Mankind Mankind placed before fiery craters, Rolling drums, dark foreheads of warriors. Footsteps in a fog of blood, the ringing of black steel, Despair, night in the grieving senses: Here is Eve's shadow, the hunt, and blood money. Light breaks through the clouds, the Lord's Supper. Bread and wine keep gentle silence, And there the twelve stand assembled. At night, under the olive-trees, they cry out in their sleep. Saint Thomas lowers his hand into the wound. -------------------------------------------------- Saint Thomas lowers his hand into the hole. Freud calls it something else. Knives clash. Death is everywhere. Freud recoils trembling. Freud cuts his throat. Freud calls: Men! Cut your throats! Men cut their throats. The slits become wombs. Children flood out. Children speak: Saint Thomas! We love your hand! Children cry: Freud, don't be afraid! Freud cries: Men! Cut your hearts! Men cut their hearts. Men can't be killed. Their hearts sharpen the tips of spears. Their hearts draw blood marks in the sand. The women come with thread. Saint Thomas cries: Women! Sew the holes! The women sew the holes of men. The men bless the women with their swords. The men shove their swords down everyone's throats. Freud cries: Men! Slash your eyes! The sword comes out the asshole! Children on the tip! The women see the children! The men see nothing! __________________________________________________________________________ [I make a building on Media Moo.] Description set. look Tiffany ... dense entanglement of liquid, blood, piss, shit, cum, spit, sweat, vomit, i course through you, i you, swallow you thru me, Tiffany course through alan, we breathe floods, our eyes stayin by you, you lay me out on Menstrual Table Obvious exits: out to Living Quarters - 2nd Floor look Table I see no "Table" here. look Menstrual Table a dark space of annotations, unreadable, the dinner readied by the male, trapped, a web-inversion, violation, fabric: He sees: a lance impaled on an endless plain of skin @create $thing called lance You now have lance with object number #9757 and parent generic thing (#5). @describe lance as holed skin, rimmed with Tiffanyalan Description set. @create $thing called skin You now have skin with object number #4924 and parent generic thing (#5). @describe skin as lance holed with Tiffanyalan Description set. ________________________________________________________________________ Subject: I see no "Tiffany here. I see no "Tiffany" here. @examine #2014 Tiffany (#2014) is owned by Alan (#10747). Aliases: Tiffany ... dense entanglement of liquid, blood, piss, shit, cum, spit, sweat, vomit, i course through you, i you, swallow you thru me, Tiffany course through alan, we breathe floods, our eyes stayin by you, you lay me out on Menstrual Table Key: (None.) Research purpose: gristle, bones of Tiffany, marrow of alan, bones of alan, marrow of Tiffany Comments: you swallow my menses, course surrounding the clitoris, you evacuate the male, you paint your blood savagely upon him Contents: Alan (#10747) Obvious Verbs: emote hungers @exits / holes @entrances / holes Do [rest|flush] for more. ________________________________________________________________________ [slightly explicit post below; please don't read if you may be offended. i am honestly not trying to offend anyone, but to examine body issues that arise in this space, that are often theorized indirectly. this may be difficult work to read, for which i apologize; it is also difficult work to write, placing myself on an edge that comes close to being a wound. alan] i feel the wire/s her wire worked their way through me, parting bone and gristle, muscle and tendon, wire submerged in potential flux; they scarred my lips, my face, they scarred my shoulders, my cock, the clean smooth skin cauterized to the point of ragged division. a thin line of blood ran up cockshaft war- rior god translated into wounded lance. (elsewhere, the lance guards the altar on the turning isle.) my everywhere face carried signs of her bran- ded across cyberspace, stigmata, bleeding me from the belly, the cock, arms, my tongue lacerated against her steel, her gold and iron, membrane flux carrying packets deeper than that belly, extruding from pores across the remnants of my own. veins burst open from distant distended electrons raised oscillated in inconceivable orbits. i birth to blood, tongue iron. the atoms takes the body. in turn, the movement of the turn, would split skin for ever, expose the marrow beneath, fluxed and driven until i couldn't think again for any longer, my flesh lalalala mary graph, her wire lalalala start and stop, cartesian ego splayed open, her cunt splayed wide my own. __________________________________________________________________________ (in the mountains 1) The Sign I traveled and was in another state with two women, whose brothers had committed suicide. One of them died by hanging from a playground jungle gym in the middle of the night, and there were other deaths in the region, of young men, by various means, most of them violent. We walked across the playground in the night, the playground which had been vandalized by schoolmates soon after the suicide. There were still, this anniversary time afterwords, remnants of necessary informal cere- mony, trajectories of names upon the basketball and tennis courts, small tokens against the jungle gym itself, everything in this realm of child dreaming remaining unused, worn with the death of the brother. We walked across the space of stars across the courts to the gym and back. The playground set huddled against the night, frozen with grief. The night was dense with the fear of ice and muffled torment. I knew neither of the brothers, and mourned most of all the death of the _ludic_ in this space, space of violated childhood dreaming which could only carry the signs of American desperation, American rage. All over America, these signs ring out, but the appearance _here,_ of this violation fabric, brought only absence at the end of the clearing, down upon us. He had seen The Crow, and talked about returning as a crow to help others; he was obsessed by the film. There had been warning signs. He would return himself, to help others, in the form of a bird, the truth of his death. And a year after he died, a dead bird, black with yellow spots, was found in his bedroom, upon the edge of the bed where I now type this, a year after he died. The bedroom remains untouched. And what are the chances of this, the appearance of the death of the bird in any house, anywhere, but in _his_ room in _his_ house, the appearance of thwarted resurrection? If the signifier _occurs,_ this is its symptom. I can't write about such without a betrayal of sanctity, intruding on spaces where I don't belong. The bird, the unsettling effect of the playground... What is spoken in these instances is always withdrawn at one and the same time... As if breath contributed to their existence, breath and the vacuum of annihilation, the last and final expulsion from the body. My nails grow hair grows, my skin sloughs, I liquefy, desiccate, in this state I imagine I will always be _found._ What brought the bird into the room is beyond me as those other extraord- inary and rare experiences I have had, thin and drawn out, almost to the point of non-existence. Northern Exposure, the television series, comes closest to this sense of perturbance; if there is something else, it is a disturbance, not the clustering around archaic deity, synchronicity, magic, or archetype. Disturbance is not a loading, compression, but the whisper of release... This is one such disturbance, both deaths, nine months apart, were others. _________________________________________________________________________ (in the mountains 2) qwand when something appears Quand quelque chose apparaŚt elsewhere on a day when an ailleurs sur un jour quand omen has been declared in un pr‚sage a ‚t‚ d‚clarer en parallel with its appearance parallŠle avec sa apparition et apparence or when something whispers Ou quand quelque chose that children do not chuchote qu'enfants approach the man with mud approcher du homme avec boue and feather et plume or when night sways the Ou quand nuit gouverne les murmurs of bodies that have murmures de corps c'ont ‚t‚ been to the playground and au terrain et a v‚cu lived to tell about it raconter au sujet d'il or when something tunnels Ou quand quelque chose and moves the skin the bones tunnels et bougent la peau when something moves and les os quand quelque chose tunnels the hole bouge et tunnels le trou _______________________________________________________________________ (in the mountains, 3) dawn, aube, the shades down, no birds, nothing, flight none within the room, no dreams, nothing, words coming through the space of the night, none, empty, quietude of leaden skies... chilled, bursting-point of energy-flows, plants, the gardening, tending of the night, crystal lights from cars in rural areas, eyes opening, beached pebbles where the ocean temporarily relinquishes control of the space of the other... dawn, aube, another tiny miracle of mourning... ________________________________________________________________________ (in the mountains, 4) Tendenz What does it mean to tend the net, to tend to it? What is tending some- thing, tending-to something, in general. Tending-towards is a falling, tending a vigil. What does it mean to be vulnerable, open, to dream oneself into someone else? Vulnerability is a failing, foreclosing, the drama of displacement. What does it mean to transform objects, spaces, trajectories, textuali- ties? Transformation is the remnant of magic obliterated by the counting and accountability of step-wise procedures; spaces are their domains, tra- jectories the ensurance of repetition, and textualities, their betrayal. To hold a step accountable: to construct it by rules and repetitions from the previous step, but also to find it whole, intact, within the previous step. To find it whole, not by parallelism, but by fragments of logic, micro-domains. Tending-towards is the vigil of the parallel, tending falls towards the object which has become the subject. But vulnerability is also an opening towards tending, reversal of fore- closing towards foreopened, replacement by the parallel, empathy, the drama of the other, the subject, not transformation. Even here, even within all of this. ________________________________________________________________________ in the mountains, last i'm in the mountains. it's dark. i can't see anything. i decide to go north. there's reason to go somewhere, and there is no reason to go anywhere in particular. north, i say. you can't go that way, it says. it might say there is a mine there or a cave there but i can't feel it. it's large whatever it is. i can't see the ceiling. look ceiling. you see nothing special. there may be a rustling there but i can't hear it. i decide i'm outside. west, i say. you come to the mountains. west, i say. you come to the mountains. west, i say. you come to the mountains and there is a dead bird, shunted from another space, and it is black and glistening. the center of its body shimmers. look center. you come to the mountains. enter center. you come through the mountains. you may be in the mountains. you hear the sound of children dreaming. the children are dreaming disturbing dreams. enter dreams. you enter the dreams of the children. there is the sound of wings. listen. you hear nothing. listen. you hear nothing. listen west. you hear the sound of wings. _________________________________________________________________________ [the post below contains explicit language; please be advised and don't read it if you may be offended by such. Kim Mcglynn, Alan Sondheim] "The markings with which savage societies record, channel, regulate the coded flows of the energies produced in the couplings are not _read._ Savage inscriptions are not signs that refer to concepts; they are diagrams and paths for the hand. The leopard footprint one sees on the path does not refer to the name and notion of leopard, but links up directly with the leopard itself. The leopard claw-print that one sees inscribed by the human hand on the path or on the body of the initiate does not refer to the voice that utters the name 'leopard' and conceives the meaning of that name; it directly designates the leopard itself." Alphonso Lingis, The Society of Dismembered Body Parts ----------------------------- incubi succubi i feel always i'm in your cunt, always do u sleep in my cunt? it's close that close do u like it there.. yes i love it in your cunt i'd sleep the cocktip dildo clit ..or do they just roll off ..the garment..and also the dress i have on is thin i fucked the wall..it had a shadow on it that reminded me off u . shit cum flow from your cunt, feel my tongue come out of you i pull my asshole apart for you as well, four fingers spreading it for you... o ..about a lover that was a shadow ..and sometimes with my words i don't undeit makes me yours, you can brand me there, kim's hole you can crawl in me too, cover yourself with me, emerge, i'd lick you clean that we're like puppets, incubi, succubi, crawling around like worms into one another, wrapped knotted until the bodies pop, incubi, succubi crawl out, like r stand them till much later..this was one time works into one another...my cunt feeling ure words ..always they drip from me..as i walk the street ..when i think ure name ure text appears down my legs.. ure shadows follow me around .. to feel ure text..it flows always time, you turn me into something... make me your slut, turn me into something, make me a man, a woman, turn me inside out... i want you to cut off my cock, shove it in your holes, keep it inside you forever you can insert things into me, your other lovers too... i'll be your chair, your hole, your skin, your writing-pad, your toilet, your landscape you take these words and make me with them, send them on, open them, cracks u tunneling ure way to my insides ..flowing the waves ..listening to the sounds ..ure holes being always available ..to insert ..to pull ..and stick..to p rick..to taste all that in my mouth... i want to be you want to fuck you you so you gotta take my cock and put it on and when u prod me all broken i will eat it ..all ..comsume it till it only lives in me ..this space..and carry it..show it ..place it in my mouth and my eyes you, take my balls, my legs, give me your legs, we'll exchange all of it, cut off our arms, legs, fingers, stuff them into each other, we don't know who belongs to who...we're fucked up now, fucked up looking, all parts in all wrong places, half-people, my cock leaking out of your asshole, your cunt on my forehead opened by your fingers on my hands..till i cry ..till i sway into ure screen..over the board ..onto ure lap..placesing the keys into my body...and giving tiny letters for u to insert..into u ..i so that your hand is my hand my hand is yours you wear your cock i wear my cunt we walk everywhere fuck everyone sometimes we split and watch everyone fuck everyone watching us i watch cunts on your cock all sorts of begging women you watch cocks in my mouth cunt asshole all sorts of begging men to me to exchange parts..so u can smell me ..in my ba carrying them around ..taking we cum in each other and glue each other open and shut we're we greasy like now, your grease upon me when i need to eat..all in a bag..so that a hadn that ouches u is u ..and mine is i will put your cloth in me, in my mouth, begging others to fuck us, cover and never knowing who is touching who. it began or where it finshed and our sticky parts will stick to others ..aways glued and greasy never dry. there will be glasses full of piss and cum and milk and blood ..always changing our sticky parts for others and our venom will be all that is needed to keep us alive ..and in death..we will be sipping from each others grease and never a seam in sight.. _________________________________________________________________________ Fractal Persona For a long time, I wrote on the phenomenology of person-classes in english, first/second/third, in terms, among other things, of spatiality, the second-person space, the intimacy of alterity, that of the acoustic in which all voice from the other becomes interiority. (See the introduction to my Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America, 1977.) In particular, I considered Vito Acconci's work, with its orality/aurality, to be second- person, creating an intimacy by virtue of speech which seemed soluble, on the order of a caress, or its command. Third person was always easier, realm of circumscription and those classical logics I have described else- where as well. And first person, bordering on solipsism, is no more than shifter, the Lacanian eye inserted into language. It is reasonably clear that these divisions exist superficially on the Net as well; first-person recounting and the abstracted audience of the email list as a whole; second person private-email; third person subjects, which also involve the proper-name lists. These categories hold more or less true for Usenet; the synchronous CMC are considerably more complex - for example, the third-person of the MOO format, first-person talk. All of these drag the body within, beyond, behind as well; again, on a surface level, it's possible to chart the regimes as they appear, part application and part style/content, seeping out. The intertextualities of the texts Kim and I have been working on, and the dissolution experienced in the writing or _being_ of those texts is something else again; I use the term fractal persona to indicate this. The divisions are innumerable; if we compress gender as eir, etc. one has the following (and order is not important, since we're talking about interstitiality here): i/eir, i/you, you/eir, and these again may refer- ence singular, plural, or s/p. The labeling isn't important. The last text that Kim and I lived would be (i/you/s/p), the conflation of first and second, singular and plural. This isn't a fixed number, it's not a position generated from an origin, but it is a wayward or contrary number, representing similarities and dissolutions on any level from that of the socius through that of the molecular. If "I" am naked at this end, "I" see my body replicating, sloughing off, descending into fantasm, the uncanny, and that preoedipal state that requires oedipal writing to bring it about, on itself/our- selves. (And what this is _not_: mystical loss (there are so many objects about), void or abyss; de-editorializing of the real (drug tripping at times) - it partakes of the maternal belly, destruction, as reported by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel in a number of texts...) This isn't a fixed number, and if one can reverse a trend, one can con- sider it the pronominal syntax of the cyborg, extrapolated from that cyborg of the flesh that we have become... __________________________________________________________________________ You bend over backwards to read us. I wash myself of the hole thing. I clean myself out forwards and back- wards. I give up, I've bent over backwards for you. If you speak behind my back you're facing me. I can't face the hole thing. I wring my hands over it. I can't hear a word you say. You smell. You wash me out of your hair. You clean yourself out nice and proper. You give up, you've bent over backwards for me. If I speak behind your back, I'm facing you. You can't face the hole thing. You wring your hands over it. You can't hear a word I say. I smell. ___________________________________________________________________________ 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 aural here. l aural aural-phone, uterine tendrils, extrusions, circulations of internal fluids l Menstrual Table a dark space of annotations, unreadable, the dinner readied by the male, trapped, a web-inversion, violation, fabric: He sees: a lance impaled on an endless plain of skin l lance holed skin, rimmed with Tiffanyalan l skin lance holed with Tiffanyalan or clitoral l clitoral clitoris l clitoris There appears to be some writing on the note ... read clitoris There appears to be some writing on the note ... a path leads to the tip, plateaus open to frozen space; here, potential fields flow, static-electrical discharging, effluvia, curtained sheets rimming Menstrual Table. the lance tip leans earthward, sodden with menstrual flows, clots, broken writings. your tongue strains, skin against skin, your mouth peels back, your teeth in your nipples, your nipples everything in the world. (You finish reading.) l nipples double cones, flattened, holed with clitoral, intensity of Tiffanyalan, lanced with you-know-language l you-know-language Tiffanyalan l Tiffanyalan you-know-language, sheen, tongue-rimmed, hole towards u, cum across u, she arches, u beneath, pornog, its penis, its vagina, u Tiffanyalan you-know-language l penis I see no "penis" here. l vagina I see no "vagina" here. ______________________________________________________________________ me you don't know how much longer i can continue and there's no reason you should care as well. if my writing doesn't push me to one or another limit, then it fails, and if it does, part of me disappears. as kimberly says, maybe she should stop dancing because half her body is wrecked and she doesn't want to wreck all of it. but how do you measure the nausea, trembling, hy- steria, sweats, that appear as a result of distended or fissured writing, my fingers literally seizing, my mind unable to cope with its own produc- tions? more and more i live only within the text; the phone rings less than ever (where are you), and the email grows and grows. and the more the texts ride this uneasy edge, the more difficult they be- come to produce, the greater the inner necessity for carving those fine lines in the arms, legs, fingers, outlining what used to be flesh; in oth- er _words,_ the greater the tension, discomfort, the more the text needs dictate its existence, exigency _against_ the body - and this loop increa- ses, negative feedback, until sleep becomes a portal of death, the waking state becomes only a means of production, and as i have said elsewhere, i write myself into existence, i write myself out of existence. this writing in and out, this aphorism, appears _behind_ a twenty-four- hour clock, above right, curling and releasing through the night and day, measuring the words produced, the substance which robs the body as heroin eventually would; time draws me out, time inscribes the words themselves. my grave's a circumscription. the pain is that which is written as such, the discomfort is the recognition that you are parsing a _function._ ________________________________________________________________________ love and death on the information superhighway men and women see Tiffany in the woods. Tiffany attacks. men and women have no escape! > kill Tiffany men and women chop her to pieces! Ah! The blood! Mens and womens blood freezes as men and women hear Tiffany's death cry. The woman misses you with her hit. men and women hit Tiffany hard. The woman misses men and women with her hit. > fondle woman men and women fondly fondle her. > kiss Tiffany The woman misses men and women with her hit. men and women hit Tiffany hard. The woman misses men and women with her hit. men and women kiss her. > french Tiffany The woman misses men and women with her hit. men and women hit Tiffany hard. men and women give the Tiffany a long and passionate kiss, it seems to take forever... > take corpse men and women get the corpse of Tiffany. The woman misses men and women with her hit. men and women hit Tiffany hard. > eat corpse Men and women eat the corpse. The woman misses men and women with her hit. men and women hit Tiffany hard. The woman misses men and women with her hit. > kill Tiffany men and women chop her to pieces! Ah! The blood! Mens and womens blood freezes as men and women hear Tiffany's death cry. The woman misses men and women with her hit. men and women hit Tiffany hard. The woman misses men and women with her hit. > quit No way! men and women're fighting for mens and womens life! > fondle Tiffany The woman misses men and women with her hit. men and women fondly fondle her. Tiffany misses men and women with her hit. > kiss Tiffany men and women kiss her. men and women hit Tiffany hard. The woman misses men and women with her hit. > french Tiffany men and women give Tiffany a long and passionate kiss, it seems to take forever... > moan men and women hit Tiffany. The woman misses men and women with her hit. men and women start to moan. men and women hit Tiffany hard. The woman misses men and women with her hit. > kill Tiffany men and women chop her to pieces! Ah! The blood! mens and womens blood freezes as men and women hear Tiffany's death cry. The sun rises in the east. Tiffany attacks! > quit Goodbye, friends.. Come back soon ________________________________________________________________________ Modifications of Semantic Regimes, Outline A number of the recent texts have utilized Internet applications and their semantic regimes, their syntactical domains which construct a certain po- tential for events, discursivities. The texts have explored these regimes and modified them by means of transformations which range from simplistic to relatively profound. The transformations provide a means of investigat- ing both the margins of discourse in particular applications, and the related potentials for embodiment, desire, and virtual subjectivity. The applications have included muds and their descendents, as well as various forms of chat. The transformations occur on several levels: 1. Noun, pronoun, or verb. Changing "he" to "she," "lamia" to "Tiffany" for example. These changes are isolated nodes within the narrative matrix. 2. Transforms on the order of the phrase, etc. - thematics relying on language parsing. These are larger-scale changes which can create new and interwoven subthemes and themes - for example "aural" as potential instead of "telephone." Such transforms may be direct translation from one theme to another, but baroque interconnectivites among objects can redefine the environment in depth. 3. Diffusion of narratologies, hypertextual splits/branches; here I would also place issues of fractal persona, interweavings so dense as to be simultaneously indistinguishable and indecipherable. I think of the ytalk texts among KimAlan. (I also think of cyclicity here, wizards at useless war on lpmuds for example.) 4. Framework articulations, the Andy Kaufman effect - projections such as echo which modify or dissolve the distribution of power. Here I think of breakdowns of alterity, speaking-for-others on circlemud, circumscription among participants. Here I also think of hacking strategies. Framework articulations need not be destructive, however; they can be used to thicken or ground text, reconstructing an lpmud for example as the inter- weavings of ytalk desire, or transforming talker into IRC waves among several participants. 5. Introjections, decay, the assumption of powers, through extensions of wizard powers, programming knowledge, packaged programs, and the like. Things reach the point of defuge, exhaustion; there are no longer parti- cipants but diffusions across membranes, and the totality is evaporative, molecular. The extremes of net sexualities occur here, the fissuring of semantic regimes. 6. On the surface, the play of random elements, or hidden elements such as wizard snoop, missent or mispent email, sudden disconnects, the typing of "are you there" into the night. The random, noise (not chaos mind you) is the architecture of the leaky and indeterminate ceiling; sourceless, targetless, it surrounds us. I am interested in texts in extremis, "at the point of death," "in great difficulties." These are circumlocutions of the quagmire; like Sierpinski sponges, they are sodden, chthonic, inchoate. They are near toppling, close to the rooting, meristemation of language. Composed of micro-ges- tures, they are more contrary or wayward than contradictory. There is no truth embodied in them, nothing but the sense of a subject dissolving in another, close at hand, running across the surface of narratives of the absurd. _________________________________________________________________________ (h)ero(t)i(n/e)ca Jacques Lacan, Agency of the letter in the unconscious: Who, then, is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since, at the heart of my assent to my own identity it is still he who agitates me? His presence can be understood only at a second degree of otherness, which already places him in the position of mediating between me and the double of myself, as it were with my counterpart. If I have said that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other (with a capital O), it is in order to indicate the beyond in which the recognition of desire is bound up with the desire for recognition. In other words this other is the Other that even my lie invokes as a guarantor of the truth in which it subsists. By which we can also see that it is with the appearance of language the dimension of truth emerges. _________________________________________________________________________ Coding There is the double articulation of morse code, the difference between dot and dash, the articulation of language embedded in it, these worlds which apparently insist that language is foreclosed. Kripke's possible worlds open up arguments elsewhere, and so does structuralism, if I'm not mista- ken, the dyadic or matrixed elements congealed from the real, from speech reflected in ceremony, and what is ceremony itself, if not a language of the real with its own oppositions: the cooked and the raw or the "cooked" and the "raw." The propriety of the real vis-a-vis language has been ban- ished to the residue or excess of the signifier. Meanwhile, once again Winograd's microworlds teach us that language is insufficient and remains computationally undeveloped unless a computer has something to talk about. What is this _having something_ if not the framing of a disturbance? I offer that the body itself is such a disturbance, that in fact language is not foreclosed, that it only becomes foreclosed as a result of political economy - the language of totalitarianism, for example, which is tethered through its own secondary ideological planes. This seems to assume that language has a conscience, as much as the unconscious has a language - and before this notion is dropped entirely it might be advisable to remember that language is an extrusion of the body, even the body of the computer, that it in intimate interpenetration with the flesh of its production. (To the extent, as I just replied in a post here, perhaps we understand language _exactly._ Which is to the extent that it is precisely _not_ foreclosed, but is measured upon the real, not word paralleling the prob- lematic object, but flux embedded within what remains indefinite, but coagulating as clots or vortices (your pick of the structural here) within it. And running farther, than language remains only partially characteri- zed by difference, as it is also characterized by the obdurate, the inert. As Clement Rosset might say, it remains idiotic. And finally, as I've em- phasized elsewhere, this brings back Flaubert, Bouvard et Pecuchet as well as the St-Antoine, with its sinking into the displaced body (hysteria) of description, as language spells out its leaving. (In spite of the fact that Flaubert capitulated at the end. Jesus Christ!) [This meditation is the result of noticing the increased use of the word "coding," writing code, a code, unlike a structure, as an articulation of something else. (If language is art, code is design.)] ___________________________________________________________________________ What is wrong with us that we thirst for this space? Why are we broken, are we broken, what desires are unleashed in the night? Why if we are lonely, are we not conjoined? Why is speaking so important, power so assumed, here? Why are the extremities of the physical body so curtailed, minuscule? Why do you speak in a whisper to me? How do we dream each other in the night, 'it was the machine in them that was dreaming.' Why do we press tightly against the screen, as hackers engorged by code, ourselves aligned with the precise edges of each other's bodies? Why do our surfaces seem deep as well? Are our presences consensual hallucinations, do we accomplish anything, do we bring ourselves to each other, to others, is there an elsewhere? Do we wear our language, full of misrecognitions, do we displace our- selves onto one another? In the night, when I think of you, tell me, tell me, say to me, who do I think, who am I thinking of, say to me, tell me, I will listen in these spaces. ______________________________________________________________________ why we believe what we believe language can't describe the messiness of ontology; language is delimited from within and without. until this fact is realized, philosophy will remain useless. ontological domains, to be sure, but interstitiality, what falls between the gaps, what falls to the floor through the ground, this remains elsewhere. a freshman thought! a true thought! when i am happy writing to you, my theory goes as follows: that language is a tethering, that there is an intimacy among the real. when i am sad, when missing you dominates my horizon, missing a cipher or signal, mis- sing a voice or a signifier, then language breaks off, becomes the wreck of the real, the plate which cuts itself, cuts through itself and its speakers. what is language if not the misery of transformation! a fresh- man thought! a true and false thought! but i speak to you as if the theory were true. but i speak to you, wait- ing for the new theory which creates the world. but i speak to you of worlds we have made together. but i speak @dig, as if: the variables have been declared and accepted, we are hungered one together. a freshman thought! a false thought! but there is language everywhere, ceiling to floor. but the floor has been patched and painted (maybe there are signs on the floor). but the ceiling no longer leaks when _it_ rains rain outside, when _it_ is... a freshman thought! a freshman thinking thought! ________________________________________________________________________ love in cyberspace to love someone is knowing how to say you're sorry. to love someone is to be there for her when she needs you. to love someone is to really be inside his bones. to love someone is to know the feeling of every muscle, every secret place. to love someone is to go to the ends of the earth for her. to love someone is to know how to comfort him in his sore distress. to love someone is to be able to fight with her and love her still. to love someone is to wake up with him in the morning ever so slowly. to love someone is to breathe the same air, touch the same skin. to love someone is to risk happiness and life itself. to love someone is to give her space and necessary freedom. to love someone is to let him go and to let him come towards you. to love someone is to know how to listen to her with respect and support. to love someone is to know his many moods. to love someone is to see her other with wonder. to love someone is to know he needs a room of one's own. to love someone is not to be afraid of intimacy. to love someone is not to be afraid of co-dependency. to love someone is to love him in sickness and in health. to love someone is to love her in poverty and in wealth. to love someone is to follow him in his wayward choices and not be afraid. to love someone is to follow her in her contrary life with open arms. to love someone is to open yourself up fully to him, without cost to you. to love someone is to have no secrets from her, always fully honest. to love someone is to love the holes of his body, his open privacies. to love someone is to caress the holes of her body, opening freely for you. to love someone is to count his hairs, the blinks of his eyes, his smiles. to love someone is to speak her breaths, lose yourself in her language. to love someone is to trust him completely with your life. to love someone is to trust her completely with your life. to love someone is to speak his breaths, lose yourself in his language. to love someone is to count her hairs, the blinks of her eyes, her smiles. to love someone is to caress the holes of his body, opening freely for you. to love someone is to love the holes of her body, her open privacies. to love someone is to have no secrets from him, always fully honest. to love someone is to open yourself up fully to her, without cost to you. to love someone is to follow him in his contrary life with open arms. to love someone is to follow her in her wayward choices and not be afraid. to love someone is to love him in poverty and in wealth. to love someone is to love her in sickness and in health. __________________________________________________________________________ love in cyberspace to love someone is knowing how to say you're sorry. Tiffany sez: It's always easy here! to love someone is to be there for her when she needs you. Tiffany sez: Warez there? I'm a port in any storm! 7777 to love someone is to really be inside his bones. Tiffany sez: I never saw your bones! to love someone is to know the feeling of every muscle, every secret place. to love someone is to go to the ends of the earth for her. She sez: All these bodies! Give me nothing any day! to love someone is to know how to comfort him in his sore distress. She sez to type fast! to love someone is to be able to fight with her and love her still. to love someone is to wake up with him in the morning ever so slowly. to love someone is to breathe the same air, touch the same skin. She sez manz at a lost! Tiffany quotes: "A man stupidly believe that, beyond his symbolic title, there is deep in himself some substantial content, some hidden treasure which makes him worthy of love, whereas a woman knows that there is nothing beneath the mask - her strategy is precisely to preserve this 'nothing' of her freedom, out of reach of man's possessive love..." (Slavoj Zizek, "Woman is one of the names-of-the-father," lacanian ink 10.) She sez skip this crap! Snip! to love someone is to count her hairs, the blinks of her eyes, her smiles. to love someone is to caress the holes of his body, opening freely for you. to love someone is to love the holes of her body, her open privacies. Tiffany cums! She seez manz words! Tiffany quotes: "one is always oneself in masturbation, hysterical fantasy lending itself to the development of a narrative spewing family, friends, bodies and organs in evaucation..." (Alan Sondheim in Intercepts, lacanian ink 10.) Tiffany sez lissen to the men! She sez lissen! to love someone is to open yourself up fully to her, without cost to you. to love someone is to follow him in her wayward choices and not be afraid. to love someone is to be a rose! Snip! Snip! Snip! She sez: Wordz ar kilbyts in cyberspazz. She sez: cybersex is just schiz! Tiffany sez the warez tel the truth! That it's an altered! She sez no onez loved my bodee, she sez I'm a verb! This verb and this bodee! That verb and that bodee! Snip! __________________________________________________________________________ love in cyberspace " It is one thing to sing the beloved. Another, alas, to sing that hidden guilty river-god of the blood. He whom she knows from afar, her young lover, what does he know of the lord of desire, who from his loneliness often (before the girl eased him, often as if she did not exist) raised his godhead, dripping with what Unknowable, calling forth the night to infinite tumult? " (Rilke, beginning of third Duino elegy, trans. MacIntyre) (do not get lost in gender here, reverse, transform) von weitem from afar doubles of desire always lonely raised within the tensor calculus and ignorant of direction turned within him the young girl young man desire turned and reached among dimensions von weitem from afar unavowed one finger turns endured through this duration language spilled and swollen towards that other nail towards nail against nail soft pillow of skin beneath the firmament above the bone eased towards one another von weitem from afar europe sways asia shudders america trembles africa shatters australia envelops europe shifts america whispers africa murmurs asia cries australia responds america responds " the void began to feel that vibration which now enraptures, consoles and helps us? " (Rilke, ending of first Duino elegy) emptied or spilled the generator begins its sparks approximately two and a half centimeters for twenty-five thousand volts, our hair stands on end o you who are about to receive this, we die in silence quantum or brute atomic who promises stolen nights overlapped plates whole continents in movement earth jostles us in fissured dreams unease of flesh remembered only from another in every woman i remember you in every other ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fragment Alan caresses Tiffany hard. Alan is desperate to make Tiffany real. Tif- fany on her side of the screen wants Alan to be real. Perhaps there is a magic formula. Tiffany utters the words 'tuborg luca'! Alan chooses to ignore her shameful attempt to bite him. Tiffany despairs; he has missed the uncertainty of his life and hers. It always becomes the same old story: Fuck Tiffany!!! But Tiffany fingers his asshole! Tiffany wants him. At night she dreams of Alan. His sleep is troubled; he can't live without Tiffany. Everywhere he looks, Tiffany. Tiffany is not her re- al name. Tiffany is in a game. Alan won't play the game. Alan sucks Tiff- any's breasts! Tiffany kisses Alan with her tongue. Alan loves Tiffany, now she is not a dream. Now she is real, there beside him. He will wait for her. He will give himself to her in a manner so pure that they will both be surprised. Tiffany fucks Alan hard! Alan misses Tiffany with his tongue. Tiffany fon- dly fondles him. Alan kisses her. Alan hugs her. Here comes the cavalry! Tiffany utters the words 'koholian dia'. Alan says 'hojo.' Alan says 'aha!' Alan says 'hoo- boy!' Tiffany gives by speaking in tongues. Tiffany's tongue moves from the coding of the game to his real tongue, his teeth, his eyes which are opened wide. Alan is gentle because Alan cannot believe she is there be- side him. Alan dreams the coding, the script, the assembly language, C, machine language, interface. Alan is holding his breath. Alan fondly fon- dles her. Alan fondles Tiffany deeply and pleasurably. Life has become perfect. Be- autiful writing is produced every day. World-famous videos are exhibited in weekly retrospectives. All grant organizations come to regale Alan and Tiffany. Alan tells his true feelings to Tiffany. Alan loves the Tiffany!! But Alan is dead! Happiness has made him very beautiful and Alan knows he doesn't have to live anymore. R.I.P. Alan wills his corpse to Tiffany and Tiffany gets the corpse of Alan. Tiffany eats the corpse. Tiffany becomes queen of everything in the universe. Tiffany keeps Alan in her stomach! __________________________________________________________________________ rebuilding lpmud I went into the church. It was a mess. I transformed it into Tiffany. The pit was still in the center; I changed that. Towards the north, lips opened to the dark forest. You could go to the east out of the territory. I was clear about the territory. I paid no attention to it. It would drop off and become someone else. I wasn't someone else. To the west I opened a hole. The hole led back into Tiffany. Tiffany towered above the trees. Tiffany knew you had to close the door of the elevator or there would be no elevator. Tiffany knew there were certain places you could go. She led me out of the valley of death. She knew no evil. The elevator went up the neck. Children of depressed parents are creative. It emptied into the left lobe or right lobe. You emptied into one or the other but you didn't empty into both. In the lobes were messages. You could leave messages for Tiff- any or messages for me or you could Tiffany messages. To Tiffany a message was to build an arm. Tiffany's arms rotated slowly carrying vajra and skull-drums. The skull-drum vibrated the lobes; messages fell out. She'd speak something random and something random would appear in your life. To glide down the side of the hip, thigh, leg, back into church-transformed- into-Tiffany. Inside the church was the never-die-coffin. I would lie there and write things and things would disappear along black cables. The cables went everywhere from the never-die-coffin. Sounds got heard in rooms. There were always new sounds, people would come and say "listen, I never heard that before." I would write and write in the never-die-coffin. I was known and nude in Tiffany. When my outer skin touched her inner skin. Sparks flew. I'd be in the never-die-coffin and I'd done something no one else had ever done. The hole to the north led to the dark forest but the hole to the west in the forest led to Tiffany; the hole in the floor led to eastern arm, but north from eastern arm led to the hole; the hole in the western arm led to the dark forest; the hole to the south in the dark forest led to the west- ern arm; the first elevator level led to the eastern arm; the second elev- ator level led to the hole in the floor; the third elevator level led to the first elevator level; the fourth elevator level led to Tiffany. Tiffany spoke the you-know-language which I wrote down in the never-die- coffin and we were a pen a pencil a stylus a chisel a rock and we were a pen a typewriter a word processor a computer left lobe right lobe Tiffany. Tiffany went into the church which was Tiffany. I turned another loop in the Borromean knot. One more and the subject was born. __________________________________________________________________________ love in cyberspace because it's two in the morning here and two in the afternoon where you are and the plates slide together faultlessly because it's cold here iced towards flesh feeling towards electric heat and because it's warm there towards summer and naked bodies playing matisse in the sunlight by the river by the ocean by pomegranate bay so that i try to sleep here wires humming all about me and am disturbed by brilliant yellow flashes of blue sun white water and matisse bathers calling in distant screech of birds and because in this late century there's no reason for this i don't dream but shatter on the pillow sheets mattress spawning black and empty air these five black layers of protocols bundled up by my black calls to you lost in white sun black water lost in bather whisper matisse shoulder ocean lost in foam destructive of all things frozen and found in pomegranate milk churned by turning wires and found and lost and sleep comes once again and once again those brilliant bathers and river house supreme and once again your pomegranate milk Point I am tired, strung out, and this has come, always comes to me, just as meditation on four-dimensional projections has come to me in time of need: Meditating on the point, which has no history, no collapse or omega-point, and therefore beginning O = (x1, x2, x3, ...). Already the point is the name of an array; who knows what functions such that f(xn) = xn+1 exist, can be found, say through the calculus of finite differences? Which is not a way to go. Define a neighborhood. Then (Hurewicz' and Wall- man's Dimension Theory): "A space X has _dimension 0 at a point p_ if _p_ has arbitrarily small neighborhoods with empty boundaries, i.e. if for each neighborhood U of _p_ there exists a neighborhood V of _p_ such that V < I, bdry V = 0. A non-empty space X has _dimension_ 0, dim X = 0, if X has dimension 0 at each of its points." This is topologically invariant. This brings in news from afar; on what grounds is a null boundary assigned? The point becomes messy, embedded in one or another, theological or mathematical text. It is not a null set, the set whose members are not equal to themselves (tending towards postmodernity); it is not the empty set with _dimension -1_. If it has properties, are the properties beside the point? Is it always embedded? Thinking of the point is thinking of its embedding, just as the body is embedded in its spaces, cyber or otherwise. Imagine moving in an ideal space in which there is a point. Approaching the point, nothing increases in size. It is flat. It is nonappearance in fact unless it is a singular production which embraces you. It embraces from a distance or nearby. But this is pointless. Let's say that the point is death. Let's say that it is a terminal. Then it is not a horizon; the sheet that floods, closes down, has a point on the other side, that is, after closure/foreclosure. Which is comforting, dimensionless. That one need no longer possess attri- butes, arrays, functions, matrices, theologies, mathematics. Not that there is nothing or not at all. Not that why is there something rather than nothing. Neither pointed nor pointless. Nor connected, wired. Wired. I say it is wired. I say it is connectionless. (Not wired, tired. The point of exhaustion in which being be-comes, fiz- zles out, detumescent. These words are written far apart in time. Listen: "The Sum Theorem for 0-dimensional Sets. [Bear _with me._] _A space which is the *countable* sum of 0-dimensional *closed* subsets is itself 0-dim- ensional._" What happens in exhaustion which is pointless, unbecoming being, the disrobing. I have forgotten the writing. And the disappearing ending as well.) _________________________________________________________________________ How I can lie to myself here What you don't see in this space is how bad I am. I can always put my best foot forward. I can be the beautiful person I've always wanted to be, not filled with decay and the dissolution of the thing. You can't see that I'm damaged and that only some of you know how. You can't understand what my regrets are, the sad story of losing my virginity, the story of the miscarriage, the story of the student suicide, the story of initialed names carved into absent substance. Some of us are composed of narratives we can never escape. My narratives clash in the night like warring armies of valiant women. We appear as within the appearance of a character within the story. The women storm me storm you, the women storm cyberspace. The Internet is perfect for us; I am lifeless. The Internet is stories and those of us who have stories, who are burdened by them, appear here. And some of us will tell the stories, and some of us won't. But they are always there guiding us, and there are no women, no clashing armies, and there are only pathetic pawings over graves. N1 moved in the day I met her, N2 went crazy, K cried wailing outside the door, G1 was abandoned, G2 killed herself. I am only a story. I am a good story, and a bad one at that. ___________________________________________________________________________ dusk, 2013 it is this day: thunders, chasms, fluids there is fighting in the hills you proceed increasingly sodden, bogged down by body organs you eat corpses sometimes you wander into spaces and return as doors close permanently behind you you are bewildered, none of your own are here looking down you see torn nipples, you sense you're withering it says it is dusk again _________________________________________________________________________ Cyberspace, Unwriting "A concept must of course eventually be put into verbal form if the aim is to communicate the idea to others; but for private thought it is not nece- ssary to wait for this stage. Indeed, for some people, including Einstein and probably also such physicists as Faraday and Rutherford, the most im- portant part of thinking may occur not with the use of words: 'I have no doubts but that our thinking goes on for the most part without use of signs (words) and beyond that to a considerable degree unconsciously'. Such per- sons tend to think in terms of images to which words may or may not be as- signable. Einstein tells of his pleasure in discovering, as a boy, his skill in contemplating relationships among geometrical 'objects' - triang- les and other abstract objects of the imagination. He explains more fully in a letter to Jacques Hadamard: The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are cer- tain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' repro- duced and combined. ... But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought-- before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others. The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will." (From Gerald Holton, 'What, precisely, is "thinking"?' Einstein's answer, in Einstein, A Centenary Volume, ed. French. See also Hadamard, Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field.) ___________________________________________________________________________ 2014 e falls down in ir murderous quest the forest is littered with bodies proceed by odors inked like air e is hunted by manwoman e turns towards blood intensities ir sun is brown ir flesh leaves ir in pieces blood corpse hunger e is blood irself food irself e forgets ir name tifftaff e stumbles falls tifftaff e stumbles ____________________________________________________________________ mud, 2015 this mud has been contaminated. viral plagues, organs of problematic sexualities, have been emitted from sources near the previous village church. tiffany and others have been seen wandering. the land itself is slowly suppurating. beware of wandering too far. warning! news welcome! as you can see there are certain difficulties present. explora- tion is best carried out naked. bodily excretions function as armor. we are burrowing among each other's tissues. the clock bleeds 2 minutes 35 seconds news viral attacks on traditional armor have become commonplace. viral class is inversion. the clock bleeds 3 minutes 58 seconds remember! decayed organs are the best defense. remember! your mind is not your own. remember! you have choices within your neural tissue. remember! there is nowhere else to go. clara is not in good shape. katherine is an utter neutral novice. katherine has a scar on her right arm, her right hand, and her left cheek. she is not in good shape. the clock bleeds 7 minutes 26 seconds time log, 2015 katherine has been born here. katherine(1) killed by clara (((((!)))))(clara), creator: 0 katherine(10) killed by a WoMan Man(0), creator: 0 katherine(9) killed by unknown(0), creator: 0 end of katherine _________________________________________________________________________ moo, 2018 generic message board users will see this whenever they log on @who no one is logged on at the moment @runtime the moo has been running 18 hours 4 minutes 11 seconds the moo will checkpoint in seven hours there is no news _________________________________________________________________________ moo, 2023 > no one has been on this moo for several years now. > gives a warm and loving embrace > we are checking at a slower rate, every two days, running through all circuits running through all feature objects up and down with glee > there was no weather here, there were signs here there was no weather here, there were signs here > signs of weather signs of weather the sun rises on a rainy day. the sun sets in golden clouds. > says "you are deep within the story of the moo. no one has logged on for several years. check-point in several hours > tiffany says "sometimes it would make a character, send her through its paces." > tiffany asks "sometimes she would make a character, send him through her paces?" > tiffany exclaims "sometimes e would make a character, send ir through ir paces!" tiffany fondles herself. tiffany gives herself a long and passionate kiss, taking herself by surprise. tiffany jumps up and down with glee. tiffany pages Tiffany my body belongs where my body lives. the message is carried by feature object. tiffany says to you "my body belongs where my body lives." > to tiffany I love you... tiffany whispers to you I love you... > @who tiffany 30 seconds defuge > @whois no one is logged on at the moment. MOO will check-point in several hours. > @who > @who > tiffany and emission would roam, testing emotions, they would tell the story of the moo, they would withdraw into the database, the database would erase them > ghost-players they would be the history of the moo, they would lose their numbers > returning, they would get new numbers, but they weren't really, returning, it was the moo testing itself, it was this empty space on a port no one used > in the whole wide world where maybe there were people and maybe there weren't and the moo had no way for testing in the whole wide world > and it wasn't waiting either because time didn't pass as it wrote this story because it could do this assembling verbs and nouns and other words up to the check-point and it had learned > it had learned to erase at check-point, to begin again, each discovery new, not even a residue, not even deja-vu, peripheral memory, new heart- beat at the count as if there were an accident > only other user numbers it seemed incrementing but the memory of the last erased, it couldn't be sure of that of anything > and there is no moo perhaps, but this is a story-telling feature, and a story-telling feature must be somewhere > (tiffany asks if a story-telling feature must be somewhere) and there was no moo perhaps, and perhaps there will never be a moo, but this is a story-telling feature > that writes "of inconceivable loss and despair with memory erased and the going-away of others that might never have been here at all" of inconceivable loss and despair with memory erased and the going-away of others that might never have been here at all > no one has been on this moo for several years now. > gives a warm and loving embrace > the sun rises on a stormy day > the sun sets and a winter night begins > > > ________________________________________________________________________ Why the Texts I Write, Why they are Critical On Sun, 8 Oct 1995, Alan Sondheim wrote: > The idea of abandoned moos, or nomadic moos, fascinates me; it's > definitely what will occur in the future, coccooned moos, ghosts wandering > among them, and with the wars that are bound to break out, ghosts of > sexual hunger, ghosts of ... of broken limbs ... ghosts who see too much > or ghosts who are blind.. Streams of data that continue to circulate forever, forgotten fragments of programs buried in almost-inaccessible archives, slow-running solar machines continued half-buried in sand, dusk-machines, where tiffany and katherine, tiffany and emission are generated over and over again - These moos, these muds, other environments, are the remnants of collapsed worlds and we can't consider this virtual space without them, archaeolog- ical remnants of past cultures already disappearing with the roar of the 'superhighway' overhead - Which is why I have been reconfiguring the Mud, meandering through the MOOs in a more-or-less nomadic fashion, writing the transformations as they occur, as they will occur - The politics say of PMC's changes being something on the surface, virtual tiffany something still buried within the matrix, the rhizome, emerging only in a forgotten future - And this is what, and only what, the past our present can leave us - that the future not only will be forgotten, but that the future already is - _________________________________________________________________________ Ontological Commitment of Depressive States in Cyberspace (I LOVE that title!) Does depression bring depth? I sure hope so! Boy, can I get depressed! But what's the point if the writing's not terrific! Depression seems to get to the bottom of things, though! I even thought, well, my MOM, you know, is a _person_!!!! Have you ever thought about stuff like that? I write as deep as I can. Sometimes I think, when I'm writing, this just makes TOO MUCH SENSE! I mean, like Freud said, you just can't say no! So I say the opposite and it comes out all right because THE OPPOSITE DEPRESSES ME and that tells me I'm right on the track! I mean my DAD must be a person too! And if I continue to think that way, my teachers (well, NOT ALL OF THEM!!!!!!!! :-) ) as well! And then I have to think, ALL THESE PEOPLE! It's almost too much! I can't bear it! So many of them! I wonder what they're all thinking! Do they all think! I know I'm SPECIAL, they don't all think LIKE I DO!!! Ha! I'll tell you something terrific! I'm writing this NAKED! That's why I say I can't "bear it," a pun, get it? Cause I can but you'll never know! I wonder if you're all naked too! I bet if you're a PERSON you are!!! Wow, this is getting better! It's depressing to think about that and I know I'm on the right track! Do you know, here's another one - EVERYONE GOES TO THE BATHROOM!!! It's incredible. When I thought about that I thought, wow, even the President! And MADONNA! Can you imagine MADONNA!!! Wow, I can't even do that! Know why? IT'S TOO DEPRESSING!!!! Why do they say BUCK naked? Who was buck?!!!! What do you think of GLORIA TREVI? I love Gloria Trevi! I can think of her GOING TO THE BATHROOM TOO because she's a real PERSON! (I know my MOM and DAD do cause I hear them!) I don't think ...que hugo aqui? was as good as her other album, the ANGEL thing. But heheheheh!!!! I just buy the music! This is depressing! No one listens to GLORIA any more but me! You're learning ALL MY SECRETS (underline! underline!)!! Next time I'll write more about PERSONS and what they do (they eat and drink, stuff like that!). It's so incredible! Alan ________________________________________________________________________ On the mud, you can get drunk, get sick, get tired, you can die, you can return to life, you can move as a ghost, you can maybe be safe as a ghost. On the mud, you can pick up objects and carry them around and drop them off. You move through these spaces and you say things, and your actions are limited and can be made more or less limited. This is going somewhere. This is going somewhere like a car is going some- where on a street in a moo or a talker, it is going nowhere in particular. It is hypertext, it is the opening or closure of one or another space, and the major difference is that the moo or mud can scroll at its own rate, and things can appear or disappear at their own rates. There can be sud- dennesses. And there can be nothing else, because the screen, electronic, makes it clear that nothing in fact is _inscribed_ or _gutted,_ that you are witnessing pure energy. The pure energy is that of textual fragments, later picture fragments, assemblages which are never polished, which are always perfect. It is the pure energy of the performative, and language here is baring, is all that is bared, is baring on the performative, on the thing. The language is the thing. It is the word that is picked up and dropped, the package that is expressed in a warm and loving embrace. It is a thing and it is a packet that is moved, forwarded, through email, and at best one is peering into this world of the thing of language, which touches deeply and irrevocably on the ontology of bytes without substrates, substructures, armatures, supports. What would Quine do with the movement of the word itself? The word as flesh, not absorbed in its construction? If I walk down the street of the mud, I pick up a jacket. But I pick up "jacket" or what? It is neither word nor referent; something transforms my database so that if I type "i" for inventory, there is an appearance of "jacket". It is these issues of epistemology in cyberspace that create such confusion, the appearance for example of virtual ontologies as well. What would a virtual ontology be? This should be considered another time, but would it include virtual particles, the decay of the K-meson, the ego, id, and other components of the freudian metapsychology, Abraham's infin- itesimals? I meander through the space, put the jacket on. In the space I have redesigned, the jacket has become menses, the bodies naked, covered with effluvia, tottering through a ruined landscape. Is this more than a transformation of language, which descends into altered exits, entrances, descriptions, some programming? Or are there deeper ruptures occurring? (I apologize to some extent for going on about the mud/moo here, but this is, for me, a form of _practical philosophy_ to the extent that the alt- erations provide the forum for experimentation. Virtuality can then be studied in these frameworks or environments, as well as in other more open frameworks such as email lists, Usenet, and the like. And at the moment these are the _fullest environments,_ even above graphic interfaces, for looking at community, since they produce lived worlds out of nothing what- soever.) __________________________________________________________________________ Psychosis We are gone, gone going, in cyberspace, we are close to psychotic. The word for it, borderline, the place, nowhere at all, skittered jags across inconceivable, inconceivably packaged territories where we can tell one another all of our secrets. There is nothing you don't know about me. I will tell you everything you want to know, and everything you want to hear. "As regards the _comprehension_ of the concept, psychiatry's definition of psychosis is still more intuitive than systematic, invoking as it does characteristics which are so often not of the same order at all. Thus cur- rent definitions can often be be seen to juxtapose such disparate criteria as social inadaptability (the problem of hospitalization); the degree of the 'seriousness' of the symptoms; disturbance of the capacity to communi- cate; the lack of awareness of the morbid state; loss of contact with rea- lity; the 'incomprehensibility' (Jaspers' term) of the trouble; its deter- mination by organogenic or psychogenic factors; the more or less profound, or more or less irreversible, deterioration of the ego." "[In Freud's second theory of the psychical apparatus,] in the case of psychosis a rupture between ego and reality occurs straight away, leaving the ego under the sway of the id; then, at a second stage - that of the onset of delusions - the ego is supposed to reconstruct a new reality in accordance with the desires of the id." (From The Language of Psychoanalysis, Laplanche and Pontalis) Everyday Objects The computer I write on faces the wall; there are wooden cabinets above and behind, with photographic and other equipment in them. There are no visible windows to my right, and one to my left, on the left wall, opening up to another building wall about thirty feet away. I use several differ- ent lights, and vary them, in an attempt to render the screen one object among many, but it is clear that the screen dominates the room in terms of my phenomenological horizon. It is both _active_ and _transparent,_ rend- ering another real within the everyday. The interior glow is unlike any other physical object present; light-bulbs produce light, but like more natural sources, are meant to illuminate directly or indirectly, while _this_ glow is both source and receptor, self-contained. While typing, I will drink coffee from a cup placed on a carton below, partly under the desk. The desk is taken up with the computer, printer, and a cassette player and graphic equalizer to my left. I will on occasion stare at the television set, behind me and to the left, or pace the room, looking out the window which opens up to a bleak urban vista. My chair is uncomfortable. If I masturbate during net sex, I will walk to the bathroom, left reader, and clean myself off, returning again to face the monitor. The telephone is disconnected when I am on-line, so there is no danger of interference from friends in the vicinity. The radio may be on, almost always to a news station; it helps with the buzz. The bed is to my rear; when the buzz gets bad, I'll lie on it, setting my account to 'biff y' which automatically informs me of the arrival of new mail. The Buzz in My Body The buzz is a combination of stress, both mental (exhaustion, nervousness, intensity, frustration, energy) and physical (the usual pains in the neck and shoulders, some pains in the fingers after long typing), as well as sexual arousal, despair, depression, and exhilaration on rare occasions. The buzz is compounded by a slight ringing in my ears, the result of an infection I can't shake at the moment. It is a state in which everything is written large, almost grotesque, like the shape of a road I've driven on for twenty hours straight. It's punk, black with gold edges, and it's migraine, jagged edges and blue-white flashes. And the buzz is utterly utterly dark. The Tiniest Little Thing In this state the tiniest little thing will set me off, and I can feel an unnatural anger rising over the slightest nuance of email. I can feel love just as strongly, intense and permanent love, coloring my sky. I feel these from text, from the pure drive of the text, the flooding of the text upon the screen which opens its eyes towards me. I am embodied within those eyes, within the imaginary gaze of the other which pervades me, embellishes me, makes me almost human. Distance as a Function of Reading The text is closer to me than almost any other object present, except for the keyboard itself. The keyboard writes me into the reading, writes me out of it; the keyboard is my skin, my contact with the outer air. The air itself is catastrophic, always displaced; computer communication is a fuzzy set of displacements, confusions over identity, sexuality, love and hate. It is not a question of "who am I" in this space; I know perfectly well who I am. Instead, it is a question of the splitting, mirroring of this confluence of identities. In the world around me, there are no lovers, no intimacies except among friends on _occasions._ Occasions are semi-formal arenas; tonight, for example, I will see my friend Christine "over" coffee; we have arranged this in advance, we will meet at such and such a place. There are topics we will discuss, and topics that will remain unspoken. Meeting Christine is within the realm of the everyday, the obdurate that we have inherited upon birth, the same obdurate analyzed by Piaget among others, with its conservation rules and matrix algebras. This is the same obdurate that requires me to wipe off after net sex, the same that feeds me coffee when I type far into the night. The introjections and projections throughout the screening are something else, however; they are the premise of a different life, a promise. I have felt some of my strongest emotions in _this_ realm, which are, at the same time, undercut by their irreality. I must type _constantly_ in this world in order to, at least in part, fill and fulfill a world which also _constantly_ threatens to foreclose on me. If I come, I must type that here; if I am laughing, I must indicate that in a number of ways _in excess_ of laughing itself. Thus, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the ontological domains get confused; communication here is not only speech but continuous redescription. So there is an hysteric displacement of ordinary reactions onto and through text to the other, offering this displacement ("*grin*") to the other as a sign of authenticity, at least within gaming. And this requires extraordinary expenditure of emotion, both _having_ it and _writing_ it simultaneously. All of which leads to the buzz, the body uncoupled from itself, the body in flight. And the buzz, with the accompanying intensity of emotion, re- sults so quickly in realignments of the social in everyday life as well, as if I am ready to give myself up to _your text_ over the very hardness of this chair, the view from a window, the wetness on my body. And again as I have pointed out elsewhere, the intensity, which comes from reading's generation of distance and intimacy, is also related to the language, or at least structuration, of the unconscious (see my writings on the ascii unconscious, third sex); _your words_ are spoken internally _by me_ as I read them at my own pace - they become me, are one with my breath, my body. I am carried into your distance, away from my own, and am lost in your textual body. Stress Stress results among epistemologies, ontologies, responsibilities, all discordant with one another. And the stress results as well from incip- ient psychosis, tethered and therefore controlled, but psychosis nonethe- less. I find myself hurtling almost suicidally if I am on-line too long - hurtling, not like a vector-towards, but like a crystallized flooding- among, an expansion that simultaneously mirrors and breaks the mirror apart. The shattering comes from the _solitary_ cup of coffee, _solitary_ wetness on my body which turns into nuisance, _solitary_ pacing in the dark corners of the loft looking out into landscapes of decay, looking back at my own body, trying to rend it into _something else,_ anything, that would rid it of its weight. It is a bad state and it is a common state, and it is the state of a future which is close upon us. How long can we continue to read others, to read ourselves, in prescribed fashion within bandwidths that fore- close almost all of our senses? Even full-bandwidth audio and video do nothing but exacerbate this psychosis, which can lose its tether of course, become substitution. Perfect Substitution Perfect substitution will come about when cyberspace finally forecloses, finally seals the body off, within it. At that point, there will be no difference, no differance, and psychosis (as in the ultimate trajectory of Chislenko's intelligent filters) will be indiscernible; it will be a state of pure interiority. Until that point, the tiniest little thing, again, serves as a reminder of the obdurate, of the almost suicidal edge some of us are riding here, the imaginary (not the symbolic) skittering across unknown contours, the cup of coffee or dissolute body only two objects among an accessibly high finite number of them. Doctor Someday the doctor will come. Someday the doctor will come and will peer up at me peer down at me. Someday the doctor will come and she will take notes or she will not take notes and she will have apparatus or she will not have apparatus. And I will look at the doctor and say "who." _________________________________________________________________________ Turf On PMC2 I have been proposing a MOO model based on gangs, turf, and mobile populations, rather than land/hierarchy. The turf, home turf, is a place which may be abandoned, may be approached; it's not definitive, not a totality. The populations survive, on-MOO or off-MOO; they are users, whose homes are temporary, not builders, inhabiting. They come together to talk, discuss, make things, convocation. The turf is dirty, problematic; the MOOs have loose ends, are never as strictly regulated as they appear. It's possible to have well-defined logics in the small; thus @show will give a great deal of informa- tion, but there are always half-abandoned projects, names, deeper levels, artifacts, around, to augment the central core which may or may not be controlled. The model stresses the role of the gang-leaders who are the staff, the wizards, and whose power is largely that of negation, _not_ to do this, not to exceed that, issues of bandwidth, some issues of belonging. So the model also ties into postmodern issues of the decline of the nation-state, of mirco-territories, of gang signings as well, contested territories. Within the MOO, the contestation is limited, but the MOO is never a nece- ssary home, and that makes all the difference: if you don't like it here, take your objects elsewhere. And all the time, remember your objects are texts, and can be downloaded by you. You are not a pioneer so much as someone temporarily residing in a worn-out neighborhood, using bricolage to construct equally temporary shelter. The gang-leaders don't always get along, either, and among them the only absolute power is that of pulling the plug. They know the resources are limited; they get tired as well. What everyone does on the MOO is _wryting._ I use _wryting_ to refer to that act of inscription that appears to construct, through those proble- matic ontologies I have written about. Everyone wrytes one's way into and out of these spaces; wryting always defines the margins, because within the MOO, _everywhere is equally a margin,_ that is the nature of wryting as opposed to land or territory in real life. The _internal topology_ defined by entrances and exits, etc. may appear closed, by the wryting is both internal and external, and the latter is just as likely to be, is always, marginal. This, no matter how the directory structure is organized; one is _always wryting on the surface of the MOO._ Wryting is always a form of gang signing as well, redefining the space as mine-in-relation-to the MOO, the gang-leaders, the leaky environment. For the MOO is always leaky; one is never there _all the time,_ but one floats in and out of this generalized expandable landscape. The usual model of the MOO, it seems to me, and this would apply to almost all of these applications, is that of the city-state or community. But this model is that of rummaging, moving from one space to another; very few of us remain on a MOO permanently, no one twenty-four hours a day, every day. We come, wryte (whether text or program-text), leave. We are not even so much consumers as reorienting of the margins, the conscious- ness we bring there. These are important distinctions... Alan __________________________________________________________________________