missing stromatolite the pictures are coming perfectly along. I've been reading an Indo-Euro- pean grammar. the book on the IE peoples is based on an old and totally absurd triadic scheme. mysticism should be kept out of any form of re- search and applied if at all as an afterthought by people roaming the street thinking of other things. the nicest thing about the human species, if it is one, is how sloppy it is, and then how pathetically it tries to tidy up things with all sorts of schemata that comes out of one or another of its orifices, usually the mouth, which itself is such a letdown. the species is a thing, then, with a mouth, you say? would you care to say further, is there more to add? what of this thing called the species? do you say, group mind? do you say hive mind? do you insist on internet and hive mind internet or group mind internet? i replied. this tidying, what is it? is this the political economy of the sign, is it a strategic abstraction, collapsing everything to the conceivable expan- sion of a single stroke? is the mouth the locus of the stroke? the cunt? the belly? womb? hole? what constitutes the inked well of the inscription? is there anyone behind all of these things, she wondered, but feared to say aloud. she feared no one. she feared no one at all. she thought, doubly, the body is a huge sponge. she thought the body is a huge sponge. it was / is / will be. ___________________________________________________________________________ what margaret knew the hole is given by the rim, the delineation; the rim is fissured from the same, opening miasma; it is the miasma that participates in the sacred; the sacred inebriates the hole. the rim job is the locus of labor in the hole, absorption / annihilation; the rim job is the labor of supplication and fulfillment, recuperation of the body's / absent / bodies. the soul is stained; the rim knows nothing of the depth. every movement of the organism, arm and leg and mouth speaking, occurs within what might be considered the _(phantom) limb of the hole,_ that is to say its extension or the gap between its extension and what has never been known. nor is this the matter of parameters or dimension, something that one is unutterably clear about, concerning. nor that writing, nor language. no matter what you say. you can say all you want to. she said. ""destroy," she said." __________________________________________________________________________ Deep-down Stromatolitic Nowhere Journey Void Boom Thud Tongue Ding Thonged Broom I'm so neurotic I can't function here. I still wake up halfway in tears. I still feel completely alone. The stars are different. The conference has drained from the body. It's all my fault. I killed all those people. I ruined their lives. I'm never done with them. I've done too much with them. I watch myself trying to get along and watch myself watching myself. I need someone to shatter the mirror, break down the door, cross the railroad tracks against the gap. How stupid can this be highschool foot- ball star. I begin the nightmares again. I miss the ease of dis/ease. I'm protected in cyberspace; no one has to see me. But I can say anything I want, and with the ease of dis/ease. I begin to think: My mind is dam damaged. My mind is dam damaged. It closes down. I want to see the stromatolites. I want to see them real bad. Most badly do I do. I do want to lie down. I do want to lie down in the pool. I do want to lie down in the pool and submerge. I do want to float beneath the surface. I do so want my eyes beneath the surface. I do so want my breasts beneath the surface. I do so want to be with the stromatolites. I do so much want to live _there_ with the beginning of life. I do so much to die so a stroma- tolite can turn be perfect ugly body shape like human shape like cyber- shape like memory. I do such much want to be like memory. I do so much want to be like memory. I do so much want to be like memory. But is there a bus there in the water? But do the rails sink themselves into that water? It's saline; batteries burn out, bodies rust, humans lose themselves in spit, spew, and spray. There's pollution too; we can't hold back our juices. The maw of death rips open my back; there's no bone. I begin to sense the purity of absence - have you read what I write? The jet lag, then nowhere in Perth, antipodean indefinite for this sick morsel blahblah - stromatolitic thud lending itself to bodies crushed beneath their own desires. Every desire is a sickness. Every single one. Every one of them. Every last one of them. Every single last one of them. Each and every one. Each and every last one of them. Each one of them. Including the rancid journey. Take my eyes and I see darkness everywhere. Take them. __________________________________________________________________________ Perth(0), unto, untoward This is like a dream. So clearly a moment already passed. Back in New York seeming. As if everything had never happened. Except for the presence of a single small object. Perhaps in the pocket or carried. As a remainder or surplus. So thisis a fantastic. Interlude of philosophy. Already missed or passed. Present as a moment within. The history of philosophy. The history of thought. Of thinking. If I am alive, I am philosophy unto its death; if I am in Perth, I am in philosophy's Perth, and there is none beyond. ___________________________________________________________________________ gland gloomy:conference:workable:perthtype:yes:7035:1:alan:perthtype:gloomy karen:justine:richard:jon:conference:sure:8364:6:Perth:conference:karen music:music!:MUSIC!:fiddle:jerry:8504:3:jerry:fiddle:music! smart:T-Bone:who?:Ari:of course:8612:1:Helen:Ari:smart Melinda:Martin:Reg:Fractal:S:8719:5:neato!:Fractal:Reg not-now:if-so:when?:Ariel:b'emet:8884:2:Antonio:Ariel:when? old:older:oldest:wet:heh!:old:yes:8986:4:Stromatolite:old:wet Karen:U-there:Stelarc:Lynne:92_degrees:21467:4:Heat:Lynne:U-there nebula:star:cantor_dust:it:rakosha:bree:22018:6:fanny:rakosha:cantor_dust adelphi:oracle:oracular:lune:nana:na:22073:3:anna:nana:oracular hat:telephony:ok_guv:cyberpain:Richard:natch:1175:2:Coll:Richard:telephony real:image:uncanny:dirty:splay:sex:sex:1241:4:sex:sex:real t-bone:fluffy:phil:extension:nu?:native:glenda:1277:5:michael:native:t-bone unroll:revel:disarm:intense:on:film:true:1320:5:kim:film:unroll alan:flood:efface:leak:lung:defuge:spill:1341:0:unravel:defuge:flood ___________________________________________________________________________ Elegy, Impossible Mourning I am not in Perth. I have never been in Perth. No one awaits me in Perth. She has never arrived in Perth. She has never been awaited. She has never been to Perth. She is not in Perth. He has never departed Perth. He has never been awaited. He has never been in Perth. He is not in Perth. You, who are in Perth, do not await me. You, who have been to Perth, do not await her. You, who have been in Perth, do not await him. _____________________________________________________________ Dusts and Radiations (Cantor Dust Transmission Towers) Dust settles. It sloughs from the real, fills the cracks, cauterizes his- tory, sinters culture. It travels. It moves substance across meridians.. Dust is atmospheric, existing in alliance with the air. Radiation travels through dust, is dispersed by the same. Radiation carries obstacle and inherent information. Extrinsic, it bounces from surface to surface, defines surface, contributes to the formation of entity and identity. Intrinsic, it run in spurts, amplitudes, wavelengths, shuttling information that defines its very existence. It's presence is intrinsic, say, and the quality of its presence is extrinsic. Nothing is pure in the radiative domain, everything interweaves, and meta- phors go only so far. Radiation, like dust, traverses; it doesn't require the atmospheric ether. If dust silently corrupts the surface, wears and is the result of wearing down, radiation floods, spews, emits; it breathes the virtual vacuums of outer space. Information is the result of division; it's _here_ that something exists, and it's _here_ that my voice is car- ried to you, and it's _here_ that image image image. Desire rides, inter- weaves, interpenetrates, but desire is an other. Postmodernity is the topography and psychogeography of dusts and radia- tions - extinctions, pollutions, desertifications, abandonments, colonias, internet, telephony, radio, television, microwave. Dusts are bottom up; they're beneath the surface, under things. Radiations are top-down, ig- noring boundaries: what is being said, produced, constructed, wherever you are. Dust erodes electronics; electronics must be placed in physical po- tential wells to continue operating - islands of stability in the midst of flux, heat, moisture, vandalism. I desire a phenomenology of dust and radiation, interspersed with global economies, the ravagings of human occupations. I desire the analysis of uncanny or imaginary ghosts wandering these denuded landscapes, with all the information anyone might desire, on any planet, anything, overwhelming and absurdist information, the truth of the real buried in defuge. I de- sire the interlace through all of this, the emergence of a pure and beau- tiful text like that very ravaged body. Dust leaves trails; radiation decays in quantum noise; we bury ourselves in the fiction of truthful nomenclature. _________________________________________________________________________ silence, only case of, your face on cuseeme silence, the figuring out of something very simple over a long period of time the only silence i have found on the Net is jouissance/visage your image there on cuseeme screen, pensive face turning, stuttering through packet deliveries that seem somehow invisible; you're there and this is it, the only silence, something that had never occurred to me before this evening, this only silence, this moment beyond language or reading, even i would _say_ the reading of the face, nothing at all, alterity, other, subaltern, emission, your face, presence, presentification, i would forgo the ideo- logical component, semiosis, even the fractional-dimensional aspect of interpretation or constructing of you or through you, what not would be an accounting of pure presence or the unaccountable, nor that which would have been announced, this face, this pleasure of the face, this slight movement, this presence of the eyes, there is no _word_ for it; my breath holds, collapses the body; leaning in toward the screen; the mutilated return of the other: as if the language were drawn from me, emptying the body - as if _nothing_ - your face looking at me, through the screen: this is the only silence on the Internet; this is the stuff of silence beyond or otherwise than language. (everything else is noise, internal reading, clicking, listening, deciph- ering, constructing, surfing, answering, calling, watching, masturbating, laughing, crying, speaking, murmuring, whispering, calling up, calling out, encryption.) __________________________________________________________________________ The They Kim, Antonio, Summa, Jason, and myself meandered through Rockingham to Lake Richmond, finding to no surprise that the small stromatolites (or thrombo- lites, depending) in the brackish freshwater lake were fully submerged at the moment. Nothing could be seen from the surface, except startled small frogs and various forms of waterfowl. We continued down to Lake Clifton, a thin saline lake paralleling the coast below Mandurah. Locating the north- ern part of the lake was like combing a raster across a disheveled screen, but we eventually ended up on a small pier extending across the water; be- neath us, indeed, were stromatolites, ranging from separate semi-spherical organisms, to a reef extending for eight kilometers. There were also con- ical stromatolites visible in the deeper waters, untroubled by the algae covering that threatens the ones in shallower and brighter areas - fertil- izer draining into the lake has done its damage. Although there were numerous tiny scavengers around the reef (which exten- ded from the shore out about fifty feet at this point), the overall effect was one of desolation and solitude; this was the briefest of glimpses into the early precambrian, when the solar system was perhaps a third to a quar- ter as old as it is today. The inertness of the habitus, its alien and dis- tant quality, were enough for awe; the stromatolites seem hardly emerged from some primeval stone matrix. They cling to organic and inorganic simul- taneously, and perhaps over billions of years oxygenated the atmosphere itself, preparing the planet for other faster forms of life. Very little surprises me, but this felt like a return where none should be, and the long detumescence or denouement of a temporality based on breath. There was nothing virtual about these entities, and for a moment or a gap, there was nothing virtual about the precambrian as well. When I can, I will send an image for downloading. ___________________________________________________________________________ A Race Against Time, by Jennifer, Furiously Typing, Beating the Machine no one's home and I'm sitting at kim's and antonio's machine, i notice that it rns slowly, so solyon this telnet in fact that I think to myself, why not/ try and beat the computt its own game. now I'm faster than most but not this fast r am I/ so I bdgin to work, thinking ahead of myselfa to say while working so you can be ablo get the machine's role in configuring what I'm doingl I'm stark naked, playing witmyself, and dreaming of you, off course of course, hoping youcome to me over the wires, come in mycross my face, slahs slash , turning me inside out, what selseww ould there be to do to m, you could do anything you want to ever that would be, yu'll see, I'm strongenough to take it, I've had it ways, I've been inntrol, youcan bet I've ben in control, hehh heh heh not like now but geere or gettingewhre, the packets are ipping from me, your tongue's deep insideme, I know you, what you're after - I know what yoou're ame anytime now, you can just slp in attle deeper there, i'm beatin gthe machine, I'm beating machns, I'm beating off the machine.... _______________________________________________________________________ violent:weather:of:or:beyond:otherwise:than:violent:weather:over: over:casuistry:of:day:of:demo:(Murdoch):talk:thinking:her:language: though:I:live:beneath:within:what:strata:stromatolitic:hunger: beyond:such:magnitude:of:fallen:stone:blue:grace:grey:granite:bark: dark:insomniac:brilliant:perth:sure_thing:23203:3:susie:perth:dark thing-like:greay:dead:mistaken:neuter:yup:26932:5:Alan:neuter:dead through:finished:done:end:tumescent:erect:8102:5:worn:tumescent:done nipple::breast::round::togue::tongue::smear:::yes:12219:2:::smear break:cripple:ligament:phantom:defuge:yes:15856:6:lag:defuge:ligament same:identity:nother:slough:used:same:same:15921:4:same:same:same kim:karen:jason:summa:antonio:fanny:coll:home:yes:29424:0:family:home:kim warm:hot:burning:ashen:ember:hearth:jawohl:29510:2:exile:hearth:burning gung:durango:lunger:lourdes:throat:true:29580:7:trachea:throat:lunger as:a:downed:infant:write_new:to:29678:1:I_am_attempting:write_new:downed living:away:from:home:life:into:29807:7:think:life:from warm:nipple:!!:through_gung:thing_same:124:3:nipple_dark:through_gung:warm quit!:bye!:kill!:had_it!:stop!:the_end!:182:4:final!:stop!:kill! _________________________________________________________________________ Alan says I'm not to write you any more. He says I'm too weird and contrary and stuff and making a mess of his life. He hates it that I keep raising my pinafore. I'll raise my pinafore all I want. He can't stop me. Jennifer __________________________________________________________________________ Rather than writing myself in and out of existence, I find the remains of the day dreading a return to the hateful and fearful USA. Dusk has no in- terest in virtuality; night refuses hir corruption at the brutal hands of the guilty. Dawn wants home, wants nested community, the smell of bodies, gropings in the light. Morning becomes hir. After noon, I begin to feel comfortable in Perth, as if longing had taken root. Every hard drive to and from friendship has a root. Evening awaits the long absence of light and division of this body. Torn from its routes, it can't find its way home. Alan, in early morning. _________________________________________________________________________ Rousseau, Emile One morning when they had not seen each other for two whole days, I en- tered Emile's room with a letter in my hands, and looking fixedly at him, I said to him, "What would you do if some one told you Sophy were dead?" He uttered a loud cry, got up and struck his hands together, and without saying a single word, he looked at me with eyes of desperation. "Answer me," I continued with the same calmness. Vexed at my composure, he then approached me with eyes blazing with anger; and checking himself in an almost threatening attitude, "What would I do? I know not; but this I do know; I would never set eyes again upon the person who brought me such news." "Comfort yourself," said I, smiling, "she lives, she is well, and they are expecting us this evening. But let us go for a short walk and we can talk things over." ----------------------------------------- So Rousseau writes this. He gets up with Emile; they go to the computer. Dear Sophy, they begin, maybe we're dead, maybe you are. Who is to know? Emile had quite a scare. If I were Raymond Queneau I'd wonder about this. Emile's only words. So am I for that matter. Who am I writing to? Doesn't this seem like the oldest story in the world? There's always control in- volved in a story. That's the masochism everyone talks about. I have no idea if it has a site, sight, or locus. It's more like a locust, plague take you everywhere, emitted from the Grund up. You rise, you sink; you understand. She dies, isn't dead; they're all dead anyway - it's too long ago. Because I'm a woman, because I'm a woman, they wouldn't like me. I'm being called to the table. I just wonder and wonder. Who were they? Why the control? Rousseau buried women in his time. He set the example and made examples. He reminds me of Hippocrates, Galen. Women are a symptom. But here, something else is happening. He bursts in the room; he's a ghost! It's a slow take. They're on the computer; one or another has the power to delete. They wryte Sophy into just about everything they do. She's the protocol. She has seven layers, only three of skin. Down there, the hardware. Beneath the pinafore. She raises it again and again. Jennifer __________________________________________________________________________ Jennifer-Memory Write it, write it all down. Id squeezes, is squeezed. Nothing remains; debris rises to the surface. Construct a flow; this requires vector fields, calculi, boundary regions, borderline phenomena. Stutter the legend. Memory becomes nothing; one might say it is all the time there is. Speaking is momentary through three and a half billion years, the guise of suicide. Nothing survives. Nothing is memory. Nothing becomes. It is well not to recognize this, the teen-age Jennifer wrote, in order to keep on living. It's programmed into us. Anything else would be false. And I don't mean to imply the truth of this or any other thing. Implication is always detumescence. She paused, pen poised, remembering. _____________________________________________________________________ Twin Motives of the Chthonic I want to propose a parallel between global finance and scientific core theory; both are contested sites involving standardized protocols. The former operates directly within the chaotic domain; participants' behavior is based on a combination of theory and heuristics. The latter does not operate, but is operated upon; totality appears at the root. Both possess claims of universality and both flood their domains. Both have a proble- matic relationship to quantification and parameterization, and in both quantity (dollar and constant) take on an abstracted ontological status. The problem of finance is the regulation of the variable; the problem of science is the constant as regulator. The scientific tends towards unity; finance desire growth and expansion. Crisis in the former is paradigm upheaval; in the latter, it is collapse and diminution. If science studies the state of things, finance operates upon the things of state. If science emphasizes the phenomenology of process, finance operates upon processes. If science tends towards a fundamental knowledge, finance tends towards the trivial; if science is substructural and determinate, finance is sup- erstructural and chaotic. Science explodes the determinate; finance im- plodes the chaotic. If science tends towards idealism and platonism with- in the core theory, finance tends towards heuristics and pragmatism. If the universality of science is problematized by its own heuristics, the triviality of finance is subverted by its own rationalisms. Both ignore the division between public and private spheres, and each sponsors the practice of the other. _______________________________________________________________________ Unlike Ari, perhaps, I do think we met in Perth; I don't think we all connected. I don't think it was really cool in Perth although some of us were hot in Perth, which was far out, way cool. There were bodies in Perth and some still are. You can think about them tethered, elastic, a syzygial game played in a concrete topography delineated by the limits of cities, bush, suburb, and their interpenetrations. It's dangerous to deny the real. It's dangerous to fetishize it. Absolute silence fetishizes nothing. Some of us talked to one another in Perth. Some of us talked past one another in Perth. No one speaks to the fullness of alterity. The group broke up into pieces, coalesced; Jerry spoke or wrote to that, after Perth, through Perth. Perth is not a divisor, inscription, barrier; it is a variable. To remember it is a variable is to remember the functor characteristics of a cyberspace of arrows and objects. Objects become arrows; arrows are objects; the world is an intermingling of communica- tions, states, processes, places, flows, and not all the poetics in the word play against the momentary glance of a face. It's not the gaze which cuts, inscribes, but the glance which fissures. In Perth we talked to one another; who ever talks with or listens? What sort of space is listening? Did we hear one another in Perth? The phenomenology of silence requires the accompaniment of hearing, the governance or editorial-body of the ear. Who has heard in Perth? What is this anywhere where the letters drop out, clatter like names to the floor? What has been gained if there are no divisions? What has been gained if there are? The words in the world don't make things easier than presence. Jon and I were discussing the phenomenology and structures of liminal spaces, gaps within rationalist trajectories between arrows. Where do they open up; what sorts of structures fill them? I submit Jon, Perth, and you are such gaps; I submit to you. Some day one of us will die first. Nothing is language or communication. Far out. __________________________________________________________________________ JENNIFER'S FRIENDS AND FELLOW FOLLOWERS!!!! WHAT HAVE I DONE? I HAVE LIVED ONLY TO CONTAM- INATE YOU, TO BRING ABOUT THE MILLENNIUM OF DEGENERACY, IN OTHER WORDS TO REPRODUCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOW TRUE IT IS!!!! LISTEN TO MAX NORDAU, DEGENERATION: "This is the natural history of the aesthetic schools. Under the influence of an obsession, a degenerate mind promulgates some doctrine or other - realism, pornography, mysticism, symbolism, diabolism. He does this with vehement penetrating eloquence, with eagerness and fiery heedlessness. Other degenerate, hysterical, neurasthenical minds flock around him, re- ceive from his lips the new doctrine, and live thenceforth only to propa- gate it." HORROR UPON HORROR UPON HORROR VACUIIIIIIII!!!!!!! I RECOGNIZE MYSELF IN THIS MAD HOMUNCULUS, GONE WHERE NONE HAD TRODDEN ON THESE PATHS BEFORE!!! OOOOOOOOOOO OH OH OH OH OH I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE SAYING! THAT IT IS NOT TRUE, THAT I AM AN IDIOT, THAT YOU HAVE NOT GIVEN ME THE TIME OF DAY, MUCH LESS OF MOURNING!!!! BUT HEED O HEED: "We have him now, then, the 'super-man' (_surhomme_) of whom Baudelaire and his disciples dream, and whom they wish to resemble: physically, ill and feeble; morally, an arrant scoundrel; intellectually, an unspeakable idiot who passes his whole time in choosing the colours of stuff which are to drape his room artistically, in observing the movements of mechanical fishes, in sniffing perfumes and sipping liqueurs." O GOD HE GOES ON!!!! BUT IT IS THE: *****MECHANICAL FISHES***** DO YOU NOT SEE? STROMATOLITES, OF WHOM (NOTE THE 'WHOM' NOT THE 'WHICH'!!) I DREAM NIGHTLY, _THERE_ UPON THE SEA-BED, MINE OWN BED, _THERE_ AS IF THEY WERE SMIRKING HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! MECHANICAL LIFE wound down to the bottom of the sea!!!!!! OH HUMMMMMM! "Whenever he rants, Nietzsche is no doubt really original. On such occa- sions his expressions contain no sense at all, not even nonsense; hence it is impossible to unite them with anything previously thought or said." HAH! (My name is Jennifer, how are you? Are you Jennifer, too?) DO NOT FOLLOW ME INTO THE GARDENS OF BABYLON, SHALT I RAISE MY PETTICOAT, SHALT I RAISE MY FROCK UNTO THE FLOCK OF THE LORD!!! LORD, HORDES UNSUB FROM THIS THINE EMAIL LIST, LISTING TO THE LEFT OR RIGHT, OH STATELY SHIP OF STATE!!! MEANT FOR YOU ALONE, I DOTH COVET SEAMEN!!!! "Mysticism is, as we know, always accompanied by eroticism, especially in the degenerate, whose emotionalism has its chief source in morbidly ex- cited states of the sexual centres." FUCK ME! Jennifer _________________________________________________________________________ The Configuration The relations now become clear. The operations described elsewhere are coupled as follows: core-theory ------ radiation | \ / | | \ / | | \ / | | / \ | | / \ | | / \ | finance----------------dusts Core-theory is both intrinsic and extrinsic in its couplings; finance is pervasive, agency of dissolution, worn and wearing down. Finance cancels time and history, fissures populations; core-theory inscribes populations and time. As dust dissipates the effects of radiation, finance cauterizes the investigation of core-theory (Brillouin) which is coupled with energy. As core-theory dusts and dissolves the entities of the world (Jeans and Hiroshima), finance introjects and projects radiation. Radiation trans- forms into media under the guise of capital; dust transforms into a re- cuperated time under the guise of the scanning electron microscope. Dust and finance embrace chaos and self-similarity; radiation and core-theory reproduce the leniency of bandwidth. The chiasm is the positioning of the abstracted alienation of the subject who appears within other masquerades; this is the construct of the post- modern. _________________________________________________________________________ Desire What's desire got to do with it? Every text becomes a tremendous signpost like a game of sport. Competition requires duration; it's not enough to win, but to win over a period of time, to have played the game, extended the rite. The text begs for duration; letters cry, weep, wail; they are genuinely in pain, wounded, sutured only by the presence of your silent voice, as they approach, one after another, just as in the fable. But it's not enough to read, to say my name, your name; it's not enough to say the name of another; a reply is in order, just as a prayer is a reply to God, con- soling her with her existence. A reply is a salve; at least I am worthy of a response in the midst of your silence, and you have spoken. God does not want our thankfulness; God knows. God wants her loneliness to end, if only for a second, an aeon, in this universe of histories and plasma. God can do nothing for you; no one can, as the world churns in every way. What you can do for God is comfort her, and it is as the com- forting of a child; it is a kindness and a space of giving, a caring from one to another. Let us love the solitude and solicitude of speech and of speech's writing; let us love the gift of comforting, the peopling of God's domain. ___________________________________________________________________________ Nikobra Sarin Alan_. chuckles. Alan_. got online ... really felt something radically new .. Alan_. is too fast .. Alan_. laughs. Alan_. partly attacks instituionalisation in generakl .. Alan_. points out the graphics .. Alan_. says, "Jennifer" Alan_. says, "Jennifer" Alan_. says, "Alan 6 unis, married 4 times ... 30 citis .." Alan_. says, "Alan gave him his writing ..." Alan_. says, "Alan talks for hours ..." Alan_. says, "And blurs all the sentences together with ands .." Alan_. says, "Audience silent at the end ... uncomfortable .." Alan_. says, "But applauded it." Alan_. says, "Different way of articulating .." Alan_. says, "Disorders of the Real .... bopok ." Alan_. says, "Early on Jennifer ..." Alan_. says, "Everything is interpenetrated with everything else .." Alan_. says, "Graphic form and that kind of thing ..." Alan_. says, "Language poets .." Alan_. says, "Left before the audience.." Alan_. says, "Nikobra Sarin (?)" Alan_. says, "Pot your life." Alan_. says, "Returned it next day ... fully annotated .." Alan_. says, "Semi-withdrawal ..." Alan_. says, "Someone reads your wryting as a symptom .." Alan_. says, "Structuration " Alan_. says, "Subvertive textst again " Alan_. says, "This is a stupid Jennifer memory .." Alan_. says, "VBiruses bacteria ... bacteriaphages .." Alan_. says, "Way that it come to be interchangeable with text .." Alan_. says, "Well known in the states .." Alan_. says, "You can say you're a brunette but the reader will read thr Alan_. says, "dusts ... counter-dusts ... did a lot of writing on that a Alan_. says, "he gets a duality out of it .." Alan_. says, "influened by feminine wryting .." Alan_. says, "is working out the question .." Alan_. says, "make sure you clean up afterwards ... Alan_. says, "momentary totality .." Alan_. says, "not clear ... everythig in everything else .." Alan_. says, "position of unease ... asociated with burnout ... own phen Alan_. says, "resonancce .." Alan_. says, "sonheim/tiffany textualising ... ex-duality ... " Alan_. says, "texts have a kind of slippage" Alan_. spells well. Alan_. talks about that .. Jennifer nods to Alan_.. Jennifer nods to Alan_.. __________________________________________________________________________ Resisting Australia It is necessary to resist a momentary intrusion into another country, a situation which leaves little to the understanding and much to the memory. So it is I bequeath myself, a resistance to Australia, to a surface pro- nouncement as to the delineation of a culture or cultures. What could I possibly comprehend, when even taxation and history are relatively un- known? This is a matter of some seriousness, for example, where aboriginal literature is concerned. Whom do I read, to whom do I listen, and for what purpose? An unknown politics plays out around me; secrecies and concepts of possession play poorly with transcription over a history of two centur- ies of writing and description. What is being described? So I find myself resisting, as in the resistance to a text, a distance which refuses bleak and fragile attachments, unless a portal is already opened. That is, unless you offer me an invitation into your heart of hearts, dear heart, your innermost soul, sitting down and genuinely sharing a meal between our peoples, coming together over breaking bread. And even then there are so may misfortunes, missteps, misrecognitions! Your tea is our dinner, and our dinner and supper move into realms un- known, different mealings altogether. My people say hi there! to your people! It is a necessary resistance against mourning and weeping and wailing and leaving and departing and saying good-byes; it retains the character of the interstice, the presence of capital, life beneath the signifier. One must always know whom one is reading, to whom one is speaking, sleeping with; what does it mean to sleep with a lover, a friend, the enemy? Resistance is always here a form of love; resisting Australia is to return with eyes wide open and apart to American pathos, pathology, paths. They'll cut the forests down here too, return the homed to the homeless, fast-foward disintegrate. I could be on the slide on the way down, the stairs on the way up. I could be with you beneath the wallaroo or kangabee tree. I couldn't find my way out of a Sydney suburb. You can gather I'm nowhere, that the Net cuts through my chest like one of Lingis' dismemberments. Whatever's burned in there is unreadable; so much for the signifier. It's not significant anyway; it just hurts, all those scars and bandages. Sometimes I have no idea where they came from, or even if they're busy reciting history of sorts. Like everything else, they resist reading. Like everything else, antipodean. ___________________________________________________________________________ JENENENENENENENNENENENENENENNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN! damn laglaglaglaglagljdlfljeroiewrlkjwerwe what's an occurrence, no eyes, there's something blocking the light, position or think of the screen as lagged, fissured, in order that I'm drawn back to the memory of the word; that's it; it continues; it's behind me; it's a shadow; it's red or raw; it's on my trail; it spells my end; it's a continuation; it's nothing at all; remember me, godamndmaandmamaamdmdmdmdmdmadnamndamnd Jennifer, remember what I did with you, remember what you did to me - there were always two of us, sometimes more; there was always a dance; there was always fun in the bushes, your breast filled my mouth - remember me Jennifer or ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss you'll kill me; if you forget the hairs on my nipples, my great frog eyes opened wide at the world - if you forget all that I did for you, all that you let me do to you - if you lag behind or move ahead, lksjdflksdfoiewrljwrwer caching the body, circumscribing it - you'd never know that I'd disappear down in the cracks, that jkjkjkjjjjkjjlklllll I'd trickle through the wood like forced mercury - you took me, Jennifer, you took me and made me beg for your time for your liquid, don't forget your begging as well, eyes opened wide, and they weren't opened at the world, sucking me in, taking me taking fuckfuckfuckfucklkjdsflksdureiuere you, you took my name - you took my skin, sutured my mind to your own - don't forget the crease in my penis, the patterns in the soles of my feet, my large lips peeling layers upon layers back sdfjkldfiuerjerwkjlrewroiusdfllllkljdsfur787878787787&*& for the beautiful clothing of the world, for all the beautiful clothing - what's an occurrence when I can't read you, can't see you - when memory slams through lag - when I'm isolated her _______________________________________________ what can i say but i'm impossible to live with, be around for any length of time; i don't know whether i'm coming or going; i have a destructive relationship to authority as well, don't know my own boundaries; when depression hits it takes me over and any relationship i'm in at the time; i can't see beyond it; i drive people away with it; it's a form of death for me; i can't get beyond the motive; the chemicals rise with uncanny precision; i'm caught there in the headlights; they burn forever; they don't go away; they're a combination torture chamber(lights on) and cauterization; the mark the boundaries, extend the boundaries, until there aren't any; until the real is flooded; until existence becomes insomniac; they continue within the manifold, stain the manifold; the manifold decays; there are holes in it; nothing seeps out, everything seeps out, goes nowhere; there are local flows, viscous; drops swell almost to the bursting point, harden; there are reflections, distorted, among them; you'd find me there. it's like trying to think through something and finding that everything comes into play - you don't know what's hit you, what you're doing, where you are - it becomes a form of defense, a mechanism to avoid the simplicity of true and tried research - the authority and labeling that come about as a result - you keep going over and over again - you get nowhere - but you're safe behind the wall of words, whatever you can throw up - you disguise yourself, use another time, recuperate your own; you huddle in the dark with logos; i get caught at it; it devours me. eh, fuck, i can't see what i'm typing these days, the lag's got me, so it becomes something else, eh, it becomes just a form of meandering, that's about it; there's nothing else, no content to it, just wondering maybe about names, places, dates - that's all there is, it exhausts itself. so what if i give up, the fingers stop for a day or so - you'll have less of me, think of this as spam, just a reminder - i promise to try and keep the depression off like water off that duck's back which apparently never did dive anywhere - can't give you any guarantees - i'd lie if i had to - sooner or later i'll craft something beautiful again, you'll see; you'll be amazed, there won't be an error in it, alan's back to his terrific ways you'll say - for that matter you might just delete all and any of this before actually coming to the point - which this is - the point of the thing - this falling off the cliff - heard a song today about the edge of time, i remarked, to jon, i said, there isn't any of course - we're so smart in sydney! - and that's the point here, that time hasn't an edge, that it melts perfectly into the landscape of depression, an alluvial plain, talus - nothing's visible when everything is - be glad you don't know me in real life - ______________________________________________________________________________ Inversion, Decathecting (Jetlag plane notes) Cybermind and fiction-of-philosophy as generators of real-life communities. look what we did in Perth, London, Chicago, NYC, meeting... Surplus from those communities in the form of electronic communication. of course! the family projects and introjects CMC becoming the aura of bodies, then, residue, footnotes, memos. the future, translucent life-forms-media Virtuality not an issue as email lists generate physical forms, conferences. the "virtual" already inscribed, abandoned The intensity of the aura, internal and external: Internal: The presence of Web pages, archives, face-to-face. External: Private email, back-channel relationships, face-to-face. Face-to-face internal: conferences, fleshmeets. Face-to-face external: personal relationships. political economy of internal and external erection of firewalls, barriers increasing semblances of the body, codings, phonecalls, panties, semen After the conference: the list becomes less a resource than a reminder. email list as continuous follow-ups lurking as audience participation Does being _mean,_ does meaning _be,_ is being mean? ___________________________________________________________________________ Omen of Signifiers The last night I was in Sydney, I communed with an Australian possum, sim- ilar to Trichosurus fuliginosus, from a distance of 1.5m; we talked for a while, explaining things back and forth. She continually remarked I seemed alert; this "alert" constituted the first omen. >>lightning strike propitious luck Later that same night, now into morning, I motivated a fruitbat from a distance of .66m, its wings brushing my hair as it flew off startled. We hardly talked. This "hardly" constituted the second omen. >>strike out amerikkka night unluckly flair At the airport, I used a $2 coin for some well-needed candy; my "hardly alert" status was waxing towards denouement. Regretting the spending of Australia's tiniest dollar cash, I boarded the plane; at the first baggage claim (customs, SF), a $2 coin rolled down the chute, landing, rather befuddled, level with my knees on the rotary belt. Hardly rotary, my knees firmly planted on American soil, I was certain this was the third. >>bondi beach much loved broad nipple flair illumination As in Jerusalem, where comets, foxes, storms, each constituted cyclical omenic presagings or hermeneutic circles, these three omens announced one another, forwards and backwards in time; I was their term (stage, arena, theater, playing-field, body, imaginary, symbolic, erasure) of pure tran- sitivity. Caught between future and past, I began to disappear. >>lost time, your packets are waiting there; >>timed out routing error machine washed down lathered >>nipple net suckling dark spirit mouthed Every telling a foretelling, already told. _________________________________________________________________________ Research I'd like to begin a dialog, if at all possible, on the viability of re- search that is non-statistical. Other lists emphasize number-crunching projects, and it's the way for any good traditional graduate student to build up points; I've been asked to fill out surveys a number of times. On some lists, these surveys are considered the proper (read _etiquette_) model of study; they give a quasi-scientific status to the work done, allow for comparative analyses, etc. They also contain the germs of Pop- perian falsifiability, not to mention the enforcement of paradigms, both in the results and the methodology. The research that I and many postmodernists/post-structuralists (or post- post- since time is of the construct here) do is otherwise, often quasi- literary in return; it emphasizes a theoretical approach based on psycho- analytical/structural/phenomenological concerns, running somewhere among anecdotes, participant observation, and theory itself. It does not seek _fact,_ but _in fact_ problematizes facticity, or locates the factual within domains of comparatively narrow bandwidth - for example, the study of gender proportions on various media. It works through a continuous re- interpretation of states and processes, based, in part, on both personal observation/critique, and the knife of theory, cutting through/cauterizing personal investment in favor of (unverifiable) interpretive structures. There is a risk here, of too-wide bandwidth, of developing an idiolect or personal terminology that obfuscates or effaces the habitus - that words obscure the "real" flow of environment and subject, that theory becomes a method of control, that data is no longer considered relevant, that in- vestment necessarily means bias. Such a risk has to be circumscribed, al- ways acknowledged as well. I write this from a position of defensiveness, since so much traditional sociological methodology resides within _data_ at this point; while humans are entering domains which are arguably "new," these methodologies turn politically conservative and restraining. On some lists, "postmodernism" is _literally_ a dirty word, associated with huge grants (?!), unethical analysis, false or inauthentic knowledge, and "opinion" - which itself is bad if unsupported by statistical evidence. This places Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Chasseguet-Smirgel, in an odd light, not for their interstitial dialogic, but for the small or non- existent size of their samples. And it places sampling itself as inviol- able, as if MOO questionnaires can produce _everything relevant,_ in spite of the fact, for example, that there are people who will answer them, and people who won't, and now there are MOOs that refuse precisely this kind of study. There should be intellectual/academic/economic space for all forms of re- search into CMC, particularly given the relative newness and confusion associated with the field (is it even a field, domain, area, singular or plural, coherency/contingency/contiguity/multiplicity? ...). Instead, I find biases across the Net, not only in favor of the statistical, but otherwise against theory - carrying the same prejudices that now affect U.S. academia, into cyberspace. Beginning with the de Man and Heidegger affairs (singular or plural, etc.), conservatives have placed theoretical approaches and deconstruction on the defensive; the result is a one-way street reminiscent of the 1940s and 50s. The political ramifications vis-a-vis CMC are troubling, since, for example, pornography becomes a question of quantitative analysis, rather than an issue of justice, the natures of images, languages, desires, and communities, etc. I do not mean to suggest that statisticians are right-wing; that would be absurd. But their approach is defined by statistics, by an insistence that this is _the_ way to carry on research and comprehension, and such an in- sistence is also a form of control. I would argue that control of research development is, in fact, right-wing by fiat, that it is exclusionary. This bias, then, is not one of inclusivity. I think that many of us, be- yond theorists and academics, will lose in the long run. On one hand, there is the foregrounding of people like Turkle and the Krokers; on the other, there are the background manipulations by the "true" researchers and their statistical analysis. The left has always been more colorful; its very self-problematizing leads to its defeat. The rest has never been history. _______________________________________________________________________ Jet and Lag From west to east, jetlag increases its attack on the body as time com- presses and finally disappears altogether. It disappears as lather; the body remains suspended between night and day. I continually check on Perth-time, Sydney-time; they're no longer "natural." East to west, New- York-time remained evident and subsumed, easily calculated and absorbed. Expansion of time across days appears easier for the body to mediate. Compression or expansion applies to internal time consciousness, those Husserlian diagrams loosening or binding in a way he could hardly have predicted. The breathing _substances_ time; this is the ontology of the disappearing lather, held and suspended in phenomenologies of insomnia and defuge (Levinas for example). Exhausted, I rise and fall in waves, lying diagonally across the bed in space artificially heated to 28 C. Naked in 25 F winter weather, I twist as seasons cross bodies, float them in spaces-interstices; Net-like, I move among them, transformed as substance floats free. For a split-second I pass (like water, feces) the image of a falling arch. The night closes in, "various." Sleep produces nothing, emptiness; I crawl back and forth within the Nets which know no occasions. They're cylindrical, helical-hyperboloid, inter- meshed, dog-legged. I've conquered what will kill me. The image drowns. ________________________________________________________________________ i murmured this murmur murmur of this murmur's murmur, murmured wires, wires murmured, murmuring my wires, this murmured murmured wire; so that these murmured murmured wires murmured flew at me, murmured - so that these murmurings were murmured wires, murmured, flown at me or murmured world murmurs me, these murmured frozen wired, or murmured heat on me, these murmured murmured worlds, murmuring these wired murmurs, murmurings these worlding worlds, or murmuring these frozen murmurs, murmuring my wires, murmuring my murmurs, murmuring my murmurs heated worlds ________________________________________________________________________ V To Poetics list, I wrote of broken symmetry, in the midst of a discussion of Zukovsky's A, _A_, "_A_", "A", which mirrored itself in every post; there is a necessity for good postmodern punctuation, "for example,_ or even _as a matter of fact." The length of the phrase gives status to the twist engendered, cross-over between, say _italic* and *bold,_ but not granting too literal "this or any other_ point. I would in fact add the presence of the "_shunt or _"circumscription, backchannel"_ _as well," holding the comma to its prescribed task of _breathing through the line.* In a fashion similar to _"the breaking of the nose, occurring over three decades ago, *effacing" what remained, punctuation normally considered _askew" pushes the symbolic into the *real,_ with the predictable result of discomfiture, defuge, _the gathering of spines._ An occurrence of sym- metry,_" then, seems overly cautious, the _insertion of the shifter" in or within hegemonic space: *_a lie," in other words. *It lies in these or other words.* The universal broken symmetry of the K meson rises to the foregrounding of the preference of mating organisms for "_pure pattern; this is the remnant of that "_object a, lure or masquerade, from which there is no "re-turn- ing._ _____________________________________------------------------------------ the pile ending in negation This is for you and you and you and you and you and you and you, or this is for you(1) and you(2) and you(3) and you(4) and you(5), or this is for Jennifer and Clara and Tiffany and Honey and Travis, or this is for David Hannigan and Paula Davidson and Jerry Everard, or this is for Madonna and Sam Donaldson and Chuck Berry and Cher, or this is for Wolfgang Goethe and Wolfgang Mozart and Heinrich Heine, or this is for him and her and her and her and him and him and her, or this is for you(5) and you(10) and you(15) and you(20) and you(25), or this is for unicorns and faery-folk and trolls and earth-gremlins, or this is for artists and scientists and plain folk and cyberfolk, or this is for PNGers and East Timorese and Lebanese and Rwandans, or this is for Rwandans and Americans and South Africans and Tahitians, or this is for FOP-lers and Cyberminders and E-confers and Imagers, or this is for MUDders and MOOers and talkerers and IRCers and CuSeeMeers, or this is for Native Peoples and Native Americans and Aboriginal Peoples, or this is for Australians and Canadians and New Zealanders and Americans, or this is for tribes and city-states and nation-states and enclaves, or this is for territories and cyberspaces and mind-states and conscience, or this is for hippies and greens and ferals and punks and hackers, or this is for you(1) and you(1) and you(1) and you(1) and you(1), or this is for them and them and them and them and them and them and them, or this is for you and your children and their descendents and ancestors, or this is for Jennifer and Jennifer-Hillary and Jennifery-Katherine, or this is for the public and public privacy and public private public, or this is for habitus and environment and surround and home and homeland, or this is for stage and theater and arena and domain and circumscription, or this is for 23948, 58934023, 4098843, 23455, 2099884, 5839, and 342398, or this is for me and myself and mine and I and mine only and all of me, or this is for no one and nothing and nobody and none whatsoever and not "What is written never has a 'public.'" (Sylviane Agacinski) __________________________________________________________________________ Future Twenty years into the future, these lists will most likely be discontinued and forgotten; email will have given way to multimedia, and most partici- pants will be elsewhere in the midst of global chaos. Consider enclaves of users, protected computers / encryption groups, information warfare which will really be entertainment warfare, the complex real reduced to nanotech sloganeering. Discussion will proceed as deadly as now, as repetitive; no one on-line will comprehend the binding of elsewhere-peoples. These are moments of rhizomatic condensation, lines-of-flight sutured into Borromean knots, impermanent subjectivities woven out of clotted postings. Just as psychoanalytics or trigonometry have no advancement, so philosophy dies always already unencumbered, which is its definition - philosophy as the study of inconsequentiality, art its domain. Twenty years into the future, our faces will be blasted off at the roots; alterity will be a condensation, the other already an over-determination. What dies, stops dying. _________________________________________________________________________ *Cookie X_ *Welcome to Cookie X_ *Cookie X is designed to collect information from you, the subscriber to this email list _^_ for the purposes of data storage and retrieval. 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I have been thinking about the paintings of Juan Davila for some time now, an Australian/Chilean painter of the '80s who used pop imagery and the proper name, vis-a-vis Lacanian/Freudian theory, as a way of exploring is- sues of identity, gender, and colonialism. His works present the spectre of continuous deferment, exploding the interpenetration of media, body, and community - one of the few instances in contemporary painting of theo- ry worked through image. The theory explodes into the residue of signs and systems which remain in- choate, discomforting, beneath or elsewhere than language. There are im- plications for Net communities and virtual bodies; the real in Davila is always already virtual vis-a-vis the spectacular body, an inversion of cyberbodies which begin with virtuality, producing the specular body. There are small books and pamphlets published on Davila's work as well as numerous reproductions; his _Stupid as a Painter,_ a work around eight meters long, is a culmination of sorts. Identified with Imants Tillers as well, both employing appropriation/deconstructive strategies, he cuts closer to the political bone; Tillers cuts closer to the eyes. What is the name connected to an image from _elsewhere,_ like America? Nelly Richard writes: "But Davila's expression of the interdiscursive function of painting in his explicit reference to a list of authors, whose work he transforms by making them interact with each other, collectivises the space of the signature. Here the name of the author is only one amon- gst many, in a series that includes preceding and contemporary authors: the field of competence Davila inscribes in his practice." Again, "The whole process of quotation implies the forging of an unfore- seeable unity, from the various statements and fragments of a decomposed unity, into a new field of enunciation. In the passage from one material- ity to another, in the translation of one support to another, new contex- tual pressures are applied to the quoted statement in question, whose con- tours are redefined and whose meaning is re-oriented in a new and unpre- cedented fashion." (Richard, 1985, Selections from 'Love in Quotes' in Butler, What is Appropriation, An Anthology of Critical Writings on Aus- tralian Art in the '80s and '90s.) Davila comments elsewhere (Paper Burns) on normative painting: "The pic- ture reinforces the idealistic and illusory elements that deny the mat- erial links between the subject and the social totality. Painting corres- ponds to the need of a community to consume its own image in a safe ges- ture." This _safe gesture_ or reinforcement is one vertex of a triad which includes series/insertions (deferment) and the discomfiture of psychoan- alytical debris. Net community occurs within self-devouring of the symbol- ic; continuous deferment and quotation; and irruption/suturing. Against these operations, identity and habitus/socius play themselves out. There is the sign of capital; there is an/other sign of hegemony: the two fuck, are identical. Gender splays, collapses; everyone, everything is out. What world remains crashes against ideological constructions. Beneath these surfaces, the imaginary/revolution in poetic language. Dav- ila: "We are faced again with the renunciation of a concept of history." The artworld (today) is equivalent to Websurfing. What upwells, re: chth- onic, is elsewhere, darknet. Davila's paintings are interstitial and where else does image do so good a job in the psycho/analysis of text-driven virtual worlds? ___________________________________________________________________________ Rim (I recognize the misrecognition in the following; the truth is only a grain here but the spec/tacle clarifies what might become a momentary immuring of vision.) Back again; in Canada's ongoing discussion of identity, Wilden's The Imag- inary Canadian, with its different French and English editions, played a role - think of this as Lacanian hegemony, or consider the black power hegemony exercised in Quebecois parti pris rhetoric. Identities are shored up - look at Quebec's language law 101 - past all privation - anything to prevent leakage, erosion, proving only once again that boundaries are por- ous and that identity itself exists within a potential well as construct. Only in US doxa does identity become essentialism; one is born in the USA, born an American, better dead than red, love it or leave it, blahblahblah. We're responsible for the fall of communism, we're the greatest country on earth, we're the last remaining superpower, we're the greatest country on earth because of God's bounty, blahblahblah. Frontiers have been our forte and it's been pointed out that the continued mobility of the American frontier, east to west, world-wide, outer-space, gives the illusion of do- minion, imagination stretched without boundary - Canada's always been hindered by permafrost - you can go just so far North, Australia by the desert interior and totalizing shores. Canada and Australia have had cultural-identity industries, self-critique; the US, by and large, has not. Canada and Australia play directly into constructivist cyberspatial concerns; the US exerts hegemony. Warhol's simulacrum implies a ruined transcendence; Davila's quotation of Warhol emphasizes linking, colonization and endocolonization (Virilio), break- down. In cyberspace, identity is unstable, shifting, partly under the subject's control, partly lagged/frozen/inundated; in cyberspace, identity is a con- tinuity of declaration/protocol. Where does identity go? How does the sub- ject _dip_ into cyberspace, and into which medium, which protocol suite, which application? The questions reflect answers in the form of hegemony and the imaginary; cyberspace and CMC _leak,_ just as the nation-state leaks, is inherently unstable, etc. We need these dialogs on the frontiers of ruined empire; it's here that languages are born, the center assailed, methodologies deconstructed. So it's ironic that theory is produced by and large from countries of the center, when the theory that's needed, desired, enactable, can only come from the periphery, where the grounds are shaken out, where the center is revealed as a classically-historical dead-zone. The conclusion - never to return to the source: it's a hole in the ground. (Or break it open, even from the center: rim-job.) _________________________________________________________________________ Christine, I had a dream that we were driving through Tonides and in Tonides we almost divided against the fast car, that Tonides was a why, McCarthy formalism, that if Tonides, then _come_ else _go,_ or that if Tonides, everything's beautiful and in this Tonides dream, I asked only "whose decision," for Tonides' beautiful impunity, where there were spined and other plants to wear brown aureoles upon the brow, the hair, the shirt, the oracular arm for luck of whatever sort Tonides might bring, for luck of whatever sort Tonides might bring. __________________________________________________________________________ #!/usr/local/bin/perl # Memo Program for Shell Account $| = 1; print "\n\aThese are your current messages:\n"; print `cat message`; print "Would you like to remove current message list?\n"; chop($str=); %zing = ("y", "yes", "sure", "yes", "of course", "yes", "yes", "yes"); foreach $key (@keys = %zing) { if ($str eq $key) {print "We're now erasing.\n"; `rm message`;}} print "Would you like to add to current message list?\n"; chop($str=); foreach $key (@keys = %zing) { if ($str eq $key) {print "Add new lines now.\n"; print "Use carriage return at the end of each line, use ^d to end.\n"; open(APPEND, ">> message"); @text=; print APPEND @text; close APPEND;}} exit(0); ________________________________________________________________________ Telephony Who were you that called in at three-thirty in the morning, hanging up just before I reached the phone, calling again at three-fifty, locking the lock, throwing away the key? I had no recourse; I turned the telephone back on (it was the phantom clicking of the answering-machine that woke me up), waiting patiently, staring at the LED signifying orange desire, emptiness, your absence inside me. These traces play lightning havoc at all times, day or night; they enter and leave the realm of pure sound. Who are you, that tolls and toils for me, vectors me, dangles me just beyond reach? I imagine you thickened with clusters of organs, organelles; they search networks for the simulacrum of presence, extol the net for vacuum and unmentionables. They pleasure you with the absence of answers. Could I have called myself forth like torn tissue from your cunt, blood- stream from your cock, cells burst into oxygenated air, I would have done so, curled in the process of death's afterbirth. Could I have clothed the _you,_ scarred orifice into the semblance of being, or could I have ex- truded this viscous flesh into partitions, cracks, body's ligatures, I would have done so. Nor do I know, now, whether your absence is my own. For who are you to unravel the membrane of dreams with technology's per- sistent click, violation fabric of welcome and masquerade? You turn away from the door, leaving your bloody prints; my tongue licks the clotted blood from handle and hinge alike. Metals become me in the absence of your flesh. Your absence inside me, pleasuring you with the absence of answers, be- comes my abscess in your flesh's absence. But I lie for the pleasure of the text and writing's (re)capitulation, spreading my hole for the sound of your voice. O needy One, protect me as _this machine_ devours tele- phony; typing, I'm safe from your maledictions. A clear line is a danger- ous one; you live to stab me again. My nipple bleeds and milks. From a distance you drink me, distend my breasts. I've not heard from you yet; I've never heard from you. In Medea res. _________________________________________________________________________ time { Time Stuffs Itself {k:31} time 0.00s real 0.00s user 0.00s system {k:32} time (time) 0.01s real 0.00s user 0.03s system {k:33} time (time (time)) 0.01s real 0.01s user 0.01s system {k:34} time (time (time (time))) 0.01s real 0.00s user 0.01s system {k:35} time (time (time (time (time (time (time (time))))))) 0.03s real 0.01s user 0.01s system } 5.28s real 0.01s user 0.05s system ________________________________________________________________________ Two Meditations aging, dying: you don't need to do it well; you sense there's a mystery to it all; it's not that complicated - it's clear that something is amiss, that something's not quite right; there's a shadow under the door, you sense that strings are being pulled; that a great vortex is behind every- thing and you've known this vortex since you were born; that events pack themselves in layers and there are too many of them; that landscapes exist just behind the eyes tightly-closed, whole worlds of images; and you don't know the source or limit of it, you don't know the parallel paths or metal sullen skies or marbled grounds; it's just something you sense like you sense food in a kitchen down the road, the curtains drawn at dusk and the car back warm in the driveway; it's there, you await it; you know and nev- er know; you'll know and never know. drowning in immensity: lost plasmas devour worlds; destabilizing comets roar in near the speed of light; vast releases of volcanic ashes plummet down on unsuspecting earth; seaplumes rise from vast depths; ultraviolet light sears cellular membranes and cancers reign everywhere on the dying planet; earthquakes reel in cities and tombs alike; asteroids disrupt all that is known and familiar; the seas boil, earth headlong flies towards sun's corona; the enormity of neutron stars disrupt mountains and valleys with inconceivable tidal forces; black holes destroy whole civilizations; human masses coalesce into substances gone with carbon and oxygen; hydro- gen and helium freeze with the corruption of eternal night; bodies are blasted past the staining of rocks eroded into noctiluminescent dusts; radiations seethe across sintered continents, distraught oceans; every- thing slides into viscous waste, white dwarfs down cold, planets slammed into incomprehension, millimeter mountains shuddered to a halt. ________________________________________________________________________ Cutting Time My computer menu counts down in seconds; in one direction, full access, and in the other, the DOS lpmud I rewrote. At three seconds, I hit enter, cutting the last three (02 01 00) dyads; they're gone. What is the "they" that awaits another turn at booting up? Instructions lend themselves to surface interpretations; what occurs on the surface is assumed "count down" by human operators. The pixeled numbers are striated by canyons de- marcating boundaries; an interrupt has halted the appearance of these configurations. I offer the possibility that time has split, opened up, as in Hugh Everett III's top-down deterministic quantum mechanics, and that the three dyads have fallen through, clattered elsewhere in other universes, suturing this one shut. What has created this suturing? The presence of consciousness, which has chosen, I have chosen, neural networks streaming precipitously, to act in a particular manner (hitting the return key), motivating matter to carry on the specificity of cutting through the count. It's a physical act that transforms time, speeds the machine into another world, where it parallels this one, a few seconds behind or ahead. For this reason, I assume that I am simultaneously ahead and behind myself - but not in such a fashion (as) that _it averages out._ Time flickers about me, incandescent flames barely visible in the day, burning brightly throughout the sullen night. This is the truth, although the many-worlds theory surely is not. Cutting through the countdown, I literally _see_ time and time's glow and decay; my body's embers churn with it. On the streets, I see time's vast conflag- ration; there is little separation between the self and the cinder, be- tween memory and bodies charred by fire. This is the truth, although the single-world theory surely is not. Cutting through the countdown, I literally _hear_ time and time's toll and decay; my bones resonate, churn with it. On the streets, I hear time's vast mur- mur; there is little separation between the self and harmony, between mem- ory and bodies sung and twisted by waves of burning sound. __________________________________________________________________________