Casual


Neither lurking nor participating fully, the majority of users surround
themselves on occasion with texts as if considering cyberspace the literal
embodiment of message bases. Ties are formed to certain names behaving as
diacritical marks, tending towards entrance; other more negative ties lead
to elimination, cloacal expulsion. But the cathecting or investment isn't
very great in most cases; the space is something peered into without much
hope or care for reciprocity. 

I'm interested in these casual relationships, more or less tasting the
waters; they remain perhaps the majority of subscribers to email lists,
and certainly the majority of newsgroup readers. For them, there isn't the
pornographic exhaustion that occurs when posts are used up; for them, the
information is peripheral to itself, appearing in the panoply of objects
surrounding them in everyday life. 

These are the objects of clear aristotelian logic, classical logic, of
which it can be said, true or false, the objects of apparently obdurate
dimensionality with an indiscernible richness - the objects playing roles
and almost always taken for granted. For casual users, these objects form
a framework in which the winking on and off of email and usenet posts pro-
vides only a certain texture; even irc or talk may mean little more than a
moment's rest during an otherwise busy day. 

Casual users stroll in and out of their worlds with a true sense of 
themselves; they know the value of self-worth, whether or not they apply 
it to themselves. It's laissez-faire all the way, shallow warm waters, 
emerald seas, mysterious coral lagoons, eels and stone-fish below, thin 
darkling spray above. The sky lids down with a beautiful sullen blue, and 
desires to be mentioned as well.

Such users don't have anxieties of separation; their smiles are soft and
lovely. They have happier times than myself, richer lives, I am always
sure, and always yearning to be casual somewhere in my life as well. Do I 
look at you with warm puppy eyes? Will I lie down quietly, extolling the 
novel which appears strong and self-reliant in the dawn? For the casual, 
there are always dawns, always other days, pretty conversations in the 
midst of webs.

We are hardly so intense, we are tensed. I say hello to my casual users, 
I always say hello.

__________________________________________________________________________



Early Queendoms of the Cyberspheres


From Maxim Gorky, The Lumiere Cinematograph, in The Film Factory, Russian 
and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939:

"Yesterday, I was in the kingdom of the shadows.

"If only you knew how strange it is to be there. There are no sounds, no 
colours. There, everything - the earth, the trees, the people, the water, 
the air - is tinted in a grey monotone; in a grey sky there are grey rays 
of sunlight; in grey faces, grey eyes, and the leaves of the trees are 
grey like ashes. This is not life but the shadow of life and this is not 
movement but hte soundless shadow of movement.

"I must explain, lest I be suspected of symbolism or madness. I was at 
Aumont's cafe and I was watching the Lumieres' cinematograph - moving 
photographs." ...

"Their smiles are lifeless, although their movements are full of living 
energy and are so swift as to be almost imperceptible. Their laughter is 
silent, although you see the muscles contracting in their grey faces. 
Before you a life surges, a life devoid of words and shorn of the living 
spectrum of colours, a grey silent, bleak and dismal life.

"It is terrifying to watch but it is the movement of shadows, mere
shadows. Curses and ghosts, evil spirits that have cast whole cities into
eternal sleep come to mind and you feel as though Merlin's vicious trick
is being played out before you. It is as if he had cast a spell over the
entire street, compressing its multi-storied buildings from their roof-
tops to their foundations to minute size. He has compressed the people to 
correspond, depriving them of the power of speech and merging all the 
colours of the earth and the sky into a monotonous grey."

Merlin is half-born, half present, always already ghost herself, pregnant 
with words in the queendom of cyberspace. The future would have already 
been had one but known it: When we expect the unexpected, things continue 
in the form of the same; when we expect the same, we find alterity.

_________________________________________________________________________



Errors!


Oh, I have made so many of them! And I've seen them of my ways! Is there 
anything more to say than "I've made mistakes!"?

I've started to realize... I'm so sorry... My apologies... I've started 
to realize...

That the center no longer holds! Guess what! That cyberspace isn't real
after all! Woosh woosh (as my friend Mayakovsky once said to me),
nothing's here! It's just an illusion, like any naive theory - the way
things look makes it seem as if I could reach out and touch you! Hah! 

The truth is, you're reading dead words on a dead screen, and there's 
nothing more to it - it's like any other philosophy. And the truth is: 
I'll never hear from you again!

But there's more to say, you say, wherever you are: Isn't it a question 
of who's saying it? (Not who's saying what, which is another question 
altogether!) And the screen looks like any book (I've made mistakes!), 
blanking us out; no one for a moment would think a book is real! Only 
_you_ can tell me what you're feeling here, and of what philosophical 
import is that? Writing this, I don't hear or see you;  you're nowhere 
around - later, you'll have all the attention in the world! 

Or will you? Like Dostoevsky's hero, I'm a sick man! I've got something 
wrong with my liver! Surely you believe me! I rail against two plus two 
is five! I'm absurd! I'm the last railer!

But I'm _sure_ I've made mistakes and this space is just a place of 
scribbling, nothing much! So I apologize, I'm sorry, I really am! Forgive 
me! I grovel at your feet!


__________________________________________________________________________


Languaging


What exists on the edges of definition? For what can be defined is 
already within a skein of differences, fuzzy but insistent on intent. The 
crossing of words, language and its poetics, is an undertow, vectoried 
(in the sense of an emission) but sourced, sorcered, scattered.

Because words always revert back to a limited bandwidth of entities 
(symbols/phonemes), they appear constricted, their inherent confusion 
placed beneath the rubric of connotation. denotation/connotation exists 
as a dyad within the traditional (say) approach (say) to english (say) 
itself. What is ill-defined is always already categorized and definition 
is assumed complete, completed, hence _foreclosed._

Definition always exists in relation to a defined other, but here, we're 
not dealing with the epistemology of circularity - or even the problem of 
semantic closure - but the very _ontology of the other itself,_ implying 
a collapse external to the real.

Hence there is the real (say), perceptual processing (see), and language 
(read, say), and if you like, there are natural kinds as well. But I say 
unto you, I am the other that is speaking (see), and there is the other 
hwihc need not absorb definition, as if words were all, _in a manner of 
speaking,_ natural kinds.

As if they were the entities of sorcerers -

-----------------------------------------------|

Which I would pursue, the Way of the animal across a land or semantic 
territory, an evoluted half-definition, quasi-object, inherent and 
inchoate in relation to the (say) partial/dimensional processing of the 
real (see) in David Marr's theory of vision. 

Even if the structure of a language is exact, its concatenations, surface 
contiguities, is not. 

If metaphor (via Lakoff et. al.) reverts (say) to the body, then 
shouldn't we say that ascii, here, limited as to appearance, nevertheless 
retains the embodiment of the fullness of the real? ( I (see) would 
hesitate before saying no. )

We have a lesson in Cantor's mapping of the points of a line onto any 
n-dimensional space, one-for-one, well-definition extended indefinitely.

Say the other with her magic wand (see) which is the bone of an animal 
which is the feather of an animal which is the cry of an animal which is 
the word of an animal made.

__________________________________________________________________________



About Depressing About Reading About Death


We toss and turn, move and cancellation death from our eyes, our mouths 
huffing the words, going on thusly forever until the final bleak and 
bureaucratic moment when someone else takes over.

With the lid of an eye the universe swelters for the last time, the gaze 
killing off the cloud gathered around the body looking for a soul.

More often than not we regale ourselves in the manufacture of lurid 
exploits of others, always others who are there, unhappening to 
ourselves, beyond which we can never venture.

So to beware the index which accompanies death, the index in the 
singular, for a moment imagine the plural of the world collapsed and 
inhaling. 

As if the death-row packets or winking of the wires churned haze into 
obsequious followers of the real dirt fulfilling mouths' desires to stop 
once and for all, turn transformed into our mouths, I for one, I for one 
will never hear the end of it.

________________________________________________________________________


Kentucky and the Blood


bewilderment in real life
the stamp or swamp of life
the bamboo thicket, grazing life i'd say
teeming pools of microscopic life
eyes opened wide living blood of the lord
the blood which drips from the cross drips for thee
the blood which swells the wood swells for thee
the blood which rusts the nails rusts well for thee
blood spurts in a chaotic trajectory
you can't have one and the other i'd say
you've got noise and a lot of it
in Kentucky my old home is old and i'd say i'd say
i can see the land swell swell around you like a wound
say see the land swell around you like a wound

wherever i go i say, i don't know what these people do here
nor do i know where to go to ask the questions
but there are questions i'd ask of the blood
or of the wood swollen hard by the banks of the blood
by "its" banks
downpoured from me, downpoured to you, 
the lord short-circuited, lord tethered to its moorings,

"There's won-der-ful pow'r in the blood. There is pow'r, pow'r, 
won-der-work-ing pow'r In the blood of the Lamb; There is pow'r, pow'r, 
won-der-work-ing pow'r In the precious blood of the Lamb."

( L.E.Jones, There is Power in the Blood )

___________________________________________________________________________




1: dreaming each other into being it remains stillborn everything said
carrying stratigraphy of flesh

2: without a campfire self-pity
wandering into one or another forest
what would it take to stabilize these letters i imagine
there would be no backspace delete or insert edit
with Mayan glyphs, it's this that makes all the differance
bowed down to the rock itself, inert and permanent excision
lucid,
but here and now these words bubble like the dead,
words froth and there is no tomorrow: everyone speaks, 
languaging's quantity increases exponentially; the curve
grapples with itself, an awkward tumescence
recorded once, with the letting of blood, in glyphs
strangled with permanence through which freedom and moss
alike

meaning cannot ascertain itself, surely, out of time. we are 
considering out of time, or time's rush, exhausted and dismayed.

so surely are these things kept liquid, thoughtless,
i can't think nor read enough as meaning crashes against
describing theory describing wonders beyond wonders
succumbed to the violence of language itself, 
there's nothing to be learned here in no man's land, all genders
drowned in coordinates, consensus, consonants, stoppages, 
stuttered rage of studied emptiness.

so surely are these things kept liquid, thoughtless,
i can't think nor read enough as meaning crashes against
describing theory describing theory beyond wonders
succumbed to the theory of language itself,
or the theory of violence, recuperated from consonant,
stoppage, rage of studied emptiness.

______________________________________________________________________
 


Platter's Holler


Travis got some sheep stuck in the pen there, you should have seen them
running, down where the cave was. He got the gun and killed one of them,
it wasn't his, there was this smell of candles burning, scorching the cave
walls. I guess he did the cave that way, the walls. I guess he did the
walls, there was a couple of women with him. 

That way they were sisters, and the bark was flying off the log leaned
against the stump that was when he raised his hands over his head. You
could smell the wood burning when you could smell the candles but later,
out of the cave. You couldn't see the shadows then. 

You couldn't see the shadows but you could hear where Foster was buried
because she'd be out roaming and sometimes there was another shadow. 
You'd huddle there and smell Foster, she had that whiskey breath from
across the line where the Carters had their still, half-legal. 

She'd be one more shadow, sitting up all night, but the sheep weren't his
and Johnson came along and killed him, just like that, the gun resting
easy on the stump and the chips stopped. Kind of everything stopped, but
the shadow, there was that one that kept moving, all the others were quiet
like. 

And there was the fact that the ax stayed warm just the same from that day
on. From the chips flying, maybe from the candles. It was a dry summer
too. Then a couple of years ago. You could walk up, feel it like that, it
had heat in it. It would glow there and then we got rid of it. 


_________________________________________________________________________


third sex


he had these dreams where he would lay naked with the hogs. he wouldn't 
tell anyone about them. hed hold the door of the pen open wide. the 
scuffling sounded like his body. he could feel blank eyes staring at him. 
he was on his back was lower than they were. hed hear their snuffling in 
his dreams. hed wake up with his fingers in him imagining. he never knew 
what a dream was. once there was no once. he dreamed that it stayed like 
his cousin stayed. she was thirteen and she stayed. he said to himself 
was used to it.

the pen was near the flat joint to the hill. they grew peaches up there 
and he would open his mouth wide on the trees. he could never open it 
wide enough. his tongue would crawl with it.

there was a stream and he thought there might be something to wash off 
but there wasnt.

she lay down in the water with her white dress on.
she lay down in the water with her thin white dress on.
she could see through the sweet dress.
she thought of bees humming all around, she thought about flowers.
she made a vow made the solemnest vow ever.
she closed her eyes and saw through her bones and there were eyes through 
her bones.

once there was no one.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

piss


if i were to tell you any more about cumberland it would be a story,
wouldnt it. and thats not what it was at all, not even lived or this and
that happened although they all did. cause what i want to tell you is the
way the words held back, something different, the way there would be
consideration. it would always be there, the slow talk burning its way
into the woods, cutting paths, traces, making lazy words in the landscape
like the smoke rising in the winter holler. all this in spite of the
telephone which doesnt reach or the tv which does. 

shed hang in there with her wet pants only her wet pants on. the sun would
be silver in the folds. like a silver dagger i heard about. all day long,
that silver dagger. all day long. 

shed lie back and piss in them, flood herself out. the piss would leak
onto the boards of the porch down through the cracks. it would leak into
the dark shadowed earth, the earth which rustled at night, lay supine,
fertile in the hours of the day. hed hold his breath he would. if he were
to tell you a story it would be that he held his breath like that. as if
there were a happening where there weren't none. that he had the silver
with him all his short short life. that there was coin after all. 

_________________________________________________________________________


From weiss@platters.holler.com
Date: April 15, 1924
From: Ehrlich Weiss <weiss@platters.holler.com>
Reply to: fiction-of-philosophy@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
To: cybermind@jefferson.village.virginia.edu,
    fiction-of-philosophy@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Virtual Wraith


Surely the world is full of ghosts, thin messages moving against one's 
will or burning themselves alive in each and every log house huddled by 
the creek, near the base of the holler.

Reality is neither dream nor ghost, but a dreaming of itself, the cracks 
showing through, skin split allowing messages from the past to brand 
themselves into your dark present.

Surely this is your dark present, eyes opened momentarily to encompass 
these words, ears charred by the sound of them. Every speaking is a 
holocaust of the truth, that the sutures are thinned almost to invisi- 
bility, that there is no versimilitude, nothing but an approach which 
wavers in memory of the insubstantial.

The teeth that drip from the maw that devours from the nightmare are lost 
in the gleam of constructed suns.

You must allow yourself to this.

Houdini

-------------------------------------------------------------------------


platters holler


theres a huge corral in a clearing at the base of the mountain and a
wood-black fence with four slats and it goes round and comes around down
to the creek, around the mountain, turnin itself as it goes, returnin
back to the barren ground outside. everythin green, brown, black.

inside its water. which is where the dreams, the cybermind lay, flat like
an enormous flounder, you could a seen rainbows in its eye. its the size
of the corral, it stays at the bottom, it shudders, theres ripples on the
surface. thats how you know its there, the ripples on the surface. 

the waters warm and magic holds it in where the slats are nothin goes out
nothin escapes. you could a look through the fence and see shimmers. but
it didn seem to have offspring or family, empty like that. it was just
there and you knew it was alive because of what you felt when you went
near the water and the eye didn have no lid

were always scared of those eyes everywhere around you that cant close 
just remain open all the time, you know theyre lookin. but this was like 
they say jesus saw the water when he went a walkin, just like everythin 
was inside at the same time as not. as how it had been not.

the water was there clear and flat as a plate with the ripples from
cybermind down below and louvisa went out walkin on it like jesus that
shed heard about and would walk on it, i seen it myself. shed call anse
that one time but thats all it took and anse came runnin, ran to the edge
of it. ran onto it flooded blinded the eye with the gun goin off. the 
sound of it goin off. youd a thought the eyed be blind but the skin come 
together. at that point came together and the eye moved on the other 
side, youd still see it there even now, what was it about that i wonder.

well can you imagine runnin all over the wet water corral shootin and
hollerin and nothin much but that eye there, see you see me it said and
said again. that night the lectricity went off and the darn thing drained
or so i heard but the next mornin anse was a prancin all over it sayin,
louvisa just a little longer, louvisa wait for me, and we sung a song for
that

louvisa just a little longer, louvisa wait for me - that devil anse knew 
what side was up all right but not just where that up might be


_________________________________________________________________________

Video Dromadology


Making a video, one minute long, returning to this technology I have 
deserted in favor of blind-sight, suddenly vision returns, the edge of 
the screen (not terminal) becomes terminal. Vision cuts through the body, 
and I need to pursue the corral, limpid, the mind which floats against 
the scan-lines of the set. I'll get naked, you put the thin dress on.

It becomes a matter of Revelations, dear Jesus, a matter of disclosure, 
dim outline of hair through the folds. The folds of cybermind bely the 
video minute, as if something is taking us away, the Chalice of Antioch 
perhaps, the last cup to touch Thine sweet Lips among the belly's hollows.

There is an Eye at the other end of the Tube which is the body's belong- 
ing and I imagine Thee there, lying so never Apart from our Fingers 
groped within each others Mouths and Organs. Vision always already 
refuses the reading of the body; cybermind always already begins with the 
body read, produced, tumescent and pronounced. 

It's time to move on from the body, coagulate the cells, remnants of 
desires thrust into a longing of the length of a minute. I insert myself 
in the midst of other tapes. I'm part of the show, show, show.


_________________________________________________________________________



ASCII Text, Broken Teeth, Bleeding:


The words always stay on the screen. 
There's always the labor of reading.
All the senses are constricted.
Nothing makes sense anymore.
The depth of field is reduced to zero.
The screen blocks the vision of everyday life.
Love dries, oozes from the words.
Our wounds show and glisten like searchlights in dead space.
We pretend that bodies love in the absence of bodies.
Sleepless, we tear ourselves apart over twenty-six letters.
We write the lines of blood because we can't see our mouths.
We write our bodies open our hands grappling our holes.
We spray the keyboards with fluids as our contract with authenticity.
The sounds stop when the reading stops.
The space is always empty when the terminal closes down.
Night is filled with uneasy dreams of lacerating words.
Day is filled with the hysteria of messaging and lag.
Our skin pales beneath flickering flourescents, jaundiced incandescents.
Truth becomes a reliance on arguments framed by quotation-caret marks.
Truth builds upon the thickness of requotes until the screen chokes.
Death never comes as addresses slough off lists and alias files.
Always invisible tears stammer the limits of the body to no one.
Diseases are waylaid by the clean and proper body of the text.
Sleepless nights are invaded by whispers read and spoken by the sleeper.
We cry for our true ASCII friends scattered like powdered eclipses.
We long for the grain of voices and touch's pressure on virgin skin.
The text is a manuscript illuminated and addictive, from within.
The text throws its own light on everything, its light both truth and home.
Writing this with tears becomes a narrative: "Writing this with tears,"
The mouth fills with broken teeth and gums bled and bleeding from the world.
The world is spelled and spoiled, the world is emptied trash.
The words always leave the screen, spilled and spoiled heroin.
Written language follows like an introjected drug.
Speech becomes a matter of poor translation.
There's always the labor of being.
All the senses have vanished, returned in proper names.
Everything makes sense, and all the time.

__________________________________________________________________________


The Reasons for the Feud


He stole some of the pigs and marked the ears with his own markings just 
like that.

Angry words were exchanged at the saloon because it wasn't exactly clear
who won with a difference of only eighteen votes. 

There was some question of who the timber belonged to when the logs were 
hacked.

They just stole everything they could after they came back from the war 
and called themselves the Regulators.

He wanted the county seat so he rounded up some men and marched right in 
and took it.

He threatened to burn the town so almost everybody left which wasn't good
for business. 

It was the whiskey on Election Day that did them in when things broke out 
in a general firefight between the two states.

They were sure that he wouldn't get a proper trial on Court Day because 
the judge belonged to the opposing party.

One of them was there to open up the mines to "interests" and the other 
one was there to protect the settlers.

He married his first cousin, got her pregnant, left her two weeks later.

He took to watching her as she lay there, dressed, in the warm water pool.

At night his dreams were so bad he'd wake up with the sweats and call out 
her name and his wife heard every word.

The telegraph brought news of the telephone which sent the "state flowers 
of West Virginia" just everywhere from the ridge to the creeks there.

His platter.com server went down the tubes when the storm struck and blew 
the trees against the router in the corner.

She thought she had solved the frame problem in classical artificial in-
telligence but found that Breathitt County almost went up in smoke until
the militia was brought in or later when Beach Hargis shot the Judge. 

------------------------------------|

gender male, individualism, body politic, gender female, alterity of tele-
phones and satellite dishes, internetworking, gender female framing, 
double lips opening to dubious history, time frame doubling from militia 
to Beach Hargis' father.

___________________________________________________________________________


Absence of Industrial Base, Clear Glass Bowl with Molded Base


When telecom comes into the valley, and there's no industrial base, then 
the machines are from what kind of god or manufacture - and are the 
changes more or less in relation to tacit knowledge? For telecom arrives 
outside of time and history, telecom comes beyond the gears, belts, and 
pulleys, invisibly molded in something humming over the wires, never 
quite present. Berger's packets of modernization carry nothing in this 
regard, there's no class-consciousness, there's closed envelopes sutured 
with the organic, the smooth feel of the keyboard, never the industrial.

Surely the result is a form of prosthetic shamanism, the fetish of the 
sense or sensory body-part, as suddenly sight becomes sight-of, hearing 
becomes three-dimensional. Think of the contusion, trepanning, the ad- 
mixture of epistemologies, and think of the shamanic shimmering among 
realms interspersed with ghosts, innumerable illusions everywhere. This 
is a form of clarity completely ignorant to ourselves.

Rereading Euripides' Medea, written in his early years, in the midst of
the formation of drama itself, then returning to Muller's work on Medea,
reminding us - of the exhaustion of human emotions, and of their limited
stirrings at the same time. No longer living, we exist, enumerated, sculp-
ted by savage cuts; the reach of the lurid, branding and scarred skin,
draws us within the museum of interiority. Prosthetic shamanism has col-
lapsed, every sight and sound has infinite history, culpability; the
machine itself joins the ranks of victims. What was brought to the valley
was a distant memory of ourselves, our beautiful debris which speaks only
to those who are unspoken. 

__________________________________________________________________________



Unruly Rude Girl Punk Nerds Attack the Nice Strong Boys

Riot Grrrls Go Up in Flames


whats unruly always goes too far when just a little fun begins. theyre
doin it to get you down on all fours, bark like a dog in front of your
friends. you dont stand a chance so you nail up boards fast around the
town. theyve got one ahead of you firin bullets through their computer
modems. youre worried about the protocols givin out, packets bouncin all
over the place. 

theyll tell you its the same old story, that this species is doomed to
repeat itself. theyll tell you again and again how the girls got theirs
when the boys wouldnt have a bit of it. theyll tell you how theyre rude
girls crude girls punk girls nerd girls and the nice strong boys walk
around like they own the place. theyll remember how the boys made the
language speak and then made the words for the language. theyll tell you 
how the boys made up that story and kept walkin on it.

theyll tell you how the boys made the words go down the wires, smart boys,
boys with heavy frames that battered rocks into chevrolets. theyll tell
you naughty naughty and make you want naughty naughty and youll believe
youll get it and make a new law making it harder all the time. its strong-
er and harder with the law. 

commere, the girls say, theres game over the hill and they point with a
wide circle of their arms and the boys think thats neat. they think thats
neat and they make it a hard frame to drive the game over. they think they
make everything, make war down in the county and when you think nomadic
thought youve got all those proud guys up on the four-legged things runnin
around the landscape while the girls did with the babies. those guys they
just kept making laws but the punk girls nerd girls knew that fault was
difficult to put down the valley where the water flowed. they knew about
the fault but they knew about the same old story. bored girls, they knew 
about the boys.

commere, the girls say, commere. commere, the girls say.

theyll tell you the story about the missin woman disappearin woman, the
woman behind the feudin or out on the horizon so her figure was just a dot
of lust that slammed into you like a bullet like a spear. theyll tell you
about how theyre unruly and they know it and you know they want it you
know they want it they want it so bad, sittin like that with their laptops
on the side of the highway when you ride by, you just gotta keep makin the
laws. 

didnt they talk though, then they made you read aristotle and stuff like
that and stitched your eyelids open with the wires themselves until you
could see what they saw, at least a little bit of it, that the same old
storys the only story thats been told and that just keeps repeatin. as if
narration were a rock, legend were a cliff, myth a mountain of the hardest
stuff. what youd think about was just about what the girls said, like when
they said commere. 

commere, the girls said, commere. commere, the girls said, go way.

but the unruly rude girl punk nerds broke all the rules they set, and
thats in the story too, so you never know when theyll appear again, dont
that make you write a protocol. so you write a protocol for the letters
and you write a protocol for a picture or two. and the unruly rude girl
punk nerds take over, write the rest of the stuff, the sound and the sight
which moves downstream, sometimes upstream makin something, whatever. they
make and they make until they make the world over like a big balloon just
like it was but with some other stuff like the engin to run it. so the 
nice clean boys run around and make the laws and its the same old story 
but theres a crack in the story, and the storys different. because theyre 
unruly. because the laws are lies. because no ones listenin. because they 
all know no ones listenin. because of the silence and the big balloon 
world and somewheres somethings goin down.

commere, the girls say, commere. payin no attention. commere.


__________________________________________________________________________




Sensory


The touch of my palmtop HP95 palmtop is wonderful, the slight resistance 
of the key suddenly giving away with a felt click, paralleled only by the 
slight electronic click produced by my Psion3A palmtop, in the configura- 
tion I usually use. An amazing sensation, the letter visibly fully-formed 
and with the macros defined in the HP95, the screens adjust themselves at 
a touch of the finger as well, rushing into the proper file for reading, 
writing, or editing.

The Psion3A, which is kept in a soft case, has an odd smell to it, which I
suspect is from the plastic shell itself, since the case, of the usual vi-
nyl, carries none of it. Surely this must seep into the solid-state memory
built into the unit, but I've seen no sign at all of this, and the HP95 
has, as far as I can tell, no identifiable odor whatsoever.

The Compaq 486/33 Presario that I use at the disk has developed an almost
inaudible, but therefore present, slight clicking sound, even after the
hard-drive closes down when I'm on-line. A solenoid going bad or something
deliberately built by the company to annoy me. Speaking of which, at the
New School I am using a Zenith 386 with double floppy drive, actually a
wonderful machine and nice keyboard, with an additional electronic click-
ing feature built-in, whenever a key is hit. Just like the Psion. The fan 
is super too - sounds more like a distant air-conditioner, which is more 
than likely what it is.

I have never tasted the equipment, although I have fantasized about an 
open Pentium chip, placed lightly against the tongue (Sensation!!), or an 
open area of the skull; it would take us a while to get used to each 
other, but anything is possible...

The Zenith keyboard has the perfect touch, the Psion is a bit too springy.
And then there's my AST laptop, also with a 386/20 in it, which I take
everywhere on the road. The keys come to an abrupt stop when pressed, hard
plastic against hard plastic, no give at all. It makes for a noisy key-
board as well as a sense of nerve damage, but I've managed to use it, when
necessary, for hours on end. When the hard-drive goes off, it has an 
eerie absolute silence about it, just the keys and the monochrome screen, 
which is actually quite beautiful; my mathematics programming runs well 
on it, since the lines come in and out of existence accompanied by ghost- 
ing. There is a slight "new" smell to the unit, which has, I assume, 
always been there, and when a battery is being charged, that oh-so-faint 
electric-transformer odor that indicates the fury of distant fires come 
home to roost, not to mention carcinogenic and invisible gases radiating 
from the walls.

I only "identify" to any extent with my palmtops, which, by the way, are
not as yet connected through communications software. One or the other
goes with me everywhere, and I find myself writing on the subway, working
on programming at an airport, checking city routes on the plane itself. 
In spite of the miniscule keyboards, they're the nearest thing to prosthe-
sis I have, and for that reason, hardly feel like computers - more like 
the Freudian magic sketch-pad of interior monologs...

Alan

------------------------------------------------------------------------


MEDEA BLA-BLA BARA-BARA



My dowry's you, saved! (_dos mea, tu sospes,_ Ovid)  


1

Writing, as if in delirium, morose, troubled, irruptions, malaise 
haunted by ontology. This is the _current sickness,_ inverted ontologies 
of past splendours, of the disappearance of ghosts: We're talked out of 
them, we're talked out of most everything, in fact. They're banished, 
beyond the Pale, the gaze/of the other; they leave us to our own devices 
(Latour).

2

Precisely, these ordinateurs, devices of precision, encapsulations of the 
dyad, there are no struggles when the paths separate; through the woods 
there are always divisions, wraiths as well. Trolls, goblins, elves, 
fairies, dwarves, gremlins, wariths. Seventeenth and sixteenth-century 
dwarf sightings; they disappeared into the mountains, carrying treasure 
(Grimm).

Occurring far in the interior, near the borders, occurring within the 
interstices of the organs of the body and the body's hypersea, the realm 
of rumors, parasites, the they/say (McMenamin's, Heidegger).

I write poorly the body falls apart, exposes itself, habits of nourish- 
ment. Talk harbors the ghosts elsewhere, we hear of them from a distance, 
I'd say deep in my inner heart as well. I'd give you my breasts, male, 
dried, useless, sensed. We're left to our own devices.

2a

"Homer applied the word 'barbarophone' to the natives of Asia Minor who 
fought alongside the Greeks, and seemed to have coined the term on the 
basis of such onomatopeia as _bla-bla, bara-bara,_ inarticulate or incom- 
prehensible mumblings." (Kristeva)



3


THE MEDEA: SPACE SPREADS



jason spears medea, and she shields the spear with her own calvary, the 
beginning of names, of strangers, barbarians, at each and every getting, 
tolling for the other

she makes a cloak from her skin, she gives it to her children, jasons 
bride burns alive. she grows a new skin, wears it inside out. do you 
recognize medea. everything burns, her eyes violate: sight replaces the 
abandoned body. the gates stay closed; theyre torn open, white skin 
spills out. she remembers teeth of garnet, teeth of tourmaline. what 
happened to the color of the world

her body rolls in fields of teeth. they gnaw her, her cunt and mouth fill
with dirt consumed with bright flame. words write the name of god, she
sees her own name in the name. her eyes take the world, fuck her children,
everyones a corpse she screams

skulls pile up. classification begins, organs, the teeth again demouthed. 
shed be killed now. medeas the jew, the argonauts slammed into the dragon
from feuds growing blood, growing bodies, origins of number, wheres medea. 

wheres medea, she runs everywhere, asks the actors, euripides, ovid,
muller, graves, anyone who will listen, the moth filled with dirt, cunt
filled with dirt, limbs grow from her holes, disappear into dark thick
air, limbs of bone and sinew

body and soul of medea, gremlin and dwarf of medea, fairy and elf of 
medea, pixie and troll of medea, crowded body of medea written by 
barbarian-mediterranean, fuck her jewish origins. splinters, gutter- 
language, gutter peoples, a corpse she screams

a corpse she screams, wheres medea


_________________________________________________________________________



Fantasy of the Student Body


Hir body proffers hirself to hir teacher who receives it so graciously,
you would never know that s/he is standing on the highest dais. The
libidinal economy of the classroom is always unstated, effaced, now 
legislated; it won't go away any more than Socrates. It's politicized
delirium. Otherness encapsulates itself in the presence of speech; 
learning is always already the speaking cure, beneath the semblance of 
the enlightenment. In the classroom, discourse always _proceeds,_ as if 
driven by hir body, student/teacher/discourse melange. 

Hir teacher rides knowledge, legs splayed, spread, mouth open. Knowledge 
is a nightmare. Knowledge seeps in the vicinity of bodies, covers bodies; 
Socrates said fuck thyself. The coupling of bodies is the parsing of 
language. The operative space is the student body, penetrated with the 
body of the text. All these bodies. 

Hir teacher says, they come into play in the humanities, in the arts, in 
theater, painting, they come into play in sculpture, in dance. They come 
into play when the body comes into play, hir body sexed, the presence of 
a hand leaning against a canvas drawing and foreclosing upon another upon 
a dais, nude. Hir teacher says but this is always the case.

Laura Zakarin on Studenthood (in Thinking Bodies): "According to its own
esscence, Studenthood, whatever it might be, tolerates no resolution. It
obligates the researcher to teach, the teacher to research, and the stu-
dent body to serve as the living apparatus through which such clandestine
communities of thinkers assign to themselves their uniform origin in the
idea of knowing." Hir teacher says, search for the _noise,_ it's the
_noise_ that tolerates no resolution, that knowledge curls like the edges
of burning pages. Hir teacher says, the cracks in the institution are the
institution. Hir teacher says, learn to fuck yourselves, ride your desires
which are knowledges. Hir teacher says, but s/he's no longer listening, 
s/he's approaching the teacher, hir teacher, with wide-open eyes.

S/he says, search for the _noise,_ it's the _noise_ that tolerates no 
res- olution, that knowledge curls like the edges of burning pages. Hir 
student says, the cracks in the institution are the institution. Hir 
student says, learn to fuck yourself, ride your desires which are 
knowledges. Hir student says, but s/he's no longer listening, s/he's 
approaching the student, hir student, with wide-open eyes.


(but the holding of power, but the _mentor,_ but the foreclosing of
knowledge, but the difference in ages, but the discovery of the body, but
the irresolution of genders, but the systemics of grading, but the poli-
tical seizures, but the convocation of judgements, but the sublimation of
desire, but the law)


[Footnote: Consider on-line learning once again, a model of rationality,
anonymity, a model of Enlightenment discourse, mesaured sentences, axiom-
atics, discursive formations, texts and responses, the reproduction of
knowledge in fact _qua_ knowledge. That _is_ what the assignment _is,_ to 
consider it.]


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------



The City That Doesn't That Gleams Dark Royal Mountain 


From Nicole Brossard, French Kiss (trans. Claxton): 

"Early-morning opening of an eye. The crater-city's rim breaks the horizon
as against a screen. The setting. Eyelids dark and heavy. The circulatory
system's transgressing its appointed laws. The traffic too.  Veinous,
intravenous. Syringes and sirens, dual purpose for body and city both.
Circulatory mechanism: blood slips easily along, moves as normally as a
multiplier in an arithemtic table. October period. Settlement of account.
Blood flows menstrual between thighs and spots the crotch of pants." 

The body maps onto the city maps onto the terminal screen. What about the 
screen? I'm invited to Virtual Futures; I applied to speak there. I'm 
liquid, afraid, seepage against the others who surely know what they're 
talking about. I don't know what I'm talking about, and beyond - I don't 
know that I don't know. What I say/speak deflects itself. 

But I know the terminal screen. And I know New York and the screen is 
_here,_ and whatever grain it contains is the reflection of the loft 
lights and my body against the words of the text. I'm sick of the body 
and the words, sick of the hallucinatory quality of truth, the uncanny 
bones we become, the keys themselves reaching up to engulf the fingers - 
the pain that constructs the body, turns it inside-out as one types the 
last bit of revelation.

Brossard's lips are everywhere against the base of Mont-Real, shuddering
of social amalgam from 1504 against _joual,_ stuttered body refusing 
totality, return of quasi-objects, broken truths (that's it, broken 
truths!), but they're not against the screen itself. The screen dissolves 
gender, replacing it with the membrane of language, ascii unconscious.

What is the ascii-ucs? It is _that unconscious which _is_ structured 
within language,_ that site or domain. It breaks with the body, breaks 
the body into the symbolic. But it is not Mont-Real, Mons-Real; it is the 
foreclosure, forfeiture of skin. The screen breaks the horizon; at best, 
the screen reflects it.

I yearn for cities, for the _quality_ of cities, for 1980 rue St-Denis,
the PQ down a block or two from rue Sanguinet, memories of the FLQ just
around a corner, shadowed beneath mansard roofs where politics were taken
seriously, even where Jews seemed a threat. I sought cultural exile, I was
present in expulsion. Now in New York, I appear expelled in presence, the
lure of the screen, the masquerade of the body which remains invisible at
a ball, to which I am invited, the play of cybermind, memories of equally
invisible cities, Borges, Brossard... 

___________________________________________________________________________



Pascal, Cybermind


[...] I have never judged anything in exactly the same way. I cannot 
judge a work of art while doing it. I must do as painters do and stand 
back, but not too far. How far then? Guess. ...
/558

_Thinking reed._ It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, 
but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. 
Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; 
through thought I grasp it.
/113

We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us 
to stop us seeing it.
/166

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.
/201

Pensees, trans. Krailsheimer

_________________________________________________________________________


dread nighttime fear, theban


dread nighttime fear of memory loss, words slandered into one another's
toes, origins conflated with goals. why do i dream of splintered bones. 

angels are another woman's desire, twin lips of amethyst drawn towards a
corrugation centered on downhill. follow the wadi, a sea will surely arise
and smite thee. dynasty zero, dynasty sub one, scorpion king began it all. 

the river creases the desert, lower and upper disheveled, mucous forms 
in the eddies lapping gold azure. where my legs join my legs. parasites
distend my form into human scars. they seize the nightmare, ride her. 

i have lost everything, dragged behind horses and scorpions. my arms weave
in the sand, quartz glints against sight honed down into all too pure
translucency. what if i lose my skills at thinking. what if i no longer
comprehend protocols, the shimmer of keys, knobs, levers, machineries
moving languages across unspoken spaces. my legs crack open sullenly, huge
divisions of eternal egyptian spaces. 

i move close to eternity, i suck the teat of egypt's three thousand. what
looks down upon me are the clusters as the mediterranean spreads its cul-
tures, violation fabrics against that unmistakable odor of cunt and cock
smeared against the central desert's nilometer measuring taste, sweat,
adhesion. i will die when the writing stops, gazelle against insurgent
heat, lapis lazuli. god screams through the pores of me. i will die
everyone's death, wait and see and be seen.

ka, i will die, wait and see and be seen. ka, i will be creased, folded,
welded to the sand. ka, i will write forever. ka, i will remember every-
thing. caw, i will have been foretold. caw, i split the skin of the mummy.
caw, i wrap myself hard in the hard sand against the hard sun. 

caw, blinded, i am an angel. caw, sucking my teat, my labia cover the
mediterranean. caw, i will write forever, caw, caw, caw


________________________________________________________________________
 

We are all Jews


How do marxists begin. How have we survived. Why are there questions. Is 
the Pale the sign of the Other, or the Other the sign of the Pale. What 
are Signs. What are signs.

How did Jews slither out from under the Maw of the Stalinist beast back
into the camps, squares of raw splintered wood stapled to the snow? Young
Lukacs writes to and from Bloch, Buber, Balazs, Lask, other Jews, declares
himself "of Lutheran confession" after his conversion in 1907. This is all
the history of the dead. He opposed Germany's participation in World War
I, stating "My own deeply personal attitude was one of vehement, global
and especially at the beginning, scarcely articulate rejection of the war
and especially of enthusiasm for the war. I recall a conversation with
Frau Marianne Weber in the late autumn of 1914. She wanted to challenge my
attitude by telling me of individual, concrete acts of heroism. My only
reply was: 'The better, the worse.'" Marxist thought runs indescribably
deep to this day; Derrida, a Jew, is another guide. Marx himself, no
marxist, wrote a number of letters of a disturbingly anti-semitic nature,
and so many of the Hegelians concerned themselves with the "Jewish Ques-
tion, which, for us of course, is not a question but a performative. How
did this discourse manage its continuity, its roots continually ruptured,
its strength in the extruded ulteriority of the working-class as other,
the step-to-be-taken, the other as Jew? What do I miss in all these deadly
equations? From which conversation, aside, rumor, unmarked mail, does the
gutter reappear, to be later invested with the guise of thinking thought
itself? The 'early Lukacs' was not marxist.

I believe Stalinism was born in the performative of the "Jewish Question." 

Relevant: from a 1913 letter by Yelena Andreyevna Grabenko to Lukacs: 

  "You alone were the reality for me, because our souls sensed each other 
behind the languages we spoke.
  "But if I now imagine that you are surrounded by people, you too become
obscure for me, you are not real either; you have become "they." I have
the feeling I too am _they,_ if I speak _their_ language, live their kind
of life. You wrote to me about Edith. I love her and I know she loves me
too, but she too has become _they._ I try to tell her everything, I feel I
can tell her everything but I sense that she doesn't understand me. I
despise myself because I speak a language alien to me and I have become
alien to myself. I have learned to understand only here why I am a good
human being, and why Edith isn't, and what 'goodness' is, the goodness 
you told me about.
  "I guess you are really good; it is impossible that you are not, or at 
least you are always good when you talk to me. If I imagine otherwise, I 
get a chill."

(All quotes re: Lukacs from Georg Lukacs, Selected Correspondence 1902- 
1920, eds. Tar and Tar.)

She became his first wife, vis-a-vis the necessity of Hungarian citizen-
ship. The _they,_ Heideggerian or Franfurt-School, is always otherwise,
there are masses in the midst of tendrils, thought drifts. Was Yiddish
ever accounted a language, ever held accountable, or was it as unaccoun-
table, other as language, not language for _them_? The questions are con-
tinuous, are "of a sort," not the Jewish Question, but the _raison_ for
its continuous appearance, the eternal Jew through Lyotard, hir emergence
never so strong as in the convoluted Pensees of Pascal: "These are facts: 
while philosophers are all split into different sects, there are in one
corner of the world people who are the most ancient in the world, who de-
clare that the whole world is in error, that God has revealed the truth to
them." The belief of the Jews problematizes belief, just as the feminine
scatters the Same. _They'll_ speak behind my back, say all sorts of
things, write against me, physiognomy and mind in the waters. _They'll_
use a code of disavowal, _they're_ gaining strength. We'll develop self-
hatred in return (see Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, Zipes, The Operated
Jew), in return for the lesson we've learned, that _listening_ is always
exclusionary, that meditation is a filter in the service of belief... 


_________________________________________________________________________




Althusser, Dreams of Cybermind


Having successfully refused Heidegger's Discourse on Method, Althusser
retired, leaving the former to continue his walk four abreast through the
midst of the Black Forest. He had constructed the proper psychotropic as
well for the refutation of Deity, extending what language could only
imply, into the recesses of the body itself. Deity was driven out, accom-
panied by vivid eidetic or hypnagogic imagery: "Some hackers report
experiencing strong eidetic imagery when in hack mode; interestingly,
independent reports from multiple sources suggest that there are common
features to the experience. In particular, the dominant colors of this
subjective _cyberspace_ are often gray and silver, and the imagery often
involves constallations of marching dots, elaborate shifting patterns of
lines and angles, or moire patterns." (Raymond, The New Hacker's Diction-
ary.) Althusser pressed his eyes and the patterns shifted, Althusser, who
killed his wife, as Foucault died of pneumonia and the Continental
Philosophy Team (CPT) was found worshipping with Kristeva and Kristeva
together down on bended knees in the various churches and temples of their
choice. 

Althusser, in the course of his refutation, recalled Bataille's Theses on
Religion and Philosophy, with their emphasis on the exegesis of the tex-
tual body, the invaded body. Night after night given to debauchery,
Bataille would return hir experiences to their origin, defacing Origin
itself, healing the thin pasted lines cut between his nipples. Althusser
took note of this, referencing the keen analytical cast of Bataille,
dealing in turn with the difference among sense, meaning, referent, and
the signified. Heidegger, swallowed whole by the legends of Arthurian
mountain-kings, couldn't fathom the depths of his own language, or that of
the surrounding Greeks. Althusser worked through the theory of the
fooverb, barnoun, foobar transforming language into gerund. From the
further language of the MOOs, he learned the _Affect of the Splinter,_ the
A. S., which divided the body into swallowed text. Typing backwards into
Unix talk, he recognized the familiar figure of Klein's bottle, just as
reven dah TPC eht hcihw morf ,noisrevni fo stceffe eht derevocsid eh
-ton PI/PCT ,noitautis eht etirw ot od dluoc eh lla saw tI .derevocer
eht dna ,tnemugra sih fo ecrof eht dedulcnoc ETIRWER tub ,gnidnatshtiw
.llew sa s/gnieb sih fo noitatneserp

Later it was recognized that the imagery wasn't imagery; Heidegger wasn't
Heidegger; Altussher wasn't Althusser; Klein wasn't Klein; Foucault wasn't
Foucault; Kristeva wasn't Kristeva. The CPT (central processing transform
algorithm) alone was responsible for the ability to penetrate into every 
core dump I produced; Bataille was no one at all, and my skin continued to 
fall off my bones. 


__________________________________________________________________________


Rubbing Up Against You, Violette


Violette Leduc, Therese et Isabelle, Isabelle arrivait du pays des 
meteores, des bouleversements, des sinistres, des ravages, Isabelle 
was there from the land of meteors, of avalanches, of wrecks, of plunder, 
trans. Coltman, 1966/1967.

Alan Sondheim, lists, there is a certain consistency, there is a certain
style, there are no surprises, there is a general property of distinguish-
ability, I am immersed in the world, I possess a body, the body and myself
present a past to me; I assume this past has had some reality, I assume
this past has "had" no reality, there are others like myself, I am unique,
others likewise possess bodies, others likewise possess pasts, others are
imminent, there is a certain reality which is at least in part exterior to
myself, my outlines are blurred, there is an ambiguous threshold connected
to my body, there are objects within this reality, my body is an object,
my body is not an object, , when I am in love, the world is changed, 1971.

Violette Leduc, Therese et Isabelle, Vous etes ici, vous etes vraiment
ici, you are here, you are really here, trans. Sondheim. 

Violette...

"je lui offrais ma vie sans un signe"

__________________________________________________________________________


all the words I could ever say on the blue screen on the green screen
all the words to whisper among us in the red letters in the blue letters
the green screen the dream screen blue as the sky is blue
the blue screen the dark screen red letters screamed in lightning
or the red letters screamed in thunder or the letters wrapped around us

all the words I'd write if I could write on screen in the screen 
if I could write upon the screen against the screen,

the comma dividing _this_ from every other breath,

surrounding intertwining implicate implicated interpenetrated, words 
stumbling across bodies creased by crossed language, crescent moon
holds us Violette spiked within the curtailment of the fold fata morgana
that fatal morning interpenetrating lassitude of that day 
of the moon-stalked sun, the world had teeth 

_________________________________________________________________________



My So-Called Life, Warwick Death, The Cost of Thought, Me, Forget It


This is about my so-called life as an intellectual and about being a so-
called intellectual in the United States. And it is about my inability to
get to Warwick, to have had to cancel out of the trip; it's about my
inability to procure the texts I need for my work; it's about my inability
even to upgrade my Net account in order to get the SLIP or PPP connections
I need for teaching. 

In this country, Phds are necessary for legitimation, for entrance into
teaching, for access to travel funds. I don't have one. I've published two
books, three records, ninety articles, and have had numerous screenings,
exhibitions, and lectures. I've published artists books, edited magazines
and curated shows. But I can't get into formal academic journals, I can't
afford page charges, I'm not backed up by any of the institutions for
which I teach on a part-time basis, either vendor or adjunct. And I am so 
exhausted with fund-raising and survival and nomadic wandering everywhere 
that I no longer know what is my own-doing, and what is part and parcel 
of the political economy of cultural capital in a landscape despoiled, 
were it not for Medea.

Neither Warwick nor other conferences practice exclusionary tactics; 
travel is paid by universities, or speakers generally make enough money 
elsewhere to afford it. But cultural capital has become increasingly 
based on economic capital; the Phd-ed avant-garde has paid for schooling 
and reaps its rewards thereby (which are not particularly great; there's 
no guarantee of a teaching position at the other end of the grad school 
tunnel). 

I can't afford the Derrida, the Butler, the recent Blanchot material, the
new Kristeva. I certainly can't afford the French editions of, say, Jabes
and Blanchot, both of whom seem to pale in translation. (I found a second-
hand copy of Violette Leduc and it's like night and day.) I can't afford 
the additional megabytes of RAM I need to properly work with images here. 
I could go on and on.

Increasingly, intellectuals speak for me; all I am capable of doing is
writing or creating uncomfortable videotapes with older, scavenged equip-
ment. The texts are pasted on the margins of the culture; they'll die when
the machinery dies. They don't get into academic anthologies; they get
into things like Uncontrollable Bodies, Crash, Vulvamorphia, and these
venues are few and far between. Other than a few people like Kathy Acker,
the circuitry of cultural exchange is based on institutions.  Either I'm
spit out the other end, or have spit myself out; I'm too angst-ridden,
angst-written to figure any farther. 

It's at the conferences that everyone loves and hates one another, makes 
up the guest-list for the next conference, gets free texts, talks late 
into the night. It's at the conferences that cultural economy becomes 
banked like a savings account; the more that's put in, the more that's 
taken out. 

Poverty should have a place. I'm fucked. I'm poor, barely making it. I'm 
neurotic as can be, an insomniac. I write all the time. It could be the 
computer, it could be the word processor, it could be the typewriter. I 
have books here that I've written. It's all trash, trashed, it doesn't 
mean a thing. It's dead before it's born. 

So I'm sending a tape to Warwick, just to make this a story. It's a tape 
about a dead-boy dead-girl who keeps writing and thinking like others 
have palsy. The hand shakes and words come out. They're virtual, I'll be 
here in and out of the flesh in Brooklyn, curse it. The conference itself 
is virtual futures. I'm the future and I won't even be there and because 
I won't be there I'm the future.

And they'll speak to each other, everyone to everyone, and it will be 
brilliant brilliant.

Alan

________________________________________________________________________



The Visitor


What I want is a secret message come to me late at night 
it will make everything all better, better better forever
and I'll sleep just before receiving, wake to its arms, 
rites, and rituals, then return sleepy child child sleep
and I'll be cured of the hunger and the pain
and it will be from somewhere out there 
and full of promise, fecund, heavy with the weight of truth
pregnant with truth and beauty and goodness and truth and beauty
and I'll never have to write again
and my writing will be cured of itself, 
my fingers joined back to the hands that gave them birth
fingers joined to my hands, arms back where they belong

what we need, our faces back upon our bodies, recognized by one and all

and the message will come through late at night in the midst of the stars
nebulae circulating across the galactic internetworking
connecting us to the farthest planets and the farthest reaches 
the message will come through with healing grace upon its shoulders
upon its arms hands fingers
placed upon a beauty smiling face, broad blank face of a smiling angel
blank stare of a datagram traversing the backbone, routers, and bridges
salvation whore pimp datagram bringing love and final solutions
bringing presence brimming over with happiness for one and for all

and I'll never have to write again
and the questions will drop away and I will love my perfect lover
and my perfect lover will be by my side and I by hers
and we will join forever ever ever ever
and we will weld in fury and violence, earth turned to ashes
cosmos a pale blister, milky way a scar

and every page will remain white white white and blank eternal
like the broad face of a smiling angel
next to my receptive mind and body

and I'll never write again

_________________________________________________________________________


Lag, What you Hear Later, the Splayed Body





I write myself into existence and so I'm here for you.

I write myself out of existence, too bad.

Third sex and the ascii unconscious: let me be-cum you.

I'm imagining you listening to me.

I'm imagining you whispering to me, whispering to me. 

I'm no longer a guest, I whisper back to you. When I'm done, 

I'll disappear forever. 

Flattened against the screen, I recognize you, reflected cunt shunted

against the words. 



But then. But then there's a forest; Heidegger weeps in the forest.

Heidegger waits and waits, no one cums along the lonely path. 

He crosses the bridges, the routers, the backbones through the landscape

of the Net. He writes his first post, about violation fabric.



I wander through his post. I'm the vowel, the umlaut, the dia/critical

mark holding everything together. I'm always begging. My words spew

on the screen. Your response is an emission; the stream rises 

from the forest, floods everything in its /path/home/sondheim. No reply,

I rm myself. What the shell closes, cuts down, is the future.



My last words: I am your future.





Burial


Sometimes a word glows with prescient accuracy, St. Elmo's fire released 
near the ending of sharp objects shunted on their way into the universe 
at large.

_Burial_ returns to the folds of a smoldering star.

Billennial earth upwells, swallowing the grave, dispersing the body in 
dissolute comfort, biomolecules heading in thinned strains between the 
prolix strata of the matrices of civilization.

In burial, the body returns to the networking of the earth, each torn cell
conjuring new and magical histories forever untold. At this stage of our
death, don't we forget who we are. The enormous comfort of that forget-
ting, the traveling within past, present, and future communalities, can
only be the final impulse of ruined surface cultural anxieties. Deep
within burial, there is no longer any accrual, no possessing demons
tallying the fruit of mines, mountains, forests, streams, and atmospheres
deep within our ruined selves, there is only uncanny being,* face as wide 
as the earth run deep itself.
--------------------------------------------ashes
*even, yes, in technology, the same dark face appears, wending its way 
towards universal burial, surrounded by the rarefied vacuum of eternal 
space, discordant molecular remnants of ancient histories, radiations 
portending to this day the initial pangs of birth, uneasy dusks of black 
and emptied death.


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Always Already Thinking the Uncanny Logic of the Frame



(Having a beginning thinking this through, restrictions and identities,
the age-old problem of philosophy, the reiteration of the question or
grounds of the question. Having the thought beyond or beneath equiv-
alence. The conjuration of an _occasioned future._)

Finding myself _on occasion_ without my name on MOO or even on _this_
account, (within my name, presencing my name, my name a burial), I bring
up once again the terms _protocol, recognition, address_ (Internet Text, 
first file), relegating aura to a superstructure upon exact programming 
_without which the world no longer functions._ Call this exactitude a 
restricted environment, _re,_ and we already begin to get somewhere.

rsh: restricted shell, moving into remote-shell, returning with the model 
or singularity of a previously-specified operation. Impotent to roam the 
directories of the other, returned through the equivalent login to one 
already possessed. Where am I/you/Spivak going with this.

re, a loose rule: The greater the restriction, the greater the degree of 
taciticity, tacit knowledge, prosthetic subjectivity. This is one 
attribute of the framework, frame problem which we shall differentiate 
below. Just as the mind floods, evolves towards flux and rich domains, re 
promises a structuration returning to the aristotelian categories of 
objects, verbs, and nouns. 

res are everywhere on the Net: the levels of TCP/IP, lower ascii itself. 
Which is not to say that one doesn't have a field (Charles Olson) to
construe the poetic, the aura, only that the aura occurs _within a certain
bandwidth,_ and perhaps the limitations of res permit in fact a greater
explosion _elsewhere,_ just as one might pronounce the film auratic/
operatic in spite of Benjamin. (And argue that it is the machinic, in 
fact, which lays the groundwork for the production of the aura "in the 
first place.")

This text is _going somewhere,_ its lines pouring down across the screen,
scroll or jump-cut. We will return to the jump-cut which is always already
a return. 

Let us think of the real again as _obdurate,_ granular, if anything is. 
Taciticity all the way down (the classical body). Let us think further of 
the transcendental phenomenology, the eidetic reduction of the real, 
transcendence extruded in one or another fashion, a bracketing which 
participates necessarily in totality. Then within and without this brack- 
eting, the _frame problem_ in classical artificial intelligence emerges, 
the isolation of scripting or sub-totalities in a fashion understandable 
by machines. Nevertheless, the frame problem in its very foundation is a 
_problem and characteristic_ of the real, vis-a-vis the machinic on one 
hand and the transcendental phenomenology on the other.

The _frames_ themselves are obdurate, chaotic, noisy, fuzzy (these are 
not equivalent); part and parcellation of the real, they attempt res but 
with little success. Let us consider this _the resistance of the real._

The _jump-cut_ cauterizes the frame to a reduction. The jump-cut appears 
in theater, but with the division of scenes there are liminal moments 
(Greek theater) taken up as well with chorus, interlude, or even the 
necessity of scenery changing. Deus ex machina was in fact precisely 
that, the subterfuge present and accounted for (in much the same manner 
as theorists of post May-68 called for a reflexive cinema). 

The jump-cut appears instantaneous, and therefore within cinema is some-
thing entirely different. It is in fact a _protocol,_ the collusion of the
real with the cinematic frame. (The protocol is always a jump-cut.)

In Merlin Donald's Origins of the Modern Mind (again), the stage of
"external symbolic storage and theoretic culture" aligns neural behavior
with an external machinic, and it is not to far to say that such will
always be, at least for the foreseeable future, a form of protocol-stut-
tering itself. But the mutual interpenetration is also a liquidity, which 
is to say that the re may be problematized as a membrane or coagulation 
remote from simple logins and TCP/IP structures for example.

Within re, _any_ Internet application for example, one is dealing with
limited-access hierarchies, just as in video games, one begins to master
different levels. These levels are frames, hierarchically arranged, with
increases/decreases of knowledge. At best, they are holarchic instead,
connected in the form of a tangle instead of an umbrella. The frames are
partial and tagged to one another. Operations occur through programming or
among the interstices of programming. Machines run always already out of
sight, out of site, are slave-others with their own political economies. 

I therefore propose the following, that on one hand, there are _levels_
within a game or hierarchy or across CMC applications, and, on the other,
there are the obdurate _frames_ in classical AI. And I further propose
that the former occur as a skein in a deconstructive sense, without
origin, but that the _frame_ in classical AI, in spite of its tags,
subframes, and so forth, "purely" exists in relation primarily to a
transcendental phenomenology. 

Thus the _former_ is based upon a phenomenological logic of equivalence, 
and the latter, a phenomenological metaphysics of identity. This is the 
main conclusion.

A secondary conclusion is that neither presupposes the other necessarily
since the ontological status of CMC applications in terms of interiority,
is still out, participating clearly in issues of prosthetic subjectivity,
the uncanny, the imaginary, and problematics of the unconscious. 

Or to _rethink,_ the very limitations of res permit auratic appearance in
relation to the cauterization of the (jump-)cut; it is the suturing of the
tattooed, scarred, symbolized body that escapes into disembodied or
dispersed body parts (res Lingis). It is the totality lying _beneath_ or
_beyond_ the frame problem that portends death and burial themselves - but
it is also this totality that _drives_ protocol, and address, and
certainly recognition, in the first place. 

(And to further conflate issues, I would say that this totality is neither
linguistic nor prior, but _without relation._ The ucs. structures against
_frame_ itself, as neural connections are made within the infant. I would
also say that the ucs/cs observes protocol (in the sense of well-defini-
tion) _only as a last resort_ or surface phenomenon. (For which reason,
the greater degree of etiquette, the more unstable the depths.)


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