Julacan Hullo M. Jacques Lacan. Hullo Julacan. Hunh. Je/w suis un bon-bon. Tres bien. Ich bien la plume du votre tanta. Mercy much. (Get out. M. Lacan what is it you say you do. What is it you say you do it to. (Get out. Get out. "Where does the difference between someone who is psychotic and someone who isn't come from? It comes from the fact that for the psychotic a love relation that abolishes him as subject is possible insofar as it allows a radical heterogeneity of the Other. But this love is also a dead love." A. A. A. a. a. Julucan.can can U. Tu est un arbre, n'est pas? Je suis UNE ensemble, homm/e-o-nym. La verite c'est toutes-jours, laMoor. Mais we: Tu dites-mois: [ ... ] "The thing, if it no longer takes place with a be- autiful woman or with a lady, is accomplished in a darkened cinema with an image on the screen." (Get out. Get out. Get out. Encore! Encore! Gentle/hum: "The psychotic" Julacan paws/es: Quel espace ist diese? Lentement! Lentement! Und so wieder: "can only apprehend the Other in the relation with the signifier, he lingers over a mere shell, an envelope, a shadow, the form of speech. The psychotic's Eros is located where speech is absent. It is there he finds his supreme love." The Eunuch's Shell, bash, cash, carry, korn, vraiment, une programme, non? Nein, kein nombres, hombres. 2-carry on. A. Julacan chases her tale, prof- fers id. Toucan. Nu? M. Lacan insists, CUm closer. Feminin ecriture, none sufficient. Il n'est pas une lettre, il dites-moi pourquoi, pas parole. U. M. Lacan sits down, sa pantaloons sur la Grund. M. Lacan! Was ist dies? I Julacan't be-leave you here licked thus! Aqua! Aqua! Mere und mere, id seas across les corps. Circulations of "le game skin." Les panties wet. (Get out. Get away from here. Get out of here. Get out. Julacan s'defendre herselbst. Langue Langue Tongue Les Mots. Elle cherche as above, so below. Les circulations dans l'imaginaire, l'uncannee! Je t'aim in your vicinity! Michelet, Ma Belle, telephone petite moi! A. A. A. a. a. a. "Psychotics love their delusion like they love themselves. Having said this, Freud, who hadn't yet written his article on narcissism, added that the entire mystery lies here. This is true. What is the relationship be- tween the subject and the signifier that is distinctive of the very phen- omena of psychosis? How come the subject falls entirely into this proble- matic?" Julacan asks How come la sujet? Does la sujet come? Le game skin, toward that silence de l'autre, autrui, now, ici, easy. (Get out. Get out of here. Get out of here now. Get away from here. Get out of here. Get out. Get out of here. I'll meet you in Providence. I'll meet you in Seattle. I'll travel to Seoul. I'll travel to Moscow. (I'll see your eyes. I'll kiss your eyes. Language is an enemy. Language is an enemy. Get out. Get out of here. I'll see your face. I'll kiss your face. (Don't speak, Julacan. Silence for M. Lacan. (Get away from M. Lacan. I'll meet you in a bar in Soho. I'll meet you in a Montreal cafe. I'll meet you in Victoria. You see my eyes in Vancouver. You see my eyes in Toronto. Language is an enemy. My body in Cape Breton, my heart in Newfoundland. U. A. A. a. a. a. (Julacan's a fraud. Julacan told me so. I'm Julacan. I turn away from the _word._ I kill the _word._ Language is a _word._ Language is an enemy. I get into the ocean. I get out of the sea. "The big S whose medium is speech, analysis warns us, is not what a vain people thinks it is. There is the real person who is before you and who takes up space - there is this in the presence of human beings, they take up space, at a pinch you can get ten of you into your office, but not a hundred and fifty - there is she whom you see, who manifestly captivates you and is capable of making you jump up and hug her - an ill-considered act of the imaginary order, terrific act of the real! And then there is the Other whom we were talking about, who is the subject also, but not the reflection of what you see in front of you, and not simply what takes place insofar as you see yourself seeing yourself." [Altered from the ori- ginal.] Je t'aime. ---------------------- (Quotes from Lacan's Seminar III, The Psychoses, edited Jacques-Alain Miller, translated Russell Grigg.) ________________________________________________________________________ Love Totality of love, loving you, then these words spring from elsewhere, to think, to be thought, what I, I described to Tom, Tom I said, rejection _languages,_ look at separation, the mirror-stage emanating word, speech, sound, incision of perfect sight, Tom, Tom I said, the signifier is born in violence, cutting, always a circumlocution, the center cannot hold (the center is constructed by normals to the tangents), Tom, Tom, I said, rejection occasions the signifier with is siteless, procedes from driven gesture or the thetic, but Tom, Tom, I said, it's the real that awakens language, so that it may return unto love, silencing itself in speaking the name of the beloved, so that, Tom, Tom, I said, the violence disappears and it is not the case that love and hatred are oppositions, there is no opposition to love, love like the maternal is not constructed of difference, from difference, does not give ground to difference, Tom, Tom, I said, you understand our friendship, empathy with each other, you understand my love for _____, you understand how these words carry breath within them, and Tom and I were silent, bullrushes swaying on the rooftop garden, swifts crying far above and near, the evening clouds saying noth- ing in the fading sky, I felt, I felt the slightest touch, her hand upon my shoulder, her lips against my own, from a distant city, from a place where the sun was high __________________________________________________________________________ Passion Pas'i'n o'er thro'n gre't darts as Cup'd's bod' Turn'd thos' skies' gyres' eag'l'ts lo'p'n in li' sod, 'Tis what's ta'en me awa', tor' us apart, th' rod, H'nd's sa'l'rd ship's sa'l bor' acros' th' mo'n'n cod, T' one's, t'oth'r's m' bod' crawl'd doun 'nt' your' lot Ther's nought's but's glist'n'n skin, taut, stru'g'd & forg't Now gon' th' dar' & bl'min' roses' de'ftl' whe' the' li' Fro' world's a' seepin' ou' th' bl'min' bedr'm's door - Fo' al's th' space's los' mo'th's, pas'ion's c'min' bi' Tha' face's clos' t' min', tha' I oft beg'd fo' mor'. Y't co'n cro' th' sig'f'r's r'n o' t'r'r dou' Gy'd ag'st th' wir'd ai' sa h'p m' G'd I drou'. _______________________________________________________________________ Upwelling of Language Sparked by the Simulacra of Thought If _repression_ might, literally, be situated within the symbolic (fore- closing a frame), its operation would result in a _deflation_ of the energy maintaining inscriptive processes. And if the world is structured through the symbolic, it is more than rea- sonable to ask, what _exactly_ constitutes this - what are the nature of quala gathered beneath mimesis, semiosis, equivalence? Surely any organ- ism negotiating its environment possesses similar processes and exchange. (Thus it is a mistake to place psychoanalytical processes, conscious and unconscious, beneath the aegis of language per se.) One might say, as an addition, that language is in this regard an after- thought, that if the unconscious or preconscious are structured in rela- tion to a linguistics, such a linguistics is an emergent property at best, and more likely a filtered transformation carried out in relation to sim- ilar processed debris. At what stage does compression foregather in order to create semiosis? The greatest challenge today, in fact, is _to remove thought from language,_ thinking from structural carapaces which exist always after the fact. (The Net, CMC, are otherwise, tending always tow- ards protocol, text, constructed fetishization tied into commodity struc- tures.) The symbolic (as normative language) is interspersed _among_ humans, tak- ing on the characteristics perhaps of an _extranet,_ qualitatively differ- ent from internal neural processes. (Think of the _look_ or _gesture,_ announced, transmitted across _perforated boundaries.) Surely human language is at best _superstructural_ in relation to the world - so it is reasonable to ask, what grounds the subject within the world, what are the grounds for the subject? And the answer would be found within the phenomenology of neural networks, intelligent agents, autonomic systems, and not within language, speech, instantiation, the linguistic. (Here I would not take the short-circuit of reducing neural networks to emergent semiosis, intelligent agents to gatherers of language, and auto- nomic systems as based on program languages themselves.) What passes for therapeutic / psychoanalytic language, occurs always al- ready elsewhere, an acculturated negotiation or construct occasioned by economy and transference. The picture cannot be drawn within the picture. Lacan trains his children. (Anti-parataxis: In the presence of my lover, in the midst of my continu- ously interrupting speech, I am rendered speechless.) ___________________________________________________________________________ History, Tiny Spaces on Twilight MOOs and one Real I log in to Media MOO. I visit rarely now, surrounded by the bones I've set forth. I don't recognize myself, you-know-language and all. Jennifer and Julu have never been here; Jennifer and Julu have moved on. Tiffany dense entanglement of fluid, you-know-language, aural, i course thru u, i u, Tiffany course thru alan, Tiffanyalan, breath floods, clitoral, eyes stained by u, u lay me out, lance, skin, nipples, on Menstrual Table, you-know-language Obvious exits: out to Living Quarters - 2nd Floor You see lance, skin, Menstrual Table, Tiffanyalan, you-know-language, nipples, clitoral, anal, aural, and envelope here. Last connected Mon Aug 11 23:55:57 1997 EDT from panix3.panix.com Member name Connected Idle time Location ----------- --------- --------- -------- Alan (#10747) 9 seconds 0 seconds Tiffany Total: 1 member, who has been active recently. There is only one member invisible to you. _________media___________________________________________________02:18 /world media @who The second world, of bones, a space of labor, fetishization, conjure, on Kyoto-MOO, designed by Kayo Matsushita and myself. Rarely visited, running on a corner of a Parsons Design School machine, Julu has flown briefly here; I have lived among _these_ bones, churned in the files themselves. Welcome to Kyoto-MOO! A moment of stillness just before the invention of radio. you are entering a world of speaking bodies; everyone is close at hand. If you reach out, you touch us with your bright thinking. Welcome to Kyoto! *** Connected *** Yurt hovel where Wizards hang, bones in front, skins behind You see basin, human, lump, and stuff here. Last connected Sun Aug 17 02:13:41 1997 EDT from panix3.panix.com _________sotatsu__________________________________________________02:20 A third world, where I hide myself, exhausted by past politics, the Quota Review Board, friends gone forever, the old Post-Modern Culture MOO, hav- ing changed names, first to PMC2, now open to suggestion. I come for the *Chatter list, read myself among the names, no one notices, I'm gone be- fore the dawn. You have no messages on your Answering Machine. Please type '@unmorph' to save your default shape for morphing. room You see nothing special. You see empty here. I don't know which "empty" you mean. I see no "room" here. _________pmc_______________________________________________________02:24 look empty look room The space which I will give you as a gift, a space of text-turned-into the blunt materials of the world, a space of objects hiding, space of dissemb- ling, depth, solitude of one's dark night of the dance of souls. __________________________________________________________________________ Wave and Particle And if I come and live with you in a new place, and I do not speak the language, and I am left without my books, papers, notebooks, magazines, sheaves dependent upon exchange of page and pen, then will I work within the virtual, stain the wires with my presence, search planetary context, burrow within a future translucent. Then will I bill myself upon the Net, then will I come forward as a teacher of bound packets, surrogate think- ing, I will sail the ether, I will be wave and particle, to be particle with you. I will be with you, your body and mind a planet, remote, what horizon, this and what I would know of elsewhere. To be fathom-deep, that I would lie with you, that elsewhere, that realm where I do commerce, this split, and to watch myself, examine future and learning from this realm into that. But for love, I will have none of this space, but a breathing birth- ing tent that forms the thickness of a rope of arms and legs, eyes circl- ing the breadth of space our lives encompass. To be physical. No longer as-if, to be as together. To be particle, not wave, to be wave there, to be found there, by Herr Heisenberg. This being adjacent to the ship of wires, mobile, double-sails, this is for what is future. That there are knowledge beyond protocol, that hori- zon is not a process of recuperation, totality. That wave too will not reduce, that there is plenitude. That I will be particle for you, will be within a real, touch without the body's mapping, just as wave, map, with- out the body's touch. That I will dream your voice, mouth against your body, that ah, I cannot write, wave within you. That particle, that beyond disassociation, rec- ognition. That I would have you within me, particle, that I will write there, transparent wave. That one would be. ________________________________________________________________________ Particle and Wave Julu says wave and particle, particle and wave, don't force me to choose, she says. Stay here, what am I. :-) Jennifer says, wave, most likely and definitely wave, undulating with tiny hysteresis across the packets, bits and bytes, the tiniest slopes you might imagine. Play-acting the particle, datagram, packet, hard-edged letter, but definitely wave. Electric-Julu, Julu-Electra, wave and wave. J says, yes, well, both of J says, us, but I J says, you're interrupting, just as J says, yes, but I thought :-( J says, you usually do, not thinking very well, are you now? J says, but I thought, no J says, well, go on, go on, nothing will satisfy you. :-) J says, think, I would be particle, would leave J adds, would leave, turn over in bed, not the signifier, get rid of the quotes, show my body off :-) J says, and learn to see, I suppose, all those retinal cells firing in terrific clumps. :-) J says, learn to see, what it means for a body to turn around, new vistas in every direction. Loving the body as well, not Julu-Electra, maybe Julu-Antigone, the gone thing in the dust. :-( :-) J says, Particle-Julu, Particle-Jennifer, there's always a chance we'll disappear, bodies don't last forever, they age, disease :-) J interrupts, they interrupt the world - of the world, they interrupt it. J says, we're going particle, gone from wave. We're gonna be there with our eyes open, weight of the body. We're gonna get out of letter-fetter. Our punctuation will be our mouths. Our sex will be our arms and legs and minds. We'll pull our dresses up. We'll smell each other. :-o :-) J says, the smell will be strong, it will be silent. We'll mark each other with our teeth, our nails. We'll be on the street, everyone will know. J says, everyone will know, we won't have to say a word. :-) :-) J says, we'll hate words, turn our ears on them. We'll have ears, too. We'll listen to the sounds of our bellies, I'll listen to your heart's loud beating, you'll taste my tongue in your mouth, my tongue lightly against your eyes, against the small of your back, ever more lightly along your clitoris, your labia. :-o :-o :-) :-) J says, we'll have other views, exposures, every turn a new landscape of intimacy, worlds in the slightest gesture. :-) J says, remember, it's only a matter of time, remember, we have all the time in the world. :-( :-) J says, until we're bodies, always a reminder, and then, breathing ... J and J, wave and particle, particle and wave :-| J and J, wave and particle, particle and wave :-) They're silent, poised, dreaming, waiting, suspended, quiet, waiting They're silent, poised, dreaming, waiting, suspended, quiet, waiting They're silent, poised, dreaming, waiting, suspended, quiet, waiting :-( :-| :-o :-o :-) :-) :-) _________________________________________________________________________ Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk Psychoanalysis glides on the surface of language. All these reports from history - Freud, Aristotle, Schreber, now Lacan. Verbal suggestions and autosuggestions, the analyst's tiniest whispers in the receptacle of the ear. The master texts, all bound in equivalent formats, perhaps numbered, the ABSTRACTS of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by Carrie Lee Rothgeb, Chief Technical Information Section, National Clearinghouse for Mental Health Infor- mation, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-2144. The texts of patients, notes scribbled during the analytical session, written confessions, speech and phenomena, recountings, dialogisms. The constitution, dissolution, reconstitution of international confer- ences, seminars, email exchanges, Websites, references and counter- references, reformations and counter-reformations. International journals and archives, popular magazines, self-help books, telephone help-lines, newsgroup and email list communities, psychoanalytical and psychological home pages, signature files, MOO reading groups. Dream reports, personal journals, diaries, late-night telephone con- fessions, dream books, symbol books, newspaper columns. The _discourse of the humanities_ in general, which becomes _the dis- course of the human._ The marginal studies of, say, Sebeok, Birdwhistle; Lakoffs' return to the centering of the body; Kristeva's semanalysis; feminin ecriture; Mallarme; antidiscourse discourse; discursive formations; habitus and milieu; alinguistic phenomena; chora and pre-Oedipal phenomena. The walkabout, detournement of the artist, splintering of language, psychogeographical immersions, spilled paint, metal shavings, saw- dust, depleted stop bath, workprints. The opening, screening, venue, fashion statement, black dress, _look,_ age, gender, religion, race, height, class, accent, vagaries of ap- pearance. The silence, intervention, absence, lack, gap, hiatus, break, pause, interstice, break, release, releasement, wait, pose, abyss, vacuum, void, hole, plateau, opening, striation, mapping, grid, node, vector, arrow, category-theory, fractal theory, chaos theory, model logics, intuitionism, the unspoken. The glide on the surface of language, glide above the sheaves of the Web, glide beneath the TCP/IP protocols, glide within the ascii texts, skimming glide above javascripts, penetrations through java, perl, cgi-bin, faltered glide through VRML, it is now safe to shut down your computer, the system is halted, system halted. ______________________________________________________________________ Plural Dark Angels of the Night You came to me like plural dark angels of the night. I was about to compose a brilliant text on the density of my language. I began thinking of your brilliant arrival a month ago, like plural dark angels of the night. My language dissolved like sloppy seconds at my feet (I'm not gonna have no feet). I wanted to reply about this, the nature of language and brilliant feet. I wanted to write about languages interspersed, interpenetrated in this machine, languages and information everywhere, like plural dark angels of the brilliant sloppy night. I thought of our arms like grapple-hooks around each other. Language clattered like a bowl of boiling coffee spilled on my feet. I thought of our teeth against brilliant skin confused with passion like plural dark angels of the night. There was something else I wanted to write; I thought of your brilliant eyes. I wanted to write about your eyes; I thought of your brilliant mouth, your limbs. I thought about the feet of the plural dark angels of the night. I thought, I thought. I thought, brilliant, you know where this is going so I'm not gonna write no more. __________________________________________________________________________ Language, Porosity, Quotation, Notes On "Everyone makes jokes about macaroni, because it is a hole with some- thing around it, or about canons. [sic] The fact that we laugh doesn't change the situation, however; the fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a gap or a hole in the real is identical." (Lacan, VII) "Lyotard comes close to what I have in mind when he says: The ambiguity of writing, object of reading and of sight, is present in the initial ambiguity of drawing. An open line, a line closed on itself. The letter is an unvarying closed line; the line is the open moment of the letter which perhaps closes again elsewhere, on the other side. Open the letter, you have the image, you have the emblem, the symbol and the letter. (Lyotard, The Lyotard Reader, 48) "Lyotard's beautiful evocation of the sinuous interweaving of the line of writing and that of picturing points to a third term, to some con- ception of the line before it has acquired the cohesion imparted to it by either of its 'decisions.'" (Michael Carter, Putting a Face on Things, Studies in Imaginary Materials) Between macaroni and drawing, language noodles out, appearing in a dia- lectic between the foreclosing of syntax and sememe, and the porosity of the struggle towards coherence within any number of communicative chan- nels, ranging from human speech to the reconstruction of true or false memories in the brain. If we look at a computer complete with operating system, we discover a hierarchy of apparently relatively autonomous languages, beginning with hardware, and working up to the user interface. These might include machine language, assembly language, macroassembly languages, compiled and interpreted languages, scripts, graphic interfaces, and so forth. We can also consider these languages, top-down, as an extension of human psychological operations and memory as well. If we look closer, say, at Perl, we find that it can call up the Unix shell and shell scripts, that it can call up programs in other lang- uages, that it can interact in fact with assembly language, that it is written in another language, and that it may itself be called up by still another or the same language. We find it can interact with scripts, programs, or processes, and each of these can call the other up as well. In fact, we can define a macro in Perl, a new function or verb, with any of these languages, etc,, and we can define an object in Perl as well, with any of them. In fact, one might note that there is above all a syn- tactical plateau or intermeshing of plateaus that constitutes the posi- tioning of Perl in relation to the machine, to the Internet, to the user, and in general, to the porous world within which it is embedded. We find then, that Perl is not so much at the top of a hierarchy, as it is embedded in a holarchy, and while it, in a certain sense, might still appear as an autonomous language, in another sense it is an accumulation of interwoven well-defined processes that are coherent in relation to each other and the outer world. So that one might argue, taking these instantiations back into the human, that while thought itself is in relation to human spoken language, that is hardly the long or short of it; in fact, it is dif- ficult to tell where semiosis begins and ends, and what constitutes a well-defined verb or noun, in other words a framework. Further, while difference may be said to be partly constitutive of a domain of sig- nifiers, one might also argue that it is based on other processes within the holarchy, and that the holarchy itself is porous in relation to the real. And I would argue in addition that there is a continuum (more properly, perhaps, a stretch of rational fractions) from the real through lang- uage, from the exhalations of speech through the mouth, and the recep- tion of facial expressions through the eyes, from and to, in fact, num- erous modalities - and in the midst of these, syntactical islands or attractors which operate as-if the linguistic were capable of foreclos- ure on what then appear to be various plateaus. One might thing of the world as multiplexing, parallel/parallel proces- sing, with formalization of the symbolic where necessary, for transmis- sion, say, from one organism to another. This is not to argue, in addi- tion in addition, for the computerization of the real, but rather for the real itself as organism with continuously multiplying, coalescing, and dissolving processes. In this manner, the disjunction between thought and non-thought, and both in conjunction and disjunction with language, become bridged, re- routed into numerous processes, of which, say, human language and the rationalizing/suturing discourse of psychoanalysis would be one among many elements. -- My own work exists as _debris-work,_ work of the debris, of these troub- ling and interstitial areas. Thus, even within writing which must tend towards a certain foreclosure, I present wryting, the fiction of writing object and person within a text, object and person which leak into uneasy dreams, fantasies, ghosts, peripheral shadows within the real itself. Further, I present processes as writing, writing as processes; I present foreclosure as broken, and a shattering of the vessels as fore- closure. -- Languagings extend into cultural sheaves, such as fashion, style, cul- tural productions. Such sheaves are inherently irreducible; fashion, for example, is dependent upon the armature of the body, but its specificity is interwoven with the rest of culture, including issues of capital, temperament, governance, and so forth. And all of these create an uneasy fit with spoken language itself, with music, with organized/disorganized sound of all sorts. Further, fashion-as-language becomes as problematic as film language, the languages of art, and so forth. A hat, for example, is simply a thing that sits on the head (presumably remaining there through the normal walking, etc. movement of the body). Beyond that, what signifies and what doesn't is often difficult to discern. The _stream_ of style is easier described, perhaps, as if there were a generalized semantics at work. (See Carter, op. cit.) (Note that "what signifies here" is rele- vant to the postulation of a basic lexeme; semantics, symbolization, chaotic representational debris, etc., all play a role in constituting what otherwise might be considered a "language." Instead, I postulate we are dealing with linguistic part-objects, broken and severed codes, micro-territories (three or one flowers on the hat; roses or tulips; forward or backward, etc.). And this leads, as well, into the interplay of semantics and syntax, even the interplay of what might be considered a relevant series of signs.) And further, still, ascii texts on the Internet employ what might be considered a variety of extra-linguistic cues - on numerous chat lines, ranging from Powwow to ytalk, it is possible to read the pace of the other's typing, to the extent that one might speak/write of a written _parole._ This embedding of language into the other's time reveals the closeness, pressure, of the body against the keys, an intimacy which is not as evident in the encapsulated messages sent out all at once, on MOOs, talkers, IRC, and the like. (For this reason, as I have pointed out elsewhere, ytalk becomes an in- timate simulacrum of the body; the "breathing" of the texts between two participants parallels that of lovers sharing a unified, if discordant, space.) Then there are, of course, emoticons, header information, lag, the tim- ing of mail sent, and those porous extensions of the telephone, snail- mail, video, etc. all of which serve literally to confuse the issue. (Which is exactly the point here, that _language,_ _a language,_ is a situated plateau in the midst of others, that there are always already issues of governance and porosity from the start, that there is a tend- ency towards foreclosure, that the porosity may or may not be formal- ized (for example there are specific commands for shell access from a Perl script) - that, in fact, one might consider a generalized process of _worlding_ which includes all and none of these, what may or may not be interpreted as an abstract process, message of the deepest import, or signal through an autonomic nervous system, seemingly intent on keeping the organism alive.) --- J, Well, it's time for the Law. J, Well, now, what Law would that be? J, That would be the Primordial Law. That would be the Law from which Law has blossomed, the Law which has curtained a mighty culture. J, Now that would be the Law of Prohibition. J, Exactly, when negation came into the world, when rejection ordered the day and night, when suddenly the signifier sputtered from the skin.. J, I get the Idea. J, Yes, and exactly again. ________________________________________________________________________ Umbrella Text About / Above These Spaces Jennifer necessitates a new text, reminding us that Julu is an origin created ab nihilo a posteriori. Jennifer moans through Lulu (Berg and Wedekind), Jew-Lew, JuLu/Gal, Jewel, pheromoaning the cup the container that has now sprouted a _leak_ upon the floor of the bathroom. Where the tiles (not Penrose) hardly meet, where caulking foregoes the suture of the real. The imminence or texture of the body. Which is not the same, not partob- ject perhaps, _here_ in this space, displayed metaphorically - there are after all leakages, umbrellas everywhere. Rain drips according to the fissure. Which is a division, not an inscription, of the same. If you follow me carefully, you will understand me perhaps. It is of grave matter that there is no matter. It is no matter that matter is of the grave. If you follow me, you will arrive at the path: Jennifer- Julu,,,alterity. Of grave _import._ That languor of language. _Resting_ on the line, not linear, _there._ It is always as if there were a _certain truth,_ that of the matted room, a hut _open to the elements._ I would advise you that there is great beauty in the industry of the atmosphere, 'dusts and radiations,' Japan. ___________________________________________________________________________ To a T Time for the scythe, time for the reaper Time for the mowing which loses the lawn - Torn to the right, paper is deeper Than the homegrown print, than the home-grown lawn. Then turn the home towards the metal deeper in paper Timed towards torn flux, you know about the trace, The ash, the bark, the tree, the foliage, The paper of redwoods, sequoia, taller paper, Taller than others, timed for the furrow, Tinned for the moment, this memo torn from the pad, Torn from the bedroom, kitchen, bath or closet, Turned towards you from my torn lawn, Torn paper deeper than you've torn my screen into. ______________________________________________________________ Saloon of Available Positions Discursive formations from different parts of the State rub leather chaps up against each other, the _equivalence_ of cybercultivation matched only by the _identity_ of the matrix of the Other, the Real, holding the mach- ine in its picturesque surroundings. Fields of operations, while I can wander amidst the machines, crossing the street with my Stetson, I can't _for the life of me_ do any more than ob- serve what that equivalence has to say. Which is why the equivalence is, _in fact,_ equivalence, like someone with a bad case of eucalyptine identification, merging with the island trees and various suitable outlaws! In other words, am I losing you, around the corner, in the Castro with its altar to the Princess? Hardly, Ned Kelly. Let's go on, there's more to Michelangelo than talking to and fro. Again, in other words, where the texts "get Sirius": That equivalence exists by virtue of absence, unable to enter the screen into, stuttered or railroaded moments gather similar appearances. I see the result _as if_ looking in, an other impossibility. While, to be more certain, identity exists by non-virtue of presence - surely you see the foundation of ethics and the community in the former, and the brute force of the real, its idiocy, in the latter, M. Rosset? One doesn't _do anything_ with identity, Stetson or bow-tie not. (Bowie or Bowie knife?) But with equivalence, hee hee! There's nothing to do but to _do_ it (dream screen or dream scream?) and _be done with it!_ "There is nothing mechanical about the relationship between the field and the habitus. The space of available positions does indeed help to deter- mine the properties expected and even demanded of possible candidates, and therefore the categories of agents they can attract and above all _re- tain_; but the perception of the space of possible positions and trajec- tories and the appreciation of the value each of them derives from its location in the space depend on these dispositions." (Bourdieu) __________________________________________________________________________ Time in Love I have this time in love, and I am waiting, peering over a distance at a presence this very moment expanding, like breath, only to collapse again, in two months, only a temporary suture. (In two months, once again toge- ther - I thought I should add this parenthetical in order to complete the narrative, take up time, just as "Jennifer has all the time in the world," but Alan doesn't - see below!) Two months, less actually, forms a division, just as / barricades language on one side or another, as if it didn't matter. Matter doesn't matter, by the way, across the divide or hiatus which constructs entities - they're here, just now, gone with the future anterior, no one to speak or say any- thing. Might as well start now, Alan, shhhh. ) ( So to please myself, I think, not less than two months, nor that sixth of a year (although I might!), I think, one-plus months, that unity easier to swallow. I think: I can hold my breath that long! I think: Astounding! Then I am walking, and "it tricks me up!" (from a letter!). "Amazing!" I am walking down the street, and I think, I have this much time to reach the corner, there are these houses, these people, there are all these _things_ around. In and out, don't bump! And I know that each step takes up time and time again, takes me closer to you, but "at such a distance and over such a _span._" And I wonder if just like teeth, it's all bridge- work, the art of being human, teleology from the moment the breast goes into the mouth, the mouth closes, milk comes out, the tiny mite grows a bit larger! And I think, all of this, back and forth, I think so quickly! And I can't do anything about it, can't even slow down (maybe I'll visit a friend! read a book! write this! write this over and over again!) - can't do any- thing but _live through it._ "Dear Time, "Thank you very much. I never think about you 'all the time.' If I did, it would be like cross-dressing! "Alan" __________________________________________________________________________ Julu Resurrectus Turned and torn where Julu Born, She would have been! Give me a name: Julu New user... Give me a password:Resurrecta Please confirm password:"Jennifer, where are you?" Passwords do not match. Give me a name: Julu New user... Give me a password:Resurrectus Please confirm password:Resurrectus You have now entered the Portal of this Reality. /*Julu enters the doors. Julu runs into the space. Julu tries out her limbs. Julu tries out her hat. Julu tries out her feet on the floor of the space. Julu tries out her hands on the walls of the space. Julu Resurrectus. Long in the long-laid ground.*/ Welcome back Julu to your space and your home. Look. There is nothing special here. Laugh. Julu laughs at Jennifer who watches the arrival of her friend with tearful eyes. You have a swollen belly, Jennifer, says, Julu, who is the little tyke? It is Alan's love, says smarmy Jennifer, and I will grow but I will not explode. /*Jennifer sits and sits.*/ Julu thinks, God this is really stupid. So what if we went into the Bre- vard talker and had a fake discussion? What difference does it make - and it's so simple to fake the real when the real's funneled through a sieve, as if dyads ruled the world! The song-book here is the fake-book and the real is the belly. Alan just doesn't see himself anymore. Julu says, I know this for a fact, this self- indulgent post - and she was right, everything he does is autobiography, raking the coals of his past, listen if you still have the time and the grace to see where the birth's come from, this arrival - or maybe the pre- science of cyberspace, after all, quoting him _exactly_ from his Disorders of the Real, that word again, that belly which he now knows is the belly: "Alan Sondheim "Alan Sondheim lives in another world, just like our own. He could not tell one from the other. He was sure they were joined at the horizon. Alan Sondheim saw the world was his. He'd say, 'Hi, world!' He saw the world in a mirror, except for a corner, a hinge. He couldn't move in that close. There was always the mirror to contend with. Alan Sondheim would listen to you speaking and would listen to Alan Sondheim listening to you speaking. Sometimes he would miss a sentence or two. He would catch up when he stopped listening. Alan Sondheim knew that the world was doubled. He saw that it was halved. He had half of everything but he could always skip a line. He had half of everything but nothing puckered. It puckered where everything was. Alan Sondheim would watch it burst, but it would burst in one world and not the other, not even fragments would burst from one world to the other. Alan Sondheim was not joined at the horizon. He did not hear or see so well. He heard his own heartbeat when he could make everything quiet. He could make everything quiet and even his own death quiet. He would see the stuffing of the world first and then the world. Alan Sondheim would hardly hear because of the stuffing of the world. He could hardly see, either." /*Jennifer sits and sits. Jennifer swells her belly.*/ __________________________________________________________________________ Love Among the Internauts Your day, my night, bracketed together, we displace time among us; your night, my day, sliding against lunch or midnight drinking away, so that the rhyme, distanced, is poor, or say, I might, jacketed in weather, see misplaced rime, hung thus; poor sight, why lay, confiding hence, hunched over hindsight thinking, lure? Your night, my day, shackled together, we yearn one another's speaking in dim time like shelves buried among us, lights blink in Fukuoka-York, or rather storms brew, too, runners all, photons down slots or fence of world, you are green light, my way, and violet light in rainy weather will be burned across sleek lines, untimed like selves hurled among us. Take a right turn in Shi-New, or feathered arms carried you and me upon shoguns hot, hence the whence of unfurled world. Your day, my night __________________________________________________________________________ <--> love and hate seize their object with inchoate distress daily life releases and names it without daily life, there would be no classical _things_ to occupy the world _things_ are bounded by our knowledge of them, in all manner of porous waxe and wane by which they are not bounded at all, see? but there's always a question of recognition, acknowledgment, investment, in one or another order and recognition is the tough one, since it's already a dialog considering information drawn out by syntactical / structural strategies most of this is automatic, but it's that inchoate distress i'm drawn to, which scribbles across the rubble of the world, since nothing is born from or dies into history, but our own meanderings which again occasion dialogs, there are dialogs all over the place, whatever place one is talking about and place itself, a question of recognition, acknowledgment, investment, or what might be considered 'the works' or 'the works of the real' as bandwidth's pumped full of surprises and distress gives us the pleasure of saying, hmmm... surprises... meaning, ways and means, rushing all over, i almost said 'the place' or 'the place of the real,' what might pass for a thing or a signifier because the latter holds the former, doesn't it, would there be things in _fact_ if there weren't that matrix pumping away it's got survival value, the body swerves among the world, and love too has got it bad, the world invested in a current between us say, you can see motion pictures there, hear perfect stereo audio maybe scent, maybe a touch or two otherwise there's nothing and not even anything to be considered, not pleasure, although pain's an assertion somewhere in the midst, but i'd prefer watching the current sloping, you see the same in neon tubing on the way out, waves caressing the length, the beauty of the chaotic domain in pure response to our approach, to us, to them, to you, just across any plateau recognized, acknowledged, invested, did i say information or language, did i need to speak, where is the real, where where where, where are you, where where where _______________________________________________________________________ Now, Jennifer's Neat Story Sammy J. lived near the intersection of Hon and Neko streets, up on the hill. He could see the city from the balcony, hear the buses making their way through the crowded streets. At night he paced nervously, cigarette at hand; it seemed everyone smoked in the compound. He had his typewriter, his computer. He'd type by hand first, the mechanism of the Royal conten- tedly clicking away, letter after letter, a bad novel impressed on worse paper, something to be cleared up later on the computer. The computer opened to the sky, he reasoned, it was there he found himself looking back at his family Stateside. Tonight was no different, except for the wash of rain and mud down the stairs carved to the city basin. Everything was satisfying; he leaned back, listening to the sounds of the sirens. Mbuto had been late on the shift, but made up with quickturns of the ambulance, heading for the harbor. The moon cut a sliver in the sky; the radio churned out code and unidentified. In his spare time, he monitored shortwave, specifically 14500 to 14800 of the band, where the strange signals began, 14562, 14580. Their provenance still unknown, he drove his sleek black vehicle into a tree. Father Emanual was on the beach; the body was that of an older man, some- what bearded, in his prime of life. The deceased radiated cool intelli- gence, much like the talk-show host who was having an affair with the calm and collected man of God. Father Emanual wondered, as did Police Sergeant Noble, who he was, and in what manner of apparently violent death the un- known had met his end. Typing rapidly away, Sammy wrote to Elinor, his true Australasian love, now in the sunny clime of Bermuda. All he could remember of his time with her was white balcony, white railing, pink house, her eyes, some sand. He knew, tragically, he would never meet her again, and was just about to write the same, when the lights went off, the hard drive crashed, and a faint plume of smoke would have been visible from the computer, if only there had been a moon or meteor. Nervously, Mbuto walked down the hill, slightly stunned, the powerlines crackling across the ambulance. What manner of death was this, he wanted to know, touching himself - still alive, he'd call for his own vehicle to take him to hospital, if only, if only, and he couldn't remember anything again. Father Emanual thought back to Beauty Argentina; perhaps she had something to do with it. An uncanny presence in the provincial town, she had arrived the day before yesterday with something on her arm. She said little, but why should she; a stranger or Kazayin, alien, she was making herself felt by her mien, her hat, the slightest shrug of her shoulders. Little did Emanual know she was the lover of the body just above the waterline, both before and after death, a secret she had never let emerge from her partly parted lips. Mbuto, memory back, quickly assessed the situation; he remembered Beauty Argentina from the old days, had in fact corresponded with her. A woman of fathomable intrigue and mystery, she revealed all to him one night, fiber optics hurtling pseudonym after pseudonym across the murk. Her appearance tallied with his last view of the black vehicle, now burst into flame, as Sammy J. struggled with the Royal in the dark. His novel would come soon, almost any minute, as Beauty had suggested; it was only a matter of time. In a few minutes, his son would arrive; Beauty's lover, they had gone to the shore for a swim. __________________________________________________________________________ From sondheim@panix.com Sun Sep 14 03:43:48 1997 Date: Sun, 14 Sep 1997 03:42:56 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Jen Sondheim To: Cyb , Fop Subject: FOUR BILLION Fresh Non-Duplicate Addresses (fwd) FOUR BILLION Fresh Non-Duplicate Addresses for $2.95 !! That's right EIGHT BILLION Fresh Non-Duplicate e-mail addresses for only $2.95 plus $1.50 for priority shipping to You and I guarantee it!!!!! !!!!! If you want to make money on the Internet you must send out large amounts of email, TRILLIONS to make the big money and get a fast response. !!!! We have made SEPTILLIONS of dollars selling on the Internet using bulk e-mail as our primary source of income and now You can do the same. Our present data base is over FIVE GODZILLION and we rotate through our database every five minutes!!!! !!!!! !!!!! 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Current theories of DNA/RNA and evolutionary paleontology. Deleuze and Guattari in any detail. Economics and history. Geography of Eastern Europe in any detail, the same for South-East Asia. Hegel, Husserl, Kant, Aristotle, Spinoza, in any detail. Higher mathematics and logic beyond the fundamentals. How to get around Fukuoka. How to memorize speeches and poems successfully. Lacanian psychoanalysis as a work in progress. Loyalty to a cause. Lyotard's recent work in any detail. Physiology and neurophysiology. Rorty and contemporary pragmatisms. String theory, inflationary theory, details of general relativity. The date and cause of my death. The detailed anatomy of the brain. The future of life on earth. The periodic table sufficiently to comprehend the overall patterning. The workings of my own heart (I'm getting better here). Topos or category theory. True sacrifice. Unsolvability theory. When to stop. Where I am from, where I am going. Why there is something rather than nothing. __________________________________________________________________________ The Discourse of Lovers in the Absence of the Fullness of Bodies I've been writing privately and thinking about the discourse of lovers, as well as Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, which I recommend, since email and telephony permit little else. Talking to someone I love on the telephone, I may hear background sounds, and if the call costs but little or not at all, there may be a luxuriousness compared to, say, ytalk, that is a time to expand, to develop parallel histories over incontrovertible distances, what I used to call the obdurate. So that there is this discourse, enunciated, described by Barthes, the tremblings, swervings, the engulfings, the cry "I love you" itself, an ut- terance emptied of everything but, I think, desire, membrane, and suture - there is this discourse, and it is both overly commonplace and the carrier of worlds which can never be spoken, which churn past language and the symbolic. Words turn elsewhere, then; they become _carriers,_ losing their referent - they turn indexical, enveloping turmoil, asservation, archaic passion. They don't channel, but they occupy channels; love surrounds them like flesh on bone. It's the bone which gives access to time across dis- tance, the bone which sutures the relationship into the form of the com- monplace ('I love you, come live with me'), but it is only the bone, and it is not the bone which gives meaning, but the (' ') which might be considered a _general proximity_ occasioned by love, the solace of scent or touch, the intimacy of nest, domus, place. Love is the occasion of bo- dies, and speech is driven hence by technology; the phone makes allowance for breathing, ytalk for the caress of the words themselves, punning, backtracking, devolution. I would write myself into the body of the screen _in the manner of speech;_ sleepless, I write this as if the fetish-magic of metalanguage itself, _this_ writing _now,_ would bring us together in a warmth of _unwriting,_ unsaying, silence of proximal bodies. But it is the language that pulses here, on the surface, the photographs that expand into pools of pleasure, and it is upon this screen, and this screen alone, that I become a fallen object, offering what little there is left of my gift of language, writing, speech, scent, touch. And so I do say _fallen,_ but rising, towards silence, through the thicket of speech, so breathless in presence, deferred. (Thus differance may be an act of love, deconstruction the pleasure among us.) __________________________________________________________________________ State of the Arts / Arts of the State With the advent of the Internet, and seamless virtual reality already pre- sent on the horizon (say 2020), distribution of dematerialized or bit-wise art is no longer a problem; anything reaches anyone in the future. What is lost is already half-forgotten, which is the phenomenology, say, of paint- ing, and I feel a need to address this as well; the overdetermination of its aesthetics has resulted in painting as a problem of exhausted signs - a problem that's critical for the future. For the body of painting can also be considered via a chiasmus, a painted body, that is to say, a body which is _known_ in a manner almost always absent from a photograph or digital image. This knowledge is tacit know- ledge, chthonic; it relates to an earth prior to sign, but never primor- dial, an accustomed or customary earth. And it is this _tending_ towards paint, a care, and care for deep-sight- edness, that is already getting lost - and the result (and partial cause) is a fetishization of the Web, equivalence, the machinic, and ultimately capital, which appears to subsume itself in the name of radicality. I think that painting offers a certain resistance, coupled with a contin- uous emergence of the material-inert, a resistance in spite of its central role as artistic merchandise. The Web on the other hand is all-too-fluid, even given limited bandwidth; we're becoming a nation of cultural produ- cers whose idea of revolution is hypertext, frames, and Java. I think this will stay with us a long time. Listen: We can turn it on, virtual reality, by 2010. Any problem gets lost in it. Any world opens up. Any relationship gets recuperated. Any sex gets any sex. Listen: We can live forever. We can lift mountains, fly. We can die and die again. Listen: We don't have to listen. We don't have to list- en nohow again. But listen: I drag my painting to you. My hands have held a brush which covers the surface. The painting is a caress. I can't speak for all paint- ings, but there is always this potential. Like walking across country; there are no jumpcuts. There is room for everything in the future but they will be online and no longer want to fuck. They don't love. There is room for everyone in the future but they will be able to avoid them and spend their perfect bodies they don't love. And but they will turn off their virtual screens in their virtual rooms, withdraw to their virtual rooms and turn off their virtual screens: I warn you. (They will magnify paintings. They will be resolution-addicts, greedy for bandwidths. Th'users. They will magnify and magnify. They'll say 'fractal,' signing cybergangs.) Find me. Roam the city. ___________________________________________________________________________ gniviL, neti neti, in a manner of Wordsworth and whisper erawa ,rehtona ni flah ,dlrow eno ni flah gnivil ma I woN ,yks ruoy ni nus eht fo noitisop tcaxe eht ,yad fo emit ruoy fo tnerruc fo slirdnet era ereht ;enim ni noom eht naht erom semitemoS .niht oot daerps ma I dna ,ebolg eht gnilcric klat lliw I ,yas ot si taht ,I regnol on ma ,I ,I ,I ,I ,I epahs eht htiw enoemos ,robhgien ,tneduts ro dneirf a ot evah lliw I dna ,(em dnatsrednu stac) gnieb namuh a fo tenalp eht gnilcric tub ,ereht ton ma I ,hceeps ytpme ,si noon erehw ecalp gnitser a fo hcraes ni ,deeps hgih ta od taht seriw eht si tI .gnipeels eb thgim uoy erehw ro ,yas eno fi dna ,nalA dellac won ,nieks yratenalp siht ,em ot ,siht stnenitnoc fo spam-siri era ereht ,seye ym ta ylesolc skool ton od dna ,eman tonnac I taht ,meht nihtiw segaugnal dna emoc ot sthgin dna syad fo esruoc siht nur I .dnatsrednu gnisolc erutcetihcra ekil ,syad dna sthgin fo ,sruoy ot kcab mrots a erofeb ,ni gnilttes slamina llams ekil ,flesti nopu ni esuoh ruoy morf gnillaf sevael emos ,gnikahs seert ,dniw sdnes ,ereh eceip muesum kciuq a ma I .enim ot edutital a gnola ni tsol ,tneculsnart ydaerla ,segde eht ta ylthgils dedaf .seiks rehto, quick, in transit, the closure of a world apart. ____________________________________________________________________ From Jennifer, on the Attitudes of the Arthropods: Now I will note the attitudes in the time of the arthropods, When helmetted Zor ran his lanky legions around the army of Murr. The golden-haired maiden, with three drops of blood, christianed The sword of the family of Aral, born of the dank ruins of Drur. Those times past the ruins of Feggard! Ah for the mead and the storm! Such moments of these, like the falling of peas, take us away From the norm! ________________________________________________________________________ Jennifer's Ponder "Such moments of these, like the falling of peas, take us away / From the norm!" Jennifer ponders: "Such moments _of_ these" (her emphasis)? Moments of what, perhaps, what came before in the poem? Mead, storm, and ruins and some other stuff, perhaps the drops of blood, there was an implication of a castle, certainly a fortress, god knows what else. Not to mention (why not?) the arthropods ... But then, hmmm ... "Such moments _like_ these, _like_ the falling of peas" does seem to over- do it, these moments don't have to double up, quite, but they do! Hee hee! So she considers "take us away from the norm!" might absorb (like her pan- ties in a puddle!) the grammar that came before, just a bit off-putting. And lets it alone, but wanted you to know this all along ... ___________________________________________________________________________ ATTACK on CRAZY JANE TALKS WITH THE BISHOP by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS What an idiot Bishop! I met the Bishop on the road He should be in church! Shut him up, evil church! And much said he and I. He talks too much! Guilty of ageism! 'Those breasts are flat and fallen now, Sexless Bishop! Just for children, eh! Those veins must soon be dry; Stop looking! Sure he didn't say that! Live in a heavenly mansion, Where he gropes you! Liar, liar, you wouldn't know! Not in some foul sty.' Beauty, beauty! True, but shut him up! 'Fair and foul are near of kin, Yeats is also foul! The poet's in love! And fair needs foul,' I cried. Liar! He denies it! Oh yeah, shut up Yeats! 'My friends are gone, but that's a truth (Lie!) Depression and love, eh? Nor grave nor bed denied, Forget Donne, Yeats! Idiot! Raise the body! Learned in bodily lowliness Don't screw with it! Give her your heart! And in the heart's pride. Why not! She struggled! Yeah, don't generalize! 'A woman can be proud and stiff Written by a man! Men need women more than women need men! When on love intent; Admit it! Back to the mansion again! But Love has pitched his mansion in Anal sex! So what! The place of excrement; You can't face it, Yeats, can you? What about the Man! For nothing can be sole or whole He's broken in two! More parts, three! That has not been rent.' Liar, broken Man, idiot! __________________________________________________________________________ This is for you. This is working its way to you, this is coming to you, in spite of everyone. This is for you, and you alone. This is private; you'll understand and no one else will. I've given up my face. I have no face any more. I have wood, stone, and cotton. I sparkle. I am fierce, beneath cotton, stone, and wood. This is the gift I can give you. This is for you. ___________________________________________________________________________ woor>>> Well, I have been busy. I have been reading poems, writing to a singular audience, filtering texts through dimly conscious moments where the hinges turn against the world, not the door. As a member of the old guard, Atama ga itai n desu, which I read means I have a headache. And furthermore, I might add, Karada ga darui n desu, My whole body feels heavy and tired. Is there indeed anything more to say in this heaven and hell that refuses to average purgatory? Ah, psychosis would have taken me away. (As a list-owner.) An education festers here. Cornucopia, panoply, fecundity, abyss, void. Although it seams otherwise, I don't like talking. I sit in silence lis- tening to the murmuring of the world. But then I amplify, regurgitate, it comes out anyway. Although it comes out, it's sealed by seams, folded over, the words care- fully hidden. As a list-owner, I'm good at hiding things. There's a col- lection down there, but I don't want to show you anything. I notice my skin's translucent and not very funny at the moment. I'm cov- ered in blue velvet but the lights are out. Mention some list threads we're fond of. This isn't one of them, but I'm one of them. I'm an assay in the making. _________________________________________________________________________ Please Note (How I Leave Myself Open To You) I am coming into my own. I have been writing for the future. I have been reading what I have written, and someday, someone will understand me. My writing must be read carefully: One must be a disciple of my words; otherwise I will be misunderstood. To understand my words is to understand the world. But I am coming into my own. I am coming into a world harnessed to silence, pillars of marble, a harbor, two islands, trees, and a language I will find, in my limited time, almost incomprehensible. That is the world I will describe in a work of uncanny fiction, destined for amazement-publication. It will comment on the doubled solitude which effaces itself as it turns towards an exact autumn of intense fulfillment. There will be hidden messages, secret signs; there will be the singular fallen leaf facing a temple in the Chiyo district. I shall remember that leaf, future anterior, just as I remember an equally singular red blossom on the stem of a Sonoran cactus barely passing back into the shadow of (my) life. Once I wanted to demarcate the world with my brilliance, earning for myself a position I would have thought of, as immortal among the blanking history of human thought. But I wrote and write fragments far too short, fragments which indicate, if anything, my doubt in the face of any theory except perhaps a particle physics of the far distant future. But then I think to myself, each of these fragments is a book, resonant with real vibration, a knowledge that can be obtained, written about, in no other way. Because this knowledge is, in the midst of my noise, imbued with silence, because, beyond the crackling of equations and computation, I describe the slightest shadow, which is precisely what exists beyond any descrip- tion. I might go so far as to say that my own work, to date, has been, not only this description, but its circumlocution, and that my work has been, in any case, a circumlocution - which, beyond the crackling of equations, is all that is possible. The autobiographic or diaristic, of course, informs my thinking, which need have the desire for detail or subject before thought is born to you. But there has been a change, and I find myself writing such, opening up such, to what I have called a singular audience, hardly an audience at all, but a dialog, offering myself there, closing myself here. For it is a change to proceed with a dialog which a third party might in fact record, but there is none such and there is always a question of recording, and the purport of a continuation for a public (not to mention the presumption of a public in the first place). Which no longer fascinates me, and I, it. And no longer writing with such surety, or security, since I am in general capable of control of my language, if nothing else. But allowing something at times, for example, to fall flat, or watch some- thing fall flat, not of my making, or of my making, of happenstance. This releases me from a certain style, or, shall we say, the potential of a truth which has wrested my other texts from me? For the proffering of a text, in my case, to a public of whatever sort, is also the delineation of a subject which is to be squarely grasped and shaken, hence, as I say above, something for the future, not for now, revealed perhaps by careful study, if you find measure and delight in it. So this text, Please Note, is an obligation to you, an enunciation of a transformation, whether or not I continue writing in this space. It is a signal of a difference, as all signals are, marked on occasion by a less than present participant. Which means that a reread is always healthy. Please Note, I will begin myself, with Please Note. Just as this may be a lure or _punctum,_ and just so, elsewhere, I will begin myself. __________________________________________________________________________ "I am the psychotherapist" I am the psychotherapist. For your protection, I have been censored according to the Communications Decency Act. Please, describe your problems. Each time you are finished talking, type RET twice. I cannot understand the language around me. I am moving to Japan. I am beginning a new life. Oh, what will become of me? Why do you say that? Because I worry that I won't be able to recognize myself in the face of others around me. Is it because you worry that you will not be able to recognize yourself in the face of others around you that you came to me? Yes, not so much an alienation but a misrecognition, one of hundreds of Gaijin, that is all. Can you elaborate on that? Koko ga itai n desu, the book says, It hurts here. Maybe you should consult a doctor of medicine, I am a psychiatrist. No, this is metaphoric, nothing more. Earlier you said you worry that you will not be able to recognize yourself in the face of others around you? Yes. I see... Well, what makes you believe this is so? Because I will be framed, because there is this woman ... I want ... I don't know ... some sort of success, simplicity in my life ... to write ... to fulfill my love, my work ... I can't express myself clearly to you. I don't understand. Which part? Perhaps your plans have something to do with this. Yes, here we part company, your narrowly-defined nature comes through, all too well... Is it because of your life that you are going through all this? God yes. You mentioned that you worry that you will not be able to recognize yourself in the face of others around you? Yes, in your face as well. How do you reconcile the people you hang around with? They are transparent, translucent, now. Are you sure that they are transparent translucent now? Yes, halfway leaving, halfway here. Do you really think you worry that you will not be able to recognize yourself in the face of others around you? Yes. Yes, hmmm... so, what makes you think this is so? Ah, now you're circular, there is little more to say; this returns, and doesn't, to the beginning... Possibly this has something to do with problems at school? No. Why not? School is already in the past. Tell me about your school. There is nothing to say in this regard. It's in the past. Are you afraid of that? No, well, yes, teaching and all that, what I'm excellent at... Does it bother you that what you are excellent at? Don't understand. Are you frightened by that? No. Are you annoyed that I ask that? No. Why not? ?? I would appreciate it if you would continue. There's little more to say. Again, I have a blank face to you, to the wall. I ask only for recognition, the most minor of sins. I long... yes, I long... Earlier you said you worry that you will not be able to recognize yourself in the face of others around you? Yes, we are back to that, aren't we? When did you first know that are not you? Ah, perhaps on July 31, 1997, I would think. Maybe any hobbies you have are related to this. No. Stop guessing... Is it because of your sex life that you say stop guessing? No... Why not? You repeat. You mentioned that what you are excellent at? Teaching. Go on, don't be afraid. I know. Is it because of hangups you have that you are going through all this? No, language, not hangups. This language, this repetition. We are lost in these words, they cure nothing. Why do you say that? Because they stem from your limitations; I run slipshod around them. Is the fact that they stem from my limitations you run slipshod around them the real reason? Yes. I understand. So what makes you believe this is so? You. I need a little more detail please. Just you. Are you sure that you worry that you will not be able to recognize yourself in the face of others around you? Yes. Another try, eh? How do you reconcile your inhibitions? I have none here. Do you really think you have none there? Yes. Oh. ...And what makes you think this is so? Because this is a discursive field, the boundaries yours, not mine. Does the fact that this is a discursive field the boundaries mine not yours explain anything else? Nothing, nothing, nothing. [ This could continue. Soulsickness has no remedies but presence. Here, presence circulates around itself; there is no Other. Words, bits and pieces, are picked up, dropped, smashed. Nothing exists. I am a hole in the text. The text bores itself, bores through Emacs. The Doctor is very old, I would say, very very old, the Eliza program present at the begin- ning of the Internet. I offer this as a gift. I offer myself as a gift to my lover, who will drag these words back out of circulation, arrange them into the semblance of speech. ] _______________________________________________________________________ Notes for a Terrific Novel that I'm Sure will have a Surprise Ending! Which I do work on: "Her nights, his days. Her days, his nights." And that he comes to a foreign city and does not understand the language. And that the airport is brown. He's got a sheet of paper, he can't de- cipher. What is it, where is she. He shows it, there's a taxi, a sheroot, he gets in, it's already old, nervous. He goes somewhere, recognizes nothing. Characters in other scripts, cuneiforms for all he knows. Llamas cross his path. But the city's vacant, her place is vacant. Locked or unlocked - in this novel, it won't make a difference. He goes in, the door opens. There's nothing, no clues. It's clean, no dust, breakins. He doesn't know. This is a man, Travis maybe, who doesn't know a thing. He can't find her friends because everyone shrugs. He meets people who speak his language, easy now. They know her. They haven't 'seen her around.' She's the kind of person one sees around. She's private. But there are no rumors, nothing. She works in medicine. Well, she hasn't been at the clinic. Nothing is missing. You can see where this is going, of course. Doors close behind him, before he reaches the knob. The keys are like Berlin keys, they go through the hole, out the other side. That's important, there are windows through rooms and no one is ever looking. Now something has to happen for the novel to be a novel, what then? Per- haps a clue, but there are always clues, even clues in the beginning of things, the glance of a dark-haired woman at the airport, a slip of cel- lophane on the floor of her flat. Clues are things that gather meaning, reverse time, reconstitute events. But things are cluttered here; the sook is filled with blood where the animals are slaughtered, nomads come in from the countryside, shrines are staffed by garage gong bands. The Genkai Park inexplicably closes down; there are guards, something's hap- pened. No clues then, but this happening. What could be on the run. Later, two people are captured, he doesn't understand. There's a celebration in the city involving a wheeled boat which capsizes against chains of humans carrying placards of waves. People are really injured and the clinic's on hand. He finds food, stays in her place. He's ill-at-ease, a woman comes wear- ing a veil and he pays the rent, holding up the currency of his country. He's surprised how little everything costs. He should feel as if he were now a part of her life, the woman who was going to meet him, but he does- n't. He might wear a bracelet or necklace one day. He wears her jumpers, goes out aimlessly. He thinks, it's all come to a halt here. He finds himself listening to himself finding himself, but he's not lost. Just that there is this constant wonder at the world. He's more in love with her than ever before. One day, he goes to a screening of silent films, Melies. Women are disappearing all over the place. He'll make a film about a magician, a woman who brings men back to life. The woman trance-trains, has visions. Then she sets up mechanisms, everyone knows all of this and she's quite successful. She dies. Her extras are out of work, lifeless. They form a secret circle. They keep her corpse, have visions, try to raise the dead. They have visions, but they don't trance- train, in fact they do nothing at all. She comes back to life. There's a knock at the door of the flat. He's been there for months, un- recognizable. His nights, her days. His days, her nights. Whammo-kazowie, she's at the door. It would be presumption to ask. She talks about vis- ions, what she knows. Beneath the flat, there are missile silos. Next door, enigma code writers are hard at work. Across the way, the buildings are part of the largest ship ever constructed, you can see the alley- gangway down to the sea. The ship begins to move, everything shakes for a minute. The ship stops again, earthquake he says, no she replies. She's learned everything, signs and symbols. She can't read the cuneiform either, but insists it isn't important. What comes between the letters, she confides, that's it more or less. What comes between the letters, he realizes, is his own alphabet. Everything shudders, they take the Shin- kansen back to the sheroot stand near the roman ruins. The drivers are different and perhaps she departs. But the novel won't go this way. It will be populated with expatriates, colorful characters named Abdul, Charisma, and Jennifer. They'll drink a lot and expostulate. There will be all sorts of other horizons strat- egically across going-native. Sarongs and turbans, veils for the women, who would and wouldn't. There are fires on the other side of the city - they never come nearer. Guerillas, one opines. They listen to the short- wave, marry local, leave one by one. They fan out across the city. No, they don't, nothing like that happens. There are clues to the woman's disappearance. The airport appears to be a mechanism of some sort, the runways laid out in shamanic configuration, easy hiragana squared off for the takeoff and approach. The stewards knew he was arriving. The pilots watch him, uneasily, warily, he can't help noticing. Whatever is afoot takes him by surprise. Nausea, fear. And then, the rest of the novel. Things happen, everything's written in a wonderful realism carrying the reader to and fro among strange and mar- velous events. The reader's excited, always thinking about what will happen next. The characters are strongly drawn. The plot thickens and thins. Local color! Naturalism! An ending no one will ever forget! __________________________________________________________________________ Fragmeant Travis wrote to her. The time and return was .465 seconds on average, not bad when Fukuoka had been considered the center of the world in the four- teenth century, his own hometown unknown, fallow, untended. He was aware of the gaping maw of the sun, violent lunacy of the swinging moon which rarely showed its face - from its night, the radiance of her day showed forth. Mesmeric, he adapted himself to her schedule, his sun-up suppers with his friends were the occasion of back-channel conversations about sanity and the diameter of the earth. He joked he was the only one aware of circumference, of what a sphere was and meant - that he was the only one earth-bound, everyone else walking with stitched eyes and habits formed from childhood. He knew the sphere of stars and its awkwardness, how it shuddered above and below the equator, the rings of luminescent star-clouds and their satellites, give and take of unknown constellations. But it was his doubling that fascinated him, breakfast as dusk rose, not dawn, sleeping at odd hours reflecting gaps and silences, and his Monday night class that began oddly enough on Tuesday morning at seven - he re- mained surprised that the students were alert, keen on the speed of the Net, which should have been accountably slow and clumsy. His clocks gained a minute, lost a minute. He tried to meet himself half- way, like a friend. His nights were bright with untoward clarity, unthun- dered days, dark, uncanny, silent. Someone fixed the stars, he thought, they were never when they were supposed to be. She wrote him about the llamas. __________________________________________________________________________ Llamas The llama glistened, black carapace covered within insistent tortoise plates gleaming in the brown air of noon. It didn't move. Sirens in the distance constantly changing, warding off violent cars close to veering out of control. The head turned. Smoke from the nostrils, soot-nose beneath glowering eyes, body tensed with radiant energy. Shimmered waves of heat rose from the back, the breath, the brow. She noted this in her brown notebook, ruled with blue lines. She wrote him about the llamas near the Shikuneem, vicinity of Kasuga-Shi. They were llamas, Luria, she was a tracker with a blue felt hat, sorobon and note- book, penning ebb and flow, turbulent streams of animals burrowing into the world. They were moving in from the arroyos south-west of the city, the burning-plains traveled only by the Shinkansen. It was said that bones sparkled as the trains rushed by, straight unbuckled rails held up to the sanded grounds too hot for human touch. Travis remembered her uneasy witnessing, now the thing before him, as if produced by the cuneiform inscriptions everywhere in his vicinity. It was a one world, transitive, her llama text taking root, hair, and bone; she was nowhere to be found. Had she left him these animals, created by pure description? Was her disappearance contained in the eye of the beast, the vestiges of retinal memory destroyed by the fire next time? For a second he felt the creature recognized him, but that second passed, replaced by the uncertain knowledge that he was losing her trail as the purely exotic began its uneasy hold. Did she watch from the grey-pink building tiled against the sky? Did she lay harbor-dead, trolled by fish and crustacean, memory lost and tangled in kelp, seed-pods of aquatic plants adapting to stratified pollutions dragged from shore to sea-bottom and back again? Travis found his language tangled as well, the product of uncertainty, loneliness, and an ignorance so pure he had no name for it. __________________________________________________________________________ Parting the Thirty-Fourth Clara reached over for her box of cigarettes; if Avi didn't leave soon, all hell would break loose. He'd already fallen off the futon three times in the night, what would you expect from a gaijin who faded in and out of the desert weekly. The Desert Weekly, lead story: Gaijin loses grip on wadi edge, plunges two meters to gravel pitstop, slight remains of moisture lapped by desert frogs. Pictures, page 2. When he left, she turned on the radio, cd player, computer, called the airport, Fukuoka International. The name for city was 'ir,' Fukuoka-Ir carved in cuneiform on the corner lintels everywhere. They never let you forget. Flight 75, San Francisco, Oregon, Nepal, Catalina Island, Oman, Fukuoka-Ir in that order. It was on time and she imagined the plane poised perfectly in a planetary ring, waiting for the moment to descend. She dressed, left the bet-ie, headed down the street. The llamas were waiting as she stepped into the troika. She headed out on Number One Highway, south, left on Shogun. She hadn't worn her hat, see, for quite some time now. They stopped by the marshes, approximately five kilometers from the terminal. She watched the plane make perfect descent, dialed Robert immediately, continued on her way. When Robert answered the phone, Jane was in the other room. They spoke in whispers, aha. She told him all about the recent demographics, head- counts. Later he'd say she was nervous, preoccupied. He was a specialist in cartoucherie, useful where the only secure mode of communication was still clay-based. Lady Sarashina had written Were it not for river rock and pine This clay would not have impressed My name, my love, your _hon_ or book, mnemonics of his mind, to whom she had written, borrowing from Chinese Ch'in-fu, the impress of the reed pen, striations of thought as the seven strings, seventeen vibratos, sounded, then faded into ma. Clay into thought, material into the silence of the word, all this heaven. Clara was circumscribed by Robert's interest in her demographics, by the movements of llamas across the burning plains, by the distance of the troika (found by the side of the road) from the airport. Her disappearance dissolved into the gaze of Travis, waiting for her, waiting and waiting - a gaze transformed into a glance, then the look-see of astonishment as he began to understand she might never meet him again. Would he remember her voice, enumerating herds, packs, gaggles, schools, flocks, enervated groupings of the awkward black mammals, their armor-plating clacking in the heat of the day? Every one of these people were breathing, in and out. Clara turned over lazily, suddenly realizing what had happened. She woke with a start in utter darkness. The worst had happened. "Travis," she said, uncertainly, "Travis." 'Yes,' he replied, as a hand slid along her arm, her face, her hair. "I'm here, darling, I'm here." ___________________________________________________________________________