make all the difference in the world. Resistance structures / restruc- tures; every text, in fact, is simultaneously resistance and empowerment - _not_ in an inverse relationship, but otherwise, in collusion... It is the resistance of the keys against the fingers, the resistance of habits of thought against the novelty of new sentencing (one is sentenced _to_ novelty), and it is the resistance of the mind itself to a reifica- tion harboring the very germs of novelty. It is the necessity to submit to novelty; the necessity to continue the struggle with the arms, the wrists, the palms, the joints, the tips; and the necessity of resistance itself as language ceases its noise, resonates with the specificity of the indexical/phonemic. It is of course the resistance to _begin._ __________________________________________________________________________ - Real-Life Morphing Player-Class: "The first warp-spasm seized Cuchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins and knees switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front. The balled sinews of his calves switched to the front of his shins, each big knot the size of a warrior's bunched fist. On his head the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck, each might, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child. His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn't probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back form his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram's fleece reached his mouth from his throat. His heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watch-dog at its feed or the sound of a lion among bears. Malignant mists and spurts of fire - the torches of the Badb - flickered red in the vaporous clouds that rose boiling above his head, so fierce was his fury. The hair of his head twisted like the tangle of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage. The hero-halo rose out of his brow, long and broad as a warrior's whetstone, long as a snout, and he went mad rattling his shields, urging on his charioteer and harassing the hosts. Then, tall and thick, steady and strong, high as the mast of a noble ship, rose up from the dead centre of his skull a straight spout of black blood darkly and magically smoking like the smoke from a royal hostel when a king is coming to be cared for at the close of a wintry day." --From the Tain Bo Cuailnge, translated The Tain, by Thomas Kinsella; Cu- chulainn is the Ulster warrior hero. The characteristics remind me of the Viking _beserk,_ from whence the English. @morphing is visceral and real, related to yoga I would think; the Tain is from the 8the century a.d. but its roots apparently go back for centuries b.c. -- _________________________________________________________________________ - Stained In Virtual-Real: the Apostrophe-'s' 1. I sign a contract with you. You do what you want with me. I trust you totally. If you do only what I want you to do, you have violated the contract. You create a sign that leaks, spills. There must be an inert redundancy. You piss on me, but not _there,_ so you piss on me _there_; you sign yourself with your teeth on me, but not _that hard,_ so, in fact, you mark/demarcate me for your own, your pleasure, which becomes mine as well. 2. I choose this position with you. My body shudders during masturbations, trembles at your name, those images you have left with me. Dreaming be- comes an impossibility. Everywhere I turn, you are there; I choose you to penetrate me, devour me. I will escape this obsession through cannibalism; alone, I tear at my nipples, spread my cheeks, open my hole to empty air. I choose you to fill me, fill _it,_ as I become pronominal in fact, skew- ered on evacuated identity. 3. There are always states of preparation, recuperation; I do not give a name to anything, neither masochism nor abjection. States are always lim- inal, between borders, absorbing borders; there is neither coming or go- ing. Sinking is a buoyancy. Memory replays and names me accordingly. 4. The liminal is between the name and spattered/splattered language; it is not the absence of language, but the frisson of existence extinguish- ing itself. The liminal is between myself and you, coated with effluvia, interiors spread like paste between us. We wear our clothing until it frays from the skin, splits, peels. We are absent signs, dissemination- wraiths. We are scented, swollen, ruptured: we are _odor._ 5. Covered with your feces, limbs, blood and marrow, I am cleansed - an eye, having conquered itself and the site of the body, an ego-egg. This is ultimate narcissism, long-circuiting and cycling through you, threaded through mouth and genitals, returning within the imaginary I have expel- led, absolved, swallowed once again. 6. Always these boundaries, interiors and exteriors, come into play. Sex- uality irrupts between us, _among_ us, as surfaces break down, as bodies are _rendered_ or _inscribed_ by one another. Transgression and delay pur- chase infinite arousal, infinite becoming. Not death but _infinite delay_ is linked to the sexual. 7. Thus I become _your_ thing, possession, your bed, cradle, toilet, sur- face of wrything / wryting / writing. On Internet, _I am inscribed_ as apostrophe-'s'; within the real, by demarcations _sutured_ from, and fore- closing the body. _It is all a question of the writing of erasure._ 8. And just as inscribed-erased, also _disinterred,_ asymbolicized, a reg- ression to the _infantile,_ choratic inchoate aggression: _splay._ In be- coming your _thing,_ (elsewhere than semiosis, determination), I escape writing, neither writing nor wryting (with its ontological implications). I _tend towards freedom,_ beneath your playful smile. 9. At this point, _punctum,_ the text evacuates, excretes, _registers._ At this point the registration is complete, an ordered disorderliness, a mess brought to and from the home. Metaphorically, an _inverted funnel,_ with obvious implications of _reading._ Text is a very part of that recupera- tion, or the liminal itself foreclosed; in _this_ space, the screen is al- ways cleansed. ( And at this moment, the apostrophe-'s' - almost transcen- dent - _I am Clara's_ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Nibelungen Rings The telephone brings people together. The telephone allows me to talk to my Mom whenever and wherever I want. With the telephone, my Mom and I can related to each other. Whenever we have a quarrel, the telephone is sure to patch it up. Sometimes my girlfriend and I need to talk about our relationship. We find talking on the telephone the easiest way to do this. We are careful to listen to each other, and not to interrupt. Through the telephone, we find we have a wonderful relationship when we really get together. My daughter uses the telephone all the time to speak to me. She can track me down with my beeper or cellular phone. She has boyfriend problems, and I guess I'm more a friend than a Dad to her. We'll talk over everything and I usually can help her have a happier life. My boss uses the telephone to reach me whenever and wherever she wants. It's really important to stay in touch with each other through the busy workday. If I'm taking an important client out to lunch, and she receives new business information, she can get in touch with me. I can tell my client the latest our company is thinking. My secretary uses the phone to remind me of important meetings I might attend. She's very reliable, and I hold her in great esteem. With the telephone, she can take dictation and even read my business email back to me. I wouldn't know what to do without my secretary and her telephone. Without the telephone, I could never contact my doctor. I use the phone whenever I'm feeling ill. It is a great comfort to know I can reach her from my house, which is also my family's home. I can reach her from my office as well, or with my cellular phone, even when I am traveling during the workday. My telephone allows me to go whenever and wherever I want, away from my office, which is where I work, and my home, which is where my family lives. With my telephone "I am only a call away." __________________________________________________________________________ The Difficulties of the Release of Emotional Tension In CMC the hardest thing in cyberspace is learning to _let go_ - more than lang- uage always seems at stake. but it is _precisely_ within language that the problem occurs - another _as if_ - consciousness itself were speaking/spo- ken to. what exists always already exists within the dominion of words and packets the flame opens the wound which only a return can suture. language serves as its own burial. but to this extent the mystery remains unsolved (remaining diacritical, excessive, as in the relationship to 'being') letting go is not a form of releasement, not a waiting or an opening - it is precisely /other/ - foreclosure, recuperation without the danger of me- mory - thus the non-existence of leverage, articulation, the intensifica- tion associated with the _node_ to remember is this other gnawing from within, dangerous to both organ- isms. to remember is a disappearance from the text, an inhalation proble- matizing consciousness itself. for if we speak only through the insertion, not just of the eye, but of the fingers _everything_ that occurs here, occurs with the semblance of power unlike being, the Net is _maintained._ unlike air, the carrier of sound and voice, packets are driven by virtue of labor MOOs for example are the theater of the real, sites within which serrated pinchers continue their operations. applications are spectacles mouthing forms, producing the forms of mouths the forms of mouths are letters ("someone dies - it's a movement of the lips" - Damaged Life) without release, flamewars and arguments, deletions and insertions, con- tinue forever, their echos resonating without the articulation or resolu- tions that occur in daily life, _when one body turns away from another._ CMC is filled with part-objects, fragments, rumors, illusions, archives, auras, packets seemingly scattered forever; everything and nothing is forgotten and everything and nothing is remembered. the body can't reas- semble; there is no body, nobody. the finality of walking away (even with remonstrations later - tears, telephone calls, _letters_), the diminution of the withdrawing body, has no parallel by virtue of reply/bounce/forward _from me to you and back to you and back again_ _retention_ - as in the protracted mourning on PMC2 for its earlier incar- nation - intermingles with the new unconsciousness of language, Lacan not- withstanding. how to let go without signing-off - how to sign and not-sign simultaneously - how to place both the sign and its absence - how to con- tend with signification _not_ determined primarily by difference (deter- mined _solely_ by difference) - there are no solutions to the problems of language in the realm of written bodies (one gets off without getting off) given the artificiality of the CMC environment, given the structuration and reception theory of the _written,_ one lets go of each and every be- lief - one betrays __________________________________________________________________________ ha ha ha ha haha hooo yeha hoooo yehaha hee hee hee haha ho heh heh heh heeeee hooha heeeee hooha huh huh huh huh huh haha haha haha heeeha heeha heeha ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho hooo haha hooo haha heh heh heh heee heee ha ho ha hoho hahaha hoho hahahahahahahahaha hoo hee hoo hee hoo hee heeeee hooooo ha ha hee hee heh heh ha ha heh heh hee hee heee hoooha heee hoooha ha ha hahah hahaha hahahaha heehee heehee heehee heh heh ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho haha heehee ho ho hoo hoo ha ha heh haha ho haha ho haha ho heeeeeha heeeeeha heeeeeha ha haha ha hoho ha heehee ha hoho heh ho ho heheh ho _________________________________________________________________________ Subject: tears in cyberspace It has occurred to me, that, while there are a number of ways to directly express laughter in ordinary English words, there are none to express tears and crying, beyond those of mourning (i.e. the 'lalala' of ulula- tion, or 'waawa' of wailing). Where are their _sounds,_ why this silence over human misery, which then is read centrifugally, described at best? As if only mourning were worthy of representaton... Laughter itself _thuds_ in pure sound, 'haha,' collapsed in breathy heav- ings. __________________________________________________________________________ what happened: half community, half theory list, cybermind struggles to get out of the huge mud that fop-l wallows in. it climbs to its clumsy feet, seeing fop-l in the air, ready for a fly-by shooting. cybermind falls heavily back into the muck, churning its thick four-toed feet into the ground, dull lidded eyes smacking of drugs too vile to mention. fop-l gains speed, stumbles in the currents, hits the earth with an eerie splash, far too close for comfort. they struggle. gape-mouthed cybermind's breath flushes hard and hot against fop-l's thinned skin bristling with nails; fop-l voice-piercings roar through cybermind's head and belly; both bellow, gullets half filled with stale waters, bones, flesh gnawed from their disheveled bodies. half-drowned, they shook the earth itself, no long leaps here, as cybermind and fop-l went under for the last time, rose to stragged feet, lumbered off in any direction but their own. the end. _______________________________________________________________________ octal love 0000000 nl nl s e c r e t nl t h a t sp i sp 0000020 t o o k sp y o u r sp b o d y sp i 0000040 n sp m y sp f a c e sp t h r e e sp 0000060 o f sp u s sp f i l m e d sp t h a 0000100 t sp i sp w a s sp a sp c o w a r d 0000120 sp nl n e v e r sp t u r n i n g sp 0000140 a l o n e sp t o w a r d s sp y o 0000160 u r sp b o d y sp l a i d sp a c r 0000200 o s s sp t h a t sp t e x a s sp r 0000220 o u g h sp r o a d nl c r o s s e 0000240 d sp b y sp s k i n sp a n d sp b l 0000260 o o d nl nl t h a t sp o c t a l sp 0000300 b r i n g s sp i t sp h o m e sp o 0000320 c t a l sp t e n d r i l s sp a c 0000340 r o s s sp h o t sp s k y sp g r o 0000360 u n d sp s h a t t e d sp i n sp nl 0000400 t h a t sp p i c k u p sp v e e r 0000420 e d sp t o sp e a r t h nl 0000434 0000000 0a0a 7365 6372 6574 0a74 6861 7420 6920 0000020 746f 6f6b 2079 6f75 7220 626f 6479 2069 0000040 6e20 6d79 2066 6163 6520 7468 7265 6520 0000060 6f66 2075 7320 6669 6c6d 6564 2074 6861 0000100 7420 6920 7761 7320 6120 636f 7761 7264 0000120 200a 6e65 7665 7220 7475 726e 696e 6720 0000140 616c 6f6e 6520 746f 7761 7264 7320 796f 0000160 7572 2062 6f64 7920 6c61 6964 2061 6372 0000200 6f73 7320 7468 6174 2074 6578 6173 2072 0000220 6f75 6768 2072 6f61 640a 6372 6f73 7365 0000240 6420 6279 2073 6b69 6e20 616e 6420 626c 0000260 6f6f 640a 0a74 6861 7420 6f63 7461 6c20 0000300 6272 696e 6773 2069 7420 686f 6d65 206f 0000320 6374 616c 2074 656e 6472 696c 7320 6163 0000340 726f 7373 2068 6f74 2073 6b79 2067 726f 0000360 756e 6420 7368 6174 7465 6420 696e 200a 0000400 7468 6174 2070 6963 6b75 7020 7665 6572 0000420 6564 2074 6f20 6561 7274 680a 0000434 Kill Me It's late at night - I am completely stressed out - my course wasn't ad- vertised by accident - no one signed up - jury duty next week - worry about skin cancer - I am afraid for another friend's mental stability - see catastrophe coming - and another friend - and a third who worries me through thick and thin - so I turn to Unix - command it - make it SLAVER - castrate myself - I want to scratch the surface - rub my name raw - rub it out: /dev/ttyp0 SunOS sun4m 3:26am up 10 days, 9:49, 24 users, load average: 1.42, 1.38, 1.29 User tty login@ idle JCPU PCPU what sondheim ttyp0 3:02am 12 w sondheim sondheim panix3.panix.com!sondheim ttyp0 Aug 30 03:02 (ts1.nyc.access.n) uid=4564(sondheim) gid=99(users) groups=99(users),1001(net) users net sondheim ttyp0 ts1.nyc.access.n Fri Aug 30 03:02 still logged in sondheim ttyp0 ts2.nyc.access.n Fri Aug 30 02:42 - 02:45 (00:03) sondheim ttyq0 ts2.nyc.access.n Fri Aug 30 02:34 - 02:40 (00:05) You are on port 1 of the server nicknamed ts1.nyc. Mail News a calendar cc hstrip3 lynx_bookmarks.html mail phoenix.hlp phoenix.irc tf tf-lib thing tiny.world venom.irc volt.irc zing Customer # 00000-04324 Alan Sondheim Last Statement Balance: 34.70 CR Current Posted Balance: 34.70 CR Past due: 0.00 Payment due: no payment due Last payment of 210.00 CR received 02/12/1996 Yearly items will be billed 09/22 Fri Aug 30 03:52:12 EDT 1996 who mom loves: panix3.panix.com!sondheim ttyp0 Aug 30 03:02 1556 . images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html __________________________________________________________________________ - read slowly i am forced to _read_ according to the position of the cursor on the line; nothing comes easily and there is no possibility of skimming. this is the resistance i mentioned in which the breath of the body is in- terrelated to the cycling of the machine, input and output. thus the words are emitted at their own pace and it is as if the inner speech is dictated by the machine, not by my own subjectivity - which (inner speech) paral- lels of course that of the other in daily life, the text appearing at this speed as the development of a _body_ not of a database to be scanned, re- iterated... the speed becomes/is something else entirely - one is held close to the body of the text / textual body, reader and writer breathing simultneous- ly, (and hold me), outcasted from the world of _terminal denouement_ ____________________________________________________________________________ - My Recent Works of Soft Love To All of You Command: fgrep -i >> Words: breast nipple love and every inch beneath the breast and legs open in an eye diffusion of violence - perfect breasts, milk and blood between them, bet your shit - my breasts are bruised, torn _(drag shadow biotech)_ - because the screen is breast, and cursor nipple, and my body presses tight of Pallas' breast concluded the frightful battle of the gods. heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watch-dog at its feed because the screen is breast, and cursor nipple, and my body presses tight from the nipples, glows in the ground itself. nor does a nipple sprout a finger. But a neck turns beneath the arms, alone, I tear at my nipples, spread my cheeks, open my hole to empty air. two of us entwined like lovers. Said in one breath by one person. Unsaid We're entwined with our lover, you, --I love you. strength and added it to the caloric machine. She looked around. I loved few people you admired, you loved my eyes. You knew I would believe you, visiting her, terribly in love. Today she is a fairly well-known painter loved by looking within the confines of the frame. I was blinded by love. nothing has loved me like it either! were writing in pure absence - it's as if we've got to take America: Love it or Leave It! everywhere on the Info And they lie entwined like lovers speaking for the last time Of things and lovers; then appear in this space once and forever __________________________________________________________________________