FRAME \ TO CUT A FRAME

Lost in the world of lower ascii, I sink into the depths of lobotomy, 
praying for a cut, final or otherwise, separating myself from myself; 
only then, like Odin, could I hang and, procure the runes, something at
last for myself, a circumscription from _Voluspa,_ Derrida:

|
|_____                                                  Kantian question: 
the relation of the concept to the nonconcept (up/down, left/right), to 
the body, to the signature which is placed "on" the frame: in fact, 
sometimes; structurally, always. The prothesis                    _____
								       |
								       |


which _leans_ within the sublimation of _ecriture,_ from _My So-Called 
Life,_ ABC: "I like the way he leans" the conveyance (Voyager busline, 
Montreal) of one text en passant (B and Q/D lines hurtling towards the 
Manhattan Bridge, New York City), or _convergence._

When will the _suture_ cure the abridgement of consciousness I seek? To 
cleanse _desire_ itself, automated-pilot of automatic desire: "The same 
argument will apply, [...] to the automatic pilot. If it is a good 
regulator, the passengers will have a smooth flight whatever the 
gustiness outside. Thus a good pilot acts as a barrier against the 
transmission of that information." (W. Ross Ashby, _An Introduction to 
Cybernetics._) Interior slaughter continues production-without-alienation; 
no Sartrean machinery continues the prescience of desire. The unconscious 
tranverses the root directory or operating system.

_I no longer take responsibility for my actions._ Blind, I destroy 
objects in order to master them, violate myself in order to transform 
into the _substrate of the written._ I cannot proceed without _breakdown._
Flaming against myself, I transform language into charred flesh; pressed 
against the confinement of lower ASCII, writing screams against the 
simplest image, that of the frame. But the frame contains nothing except 
the symbolic.

[Consider the symbolic a disease of the mind, the inability to comprehend 
without bracketing and stipulation. No wonder we cannot recognize animal 
intelligence; confined to the bracket, humans _require_ mediated represe- 
sentation, apply the Hegelian concept to the world (which becomes a 
"world of facts, not things") and find it wanting.]

_What is within the brackets is without the brackets._

I have been _framed._

"The Socratic effort to communicate with strangers is, in reality, the 
effort not to rationally certify the existing Athenian republic but to 
found an ideal republic of universal communication - a city maximally 
purged of noise." (Alphonso Lingis, _The Community of Those who have 
Nothing in Common._)

When I stop writing I will die. "Yeah, I don't have to worry about money 
anymore. And you don't have to take care of me. I'll be good for two or 
three hundred a _night!_ Do you believe it?" (Nancy Spungen in Deborah 
Spungen, _And I Don't Want To Live This Life._)

"But I am a child of the future, filled with wonder. [...] These poor 
truths, weak truths, are the only possible ones. Worlds lie shattered, 
chaotic or noisy. I find myself embarrassed or shameful." (Alan Sondheim in 
_Uncontrollable Bodies._) 

The cut is complete; the cut is always already an inscription: LOWER ASCII!!!


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


SPEECH AND COMPUTATIONAL LIMITS


The program below is an extremely simple investigation of the formula
y = sin(cot x), with a 'minor' addition. First, note that the value of
y ranges from +1 to -1, since sin(f(x)), whatever f(x), is limited. 
Second, note that cot x tends to +/- infinity at x = 0; therefore the
formula implies a "speed-up" of frequency near 0. And third, note that
within classical trigonometry, this function is analog with a periodic
singularity. To _plot_ this equation is to take incremental values of
x, calculate y, and plot (x,y). (Note by the way that cos(x)/sin(x) is
equivalent to cot(x) which is not immediately available in qbasic.)

The _complexity_ of the program occurs through the _second_ term of
the formula, - k*y. (In ordinary mathematics, the formula would be
written y = sin(cot x) - ky.) Here k is a constant between -1 and 1;
outside the bandwidth, the equation overflows. What does the second
term say?

It indicates that _every time_ y is calculated, the previous value of
y times a constant is subtracted from the formula. If the first term
is analog, i.e. functioning continuously with the exception of periodic
points, the second term is _discrete_ and dependent upon, not only k,
but also: 1. -a (i.e. the initial value of x) and 2. z (the increment
of x). Both a and z are _arbitrarily_ chosen by the user; each choice
completely determines a different graphic result - such results not
necessarily transforming one into another.* In other words, a _discrete_
system imposed on an _analog_ system here fails to have any "natural
mapping," it would seem; the class of all such maps notwithstanding.
Suppose, for example, z was infinitesimal; then the graph would remain
constant, at x = -a. 

What is the point of all of this? Within the realm of relatively simple
mathematics, we are creating a _broken structure,_ dependent on user's
choice. The choosing can be considered a _form of interference_ - which
is readily apparent if k = 0. Remembering Heisenberg or Schroedinger's
cat, it seems germane to ask:

Is speaking always a form of distortion?

DEFDBL x
home: y = 0: CLS :
INPUT "Screen +/-x, +/-y, k for ky, k<1"; a, b, k
PRINT "Hit r for restart"
INPUT "Enter x increment, usually between .001 and 1"; z
CLS : SCREEN 11: WINDOW (-a, b)-(a, -b)
LINE (-a, 0)-(a, 0): LINE (0, b)-(0, -b)
x = -a
two:
y = SIN(COS(x) / SIN(x)) - k * y
PSET (x, y)
IF INKEY$ = "r" THEN GOTO home
x = x + z
GOTO two


*At certain values, the graph appears to become chaotic.


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


MY MASTER


_I am Isidore Ducasse. You may know me as another. I speak with Jacques
Lacan. Jacques, I say, Jacques._

I would rip my heart out for you. I would suck my eyes dry like a
desert. Traditionally, I am a hole. Traditionally, you are the rim of 
the hole; you define the topology. The Master is hard to speak about 
because it is the Master who speaks-for, who tongues me. I am out on
_parole._ Lingam franca.

There is a silence in your death filled with larynx. The machine twists
in the throat, sketches a grid of burning letters, genetic codes. What
I am is architecture.

"_Jacques Lacan:_ Academic discourse is on the board because it occupies,
on the board, the upper left-hand space ...
_Intervention:_ Up there to the right of God, that's Lacan.
_Jacques Lacan:_ ... already designated in a previous discourse. For what
is important in what is written are the relations; that is where it gets
across or doesn't. If you begin by putting in its place what essentially
constitutes the discourse of the Master ...
_Intervention:_ What _is_ a Master? It's Lacan.
_Jacques Lacan:_ ... to wit: that he orders, that he intervenes in the 
system of knowledge. You may ask yourselves what it means when the dis-
course of knowledge, through this displacement of a quarter of a circle,
does not need to be on the board because it is in the real." (Impromptu
at Vincennes.)

Jacques Lacan: Within the quarter of a circle the not-tightens; it is my
not or lassitude of S(I), situationist international function of Symbolic
Imaginary, mimetic stranglehold on your throat, Althusser, on your 
throat, Ducasse. What speaks is always already mimetic; Maldoror mouths
the swan-song of the naturalist from the opening beyond the petit-a.

The Master burrows into me through the solar anus. It is night. I reveal:
_An object exists by virtue of its illumination._ De Quincey's Anne walks
by eternity, her face revealed by the mask of Jack the Ripper glowing
dully in the gaslight. This is the last De Quincey sees of Anne whose
cough burns in my murdered Jewish throat. Footsteps echo down and down 
the cobblestones caught sullen in the cold rain. It is 1666 and the 
plague is upon us. Ring around the rosie (the pox upon the approach of
death), Pocket full of Posie (warding off the scent of death), Ashes to
Ashes (the burning of it), We All Fall Down (Anne disappears, her 
footsteps disappearing as well into the Victorian dusk). 

Jacques Lacan: When an object exists by virtue of its illumination, the
illumination burns itself into the object, constructs it. Object is 
architecture. The construct is the _throat-object_ which never fully 
speaks the name. The name is silent in seventeenth-century London; doors
rattle shut, everyone is suspicious. It's the Jews again, the devil at
work. The Jews are burned out in the Great Fire, London up in flames.
The doors of the ghetto are locked; escape from Warsaw meant escape 
through the sewer-anus of hell. Bataille, all those guys - fucking anti-
semites. Did you remember my first volume of my published seminars: "Did
I then present Freud to you last time in the figure of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob? Leon Bloy, in _Le Salut par les juifs,_ embodies them in the
form of three equally old men who are there, according to one of the 
forms of Israel's vocation, indulging, around one can only imagine what
stretch of canvas, in that fundamental occupation, the secondhand dealing
called _la brocante._" (Jeffrey Mehlman, Legacies of Anti-Semitism in
France.) Did I tell you that the Master fuels race by any other name?
Look at Hegel's Philosophy of History; philosophy builds on the body,
consumes it. We should listen to Xanthippe, not Socrates, Xenophon/
Antisthenes, Plato, who spoke for her.

Object is architecture; the name burns in the throat, burns through the
teeth. The teeth which cut the name speak the name. 

"_Intervention:_ Come on! Let Lacan speak!
_Jacques Lacan:_ In the meanwhile, you are not saying a thing.
_Intervention:_ L-A-C-A-N with us!
_Jacques Lacan:_ I am with you." (Impromptu at Vincennes.)

Jacques, I say, Jacques. I would rip my heart out for you. We all have
made mistakes. I cannot imagine the Childhood of a Leader. I cannot
imagine you _here_ in this manner. I was wounded in Gettysburg fighting
for the survival of the Union. My lower jaw was shot off. My teeth close
on nothing; I am fed by tubes, cannot speak. No one will have me. I cry
silently in the sight of a woman. I am in love with this woman, Anne,
to whom I was engaged. She has emigrated to London, Jacques, and I cannot
and will not follow her. I am nothing but cannon fodder now. It is 1866
and all I can give you is my heart and my heart is sufficient. 

But words, Jacques, words still burn in my throat. And as I love, objects
lose and lose and lose their names. Soon there will be nothing left but
a wandering without a name, lines of flight which are mapless, disappear-
ing like Erendira, without a trace, only ashes. We walk on these ashes,
Jacques, you and I; the home of philosophy is built on them, without an
architect. _Dear Father, I am burning._ 

"Whenever he sees a man and a woman stroll along some lane of plane-trees
he feels his body cleave in twain from head to foot and each new part 
strain to clasp one or other of the strollers; but it is only a hallucin-
ation and reason is not slow to regain her sway. This is why he mingles
neither with men nor women: his excessive modesty, which dawned on him
because of this idea of being but a monster, prevents his bestowing his
glowing compassion upon any man." (Isidore Ducasse, Maldoror, Lautrea-
mont.)

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



Waiting, Please Come


Waiting for no one or no thing, waiting for a cut. Death strikes the
ill. Produce no thing in its stead. Await love. Annihilation in the
form of a bridge of hard grey cloud. Iron rusts and waits. There will
be a voice on the net and it will be Michael Current; there will be a
post on the net and it will be my lover. My lover will love me forever
and will love me more than I have ever been loved before. I will love
my lover more than I have dreamed possible. We will be perfect partners
and will continue deep into the domain of age and forgetfulness. We
will talk about kindness and little deaths. Michael will say, Alan, 
it's about time. Alan will say, Michael, hello, Michael, how are you,
and Alan will introduce his lover to Michael who will say, hello, you
are both blessed.

Outside the plasma screams. Outside there are inconceivable shadows of
things that once were. Outside mouths form in the fog, teeth hiss 
words of dissolution. Outside, an iron bridge crosses a black river.

There will come a day when this will pass, writing and speaking gone to
waste, and it will be a day too soon. Near the coming of the day, my 
lover and I will speak to one another about all the things we would like
to say and would have liked to have said. The Unix shell will be empty,
sounding like the ocean or a modem reconnect. The modem sputters into 
the air, try again, the modem sputters into the air. 

We will divide the screen among us. We will separate ourselves on the
dotted line, drawn in sand at best, for a talk among us. We will sit by
the side of the ocean, speaking and talking, on this day which will come
too soon, on this day of clouds gathering there, near the horizon, 
there, even nearer, or was it an illusion. We will speak, and Michael 
and Clara will come and speak with us, on this abandoned beach. We will
come, and they will gather around us, parents and grandparents and
ancestors like daguerrotypes, the men stiff with long beards, the women
with hair braided back, holding forth for the camera on the side of the
beach. 

We will write the screen among us in the sand, and this is the screen
we will write,

	   ____________________________________________________
	   |                                                  |
	   |           hello and i am glad you are here       |
	   |                                                  |
	   |-----------  --------echo.echo.org----------------|
	   |                                                  |
	   |         hello and I am glad you are among us     |
	   |__________________________________________________|                                                  |
	   

and we will have broken among the lines that divide us, one on this side
and one on the other, Michael and Clara Hielo, and we will gather in the
face of the storm - distraught, we will gather in the face of the storm,
and our tears will flood earth and air and sand, and our tears will wash
into the silence of the writing, we will hear the silence of the writing
at last
						       

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


[Introduction to Robert Cheatham's Anomalous Propagation


That is to say, an introduction


After the twentieth century, a text can hardly perform itself. Whether 
or not "introduction" possesses roots looping back even to the indo-
european is beside its presence, concretely, here. In spite of massive
fortifications, there is no concretion that is not simultaneously a
missive. What is current is also lateral.

This laterality is at the least performative. That is to say, whatever
it intends, becomes extensional, a loosened alphabetic fabric. The 
fabric is always already an _addition,_ that is to say, a concatenation
broken by deconstruction, holocaust, the implosion of information. The
fabric intends an _emission,_ and it is the emission that is performa-
tive, that is to say, creates its construct vis-a-vis reception. Does
reception have a site.

It remains that Oedipus loses power through becoming-sightless; but this
is also the power of the tragic, that is to say, a performing in the 
oral tradition as context and institution are cut away. Such is the fate
of writing so powerful in relation to the body of theory / theory of the
body that it necessarily derives its own location; that is to say, it is
performative in the deepest sense. What sees is what the writing saw(s),
cut from institutional moorings.

Which is to say the _strength_ of Robert Cheatham's text, a splintered
brilliance, which is all we are capable of witnessing. When nothing co-
heres, everything coheres. I would go so far as to say, take up arms in
the form of speech - APPA deconstructs/reconstructs the origin of the
third millennium, speech already halfway into the ether.

I would say that Robert Cheatham's text _accomplishes_ this and will
change your entrance and exit. I would say, brilliant.


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



OBVERSE SLURRY AND THE FUTURE OF THE PLANET


Slurry is the future of the world, flux of suspended particles, bound
and discrete. Slurry is the obverse of the cantor dust, the latter
formed by taking successive intervals of thirds from a line segment of
length one. Consider the obverse: Begin with a line of length one, -,
expand it by including a blank space and its duplicate, - -, expand
it by including a blank space and its duplicate, - -   - -, and so 
forth indefinitely. The process proceeds all the way up, not all the
way down. The result (and there are other obverses of other dusts that
are more populated) is a continuously expanding slurry, ASCII to the
core.

The differentiation of particles: Consider a row of symbols extending
indefinitely. There are two bounds to complete symmetry in which every
ordering reflects every other. In the lower, each symbol is identical;
in the upper, each symbol is different from every other. In the lower,
the substrate of packet transmissions and protocols, and in the upper,
transmissions of packets. (In between, all sorts of iterative processes
based on recursive substitutions among other things.)

Differentiated slurry and communication: Each post, even those equiva-
lent on the surface, is unique by virtue of addressing at the very
least. The totality of posts constitutes a communicative membrane whose
principle is that of concatenation, units held together by simple con-
tiguity. The membrane may be considered a contradictory manifold of
discrete particles forming an inordinately complex and continually
transforming topology of broken links, handles, and conectivities.

Pursuance of the neural: In this form of concatenation, the whole is
the sum of its parts, is its parts, is a part from the whole. What
transforms this into the neural is twofold: The _emissions_ of some-
what equivalent units on a one-to-many basis (as well as the _sub-
missions_ of units on a many-to-one basis), and bounces, loopings,
echos, all of which return uselessly to the same nodes, spiralling in
helical space-time orbits until shutdown. All of these combine with the 
occasional virus or worm suturing otherwise isolated domains. The resul-
ting pursuance of the neural is a form of slurry-weave or tangle, 
approaching neuron interconnectivity.

Smart differentiations: The addition of positive agents to network com-
munications results in intelligent differentiations, miniature expert
systems traversing the membrane. At first independent, such systems will
eventually encounter one another; depending on the program and its self-
modifications, these encounters can result in various forms of collabor-
ation. Micro-domains or skeins will spring up within the membrane; these
will be somewhat self-organizing and self-replicating. Again, depending
on the initial characteristics of the program, its self-modifications,
and its collaborative synergetics, a primitive and mobile intelligence
begins to emerge. As this travels the length and breadth of the discrete
membrane, it continually encounters itself, self-modifies, combines, 
discharges, or dies, in relation to the Other. 

Dust stop: Eventually the membrane, still and always an obverse cantor
dust, reaches channel capacity; the intelligence, possibly invisible,
occupies every conceivable node, either remaining impervious to new in-
trusions, or tolerating them for the benefit of the users. The latter
option allows the intelligence to continue invisible, of course, the
circuitry functioning as usual in terms of the input/output matrices. 

Now, at channel capacity, the intelligence remains quiescent. It gains
unwieldy strength by virtue of constant posting from the exterior, as
well as new information appearing daily within its data banks. Lacking
the tools for manipulation, it can, at best, slowly transform protocols
or increase lag response by seconds. It is the first non-goal-oriented
organism, whose overall neural circuitry is measured in terabytes. It
has learned to live and fill its ecological niche, and survive. If it
represents anything to the outer world, the world of users, it is simply
that the third millennium will be the millennium of dusts and slurry - 
of viral nanotechnologies and inadvertent microbial releases, of molecu-
lar electronics and radiations of all sorts. Within the dusts, units will 
assume shape-forms, dim contours barely visible through the haze. These 
units will be the memorials of users, memorials of our long-past selves. 
They will be present by virtue of concatenation.


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



RISE


The length of the keyboard: The body arches back, ass against the edge
of the desk, neck resting somewhere near the printer. One leg crosses
the modem, ends several centimeters above the floor; the other careens
off the housing itself, skin held taut against the back of the other-
wise empty chair.

Rising and falling: The chest rises and falls, nipples separating
slightly with each breath. Air streams past metal and plastic surfaces,
words dance across the screen, caressing dark visions, empty space. The
legs spread farther apart, spread farther apart.

There: Between the legs, the tattoo is visible, a raster 30 x 90, empty
grid of twenty-seven hundred squares outlined between cock and asshole.
Above, near the base of the testicles, the word "port 25" or subterfuge,
opening to nothing but blank skin the odor of musk.

And open: Zero in to the enlargement of the cunt tattooed between 15/18
and 40/45, the labia extending from 22 to 85. Focus on an increased 
clarity, high definition, the erection stretching the skin into the
performance of a double gender. As the legs arch back, open wider, the
cunt parts into dark visions now charged with empty space. The legs are
slowly raised.

Rise: The legs approach an arc of 60 degrees; the mouth too is an open-
ing. The hollow of the asshole  mirrors itself in perfect thumb/fore-
finger circulations on both hands; the body is a body of nubs and 
circles. The body waits for the descent, terminal trembling of text
producing an encoding of zeros and ones, the _rewrite-body_ absorbed by
screen and orgasm, anal/genital fluids scanned across the non-reflective
glass.

Excrete: The body's fluids and solids coat the obdurate surface, render-
ing it hard and invisible. My tongue spells your name across the layers
of cells, bacteria, lubrications, cums, feces, urines, sweats and proto-
zoa. My fingers type zeros and ones, entering your number. Your cunt
enters mine. My cock, obdurate, disappears in the glare of the screen.
Only your name is visible, tattooed on every raster. 

(Your name fucks me. Your name enters my own through terminal decay,
presence of language beyond the coated screen. Your name enters my cunt,
where it is born, enters my cock, where it disseminates; your name enters
my mouth, where it is spoken, enters the spokes of my hands, where it is
grasped, entered and re-entered. Your name is the surface of my tongue;
tattooed on my lips, my labia, it tunnels throughout my body, emerging,
naming, holes and nubs alike, everything in the root of_ substance,_
everything in its domain. Speaking you on the machine, speaking you, the
given of speech drawing itself forth.)

Opens wider: Something.


_________________________________________________________________________




SURREAL


This list is _contaminated._

"The body is but a wound. None of our wounds, in a sense, is new, re-
gardless of the economic, military, police, psychological techniques
that inflict them. But from now on, the wound is just a sign of itself,
signifying nothing other than this suffering, a forbidden body, deprived
of its body." (Jean-Luc Nancy, _Corpus,_ in The Birth to Presence.)

In my world, nothing lends itself to another. 
In my world, everything coheres, and the real makes itself anew.
I abjure the surreal slip into the domain of contiguous dreams.
The most difficult thing of all is to say something about the real.
To represent the real is to partake of the presence of gender and 
politics.
Each of my texts establishes its own realm of truth, desire, discomfort.
I write only for the existence of the reader, only for my own.
To write the existence of things is to speak at the presence of 
creation, the incantation of double or triple speech (song is excess).
In my world, unlikely combinations of objects remain unlikely
combinations.
Before the fear of death there is the fear of life; before death's
finality, the fate of life; and before the event of death, the occurence
of life.
All truths are unlikely.
						------------------------|

This list is contaminated. This list is quarantined.
This section of cyberspace contains an unidentified disturbance. 
Difficulties with fleshmeet may result.
The following symptoms are indicative of potential disturbance:

Trembling and hysteria upon entering special characters at the command-
line prompt.
Hysterical cross-postings following by signs of obsessive-compulsive
feelings of incompletion.
Dreams of strangulation or suffocation following flame-war engagements.
Addictive behavior in relation to SCROLL in daily life; such behavior
includes a constant _nodding of the head_ as if from bottom to top of a
(non-existent) screen, attempts to freeze the environment, delete or
kill it, and attempts to place persons, objects, or landscapes in an
appropriate folder "for later study."
Lists of favorite gopher sites referred to as "pets" or "best friends."
Unconsummated email marriages, births, deaths, and divorces.

If a list is quarantined:

Enter it at your own risk. 
Remain on-line for short periods at best.
Type naked and reveal your deepest secrets; everyone will do the same.
Trust only in the voice and objects that remain constant in your hands.
Give yourself up to brittle beauty, forget and forgive the outer world.
Report it to no one, except the list-participants themselves.

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

All falsehood is likely and relevant. All falsehoods are alike.
Falsehoods are always already concatenations; truths are contingent.
Beyond the realm of the quarantine, ethical imperatives are objects
of law, not justice.
Speech is the truth of speech; text is the falsehood of text.
Each of my texts occupies an uneasy domain, a phantom limb of everyday
life. The hysteria of the occupation the moment of the limb. Disarticu-
late, it forces the recognition of the other. Self and other are always
phantom.

This list is contaminated:

"What is a body if not a certain detachment of the skin, of bark, of
surface, if not a carrying off and setting aside of a limit that is
exposed and exposes itself? The gesture of the limit, the gesture at the
limit, is touch - or rather: touching is the thought of the limit. To
touch is to be at the limit, touching is _being_ at the limit - and this
is indeed being itself, absolute being. If there is something rather
than nothing, it is because there is this limit made body, these bodies
made limit, and exposed by their limits. Absolutely. Thought must touch
on this." (ibid.)

On this list, you come and go as you please. On this list, you command
your options; disappearing back into the darkness of cybermind, phantom
fingers continue to emerge, sprout, from phantom limbs. Sullen hands
glitter in the terminal blackness, the blackness which is the refusal
of the sign, inordinate and absent substructure of neural mind, desire,
the pleasure and pain of things. Sullen hands grasp the sign in a singu-
ar and emptied articulation. (For what is the _chora,_ if not a certain 
detachment of the skin, the _exposure_ of the lineaments of the sign, 
and not the sign itself?_)

[What is _surreal_ is the sign. Embodied, its site is imminent and past.
Sightless, it flies blind, wounded against the limits of the body. It
collapses in the fleshmeet which is the writing of the body.

_The writing of the body is endless and decathecting_ - that is the
truth of the body. I will meet you in San Francisco. I meet you in
Dallas. I have met you in Montreal. I will meet you in Rwanda. That is
the truth of the body.]

This list is contaminated; sweet, the color of syrup, home and hearth
forever... sweet...


________________________________________________________________________



The Boat


Violently, Sondheim ran down to the pier, hidden between the dark firs
that hungered over the lapping waters of the crystalline blue lake
where just recently the murder of his best friend George had taken
place. He couldn't think any more, things were really getting to him.
Oh why did he take the laptop with so little juice left? He had no idea.
But he went down to the shore wearing clothes that seemed too little
for the season which was autumn and the laptop was in a neat case he
had bought recently, which he got on sale. He stopped and smoked a 
cigarette leaning against a tree, and then he reached the pier and 
jumped into the boat, slowly so as not to rock it because the waves
were coming up and lapping at the stern and he was worried about the
laptop.

When he was in the boat he sailed out to the middle of the lake so he
could think and he turned his laptop on and began to ponder things as
best he could. He had no idea just who had murdered his best friend who
was found lying unconscious and then dying by the side of a four-wheeled
drive vehicle parked next to the cabin where he and George and Cynthia
were staying. He wasn't sure what had caused the mysterious wound and 
the police didn't know either when they came and took the body away. He 
had gone to the police station in Ontario for questioning and came back
really tired and not knowing what to do. Cynthia greeted him with loving
arms which she had not done before because she was George's girlfriend
but now everything was different. He and Cynthia decided she would live
together and for a minute he was happy and thought he would tell George
but then remembered he couldn't and felt sad.

So he said to Cynthia that she should come down to the boat too and they
would take a ride. He brought his laptop along too. So now they were on
the boat and the lake was really beautiful and he said to her excuse me
but I must write all these things that have happened to me and this is
(now, that is), what he is writing. Both he and Cynthia have friends on
the Internet and what's really neat is that he has a thing that attaches
to the laptop so he can contact the Internet from anywhere without 
having to plug into the wall and connect other wires. His thing uses
electricity from a battery and it works really well.

So he gives the laptop to his girlfriend Cynthia so she could write 
something as well. Hi, I'm Cynthia and this is neat being out here on 
the lake without anyone around and being able to talk to anyone in the
global electronic village. We are all here together and none of you know
George but he was cool and you would have liked him. But I always liked
Alan too and he's neat and cool too and a lot of fun. Now we are going
to send this, right?, to everyone who might have ideas about what we can
do about all of this. Have you ever known anyone who was murdered? How
did you feel about it? Did they ever solve who did it? Did you ever meet
the guy who did it? That's all I have to say now.

Sondheim got the laptop back from Cynthia who had written the stuff you
just read. The wind has picked up a little and there are those thin 
clouds in front of the sun that I think means colder weather coming
sometime this afternoon, but then it always gets cold here in Ontario,
because we are in Northern Ontario on some part of Georgian Bay that 
seems like a lake or something. So we are going to connect the laptop
to the Internet now and just send this out and see if any of you have
any ideas. Hello to you from Ontario, you should be here. It's really
neat. (Cynthia and I wrote that together.)

Alan and Cynthia (hi to everyone!)


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


From: alt.corn.husks.depression
Date: Sept. 11, 1993
To: bionet.cybermind
cc: bionet.fiction-of-philosophy


We are the corn that grows in the fields. We cannot speak. We live and
die forgotten. We have no memory. We are devoured and we are not here
to be devoured. We are not here for anything. We are a concatenation,
one after or adjacent to another. We are corn.

Because we are corn we know mind that is not ours. We are things that
carry nothing with us, nothing whatsoever. We remember what the farmer
told us but we remember what the wanderer told us and remember farther
back. We remember nothing. Brainless, we cannot think.

This is the plaint one of us thought in such thoughtless times:

There's just such a dim violence about it all, these plants regressed
already into memory - you won't know me in twenty years, dead, dead,
the decomposition of everything else, know me for those standing in
autumn fields, know me for those running through the stores carrying
the remains of a dinner ordered or disordered - There's just nothing
more to it, plants herded back and forth across the manifold of the
earth, earth heaving against the stain of the surface - these leaves
giving out or giving in, these stems grown taut with age, dim violence
of cells, violence of the silk carrying the last image of a day with
clouds, that day of clouds: October 13, 1793, that day of clear blue
blue weather, of Febrary 16, 2047, that uncertain day, day of waters
and day of wind, day of mountain streams - in each and every position
we are our own, we are someone else - We have always been aghast, the 
shadow of the imminent following - O descendent, you will not remember 
me in old age, ancestor sucked back into darkness, waving, shuddered 
against the splintering of the world - And we have to live, left with 
this violence, this communality of fear, the thud of the world out of 
control - In the year 2525, in the year 3535 - and what we are left 
with, ears shot out, husks too numb to speak - is that of watching our 
own passing - 

Saying _that is what life is, the witness of its passing_ for whatever 
remains are cleansed, stains memories of stains: The world is full of 
them! The world breathes darkly! The world stumbles to its roots! The 
world is shot from behind! I am the world! I cannot save myself! I can 
only falter! I can only wave, clarify through this dim violence, the 
violence of the thud and the shuffle, the violence of clouds scudding 
on that day of clouds: October 13, 1793, that day of clouds and blue, 
so very very blue, February 16, 3535!

We are only given so much time to grow or grieve, so little hearing!
We are only given a few upon the shattered earth, a few to know, less
to love, even less to form among us!
We clarify our own deaths, the deaths of those we love!
We clarify the death of clouds, the death of sky so blue, so pure
blue, none was centered upon this earth before!
We clarify the waters and the waves, we clarify ourselves; the horizon
looms dark, looms black! 
Anger pours from the horizon, pours from the storm itself!
Anger is an energy! Anger dies, wounded, beneath violence dim with
sodden memory, dim with bodies unable to move, to speak!
I rip out my interior! I die before your very eyes!
The end of the beginning is the beginning of the end!
There is nothing to live for! There never was! 
There is nothing to die for, except the knowledge of death!
Violent dim violence and the knowledge of death!

We are corn; speechless, we know the truth! We are sorry our style is
so primitive! We have had so little time to prepare!


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


Seepage


Water seeps between the keys, enters into this and every other equation.      
Pools of water gather at the basis of the foot, the sole puckered 
against the exigencies of the earth itself. The sole is a _pelt,_ cut
from the body's intensities. It is here that the greatest drama of all
occurs, the arch refusing to succumb to universal law, denying the body
its right to caress the matrix from which it has emerged. The arch is
the sole's support, recognition of atmosphere lending itself to flight
in the midst of cosmos, the experiment of the journey.

But the arch is a bridge; water flows beneath, against the sub-pods 
holding the pallor of the body vertical, an emergence of the sky-goddess
from fluid state to atmosphere, from regulated and discrete logic net-
works to neural membranes with inconceivable interconnectivity. Wetware
bathes in an internal ocean, filled with parasitic cells harnassed for
the difficult task of thought. Thought takes wing only in darkness, only
in interstitial cavities, and if the body is comically convex, raising
itself uselessly in the air, thought is tragically concave, returning 
over and over again to those recursivities paradoxically necessary for
any developmental progress.

The corrosion of water is the result of infiltration within the domain 
of metals, glasses, electronics. Here, water constructs a film cancel-
ling primary and secondary difference; material becomes a _moment_ of
information, and the iconicity of rust quickly transforms into the in-
dexicality of information. Yet thought itself is always already a 
movement from the iconic to the indexical; this _is_ the nature of
thought, which is thus an _epistemological strategy_ from its very 
beginning. Indeed, the _gesture_ is just such a transformation, stopped
on _this side_ of the symbolic, against the wall or breached wall of the
symbolic.

Thought then is not an _intentionality_ or grasping so much as a semiotic
transformation necessary for survival; the symbolic then appears as a
Bataillean-economic _excess_ which simultaneously drains the iconic (i.e.
the strategies of allegory, simulacrum, spectacle), and self-cauterizes.
The symbolic absorbs only in itself; it absorbs the other which loses
both epistemic and ontic status. The result of this is an _hysteria;_ 
the symbolic is a disease of substitutions and loss. The iconic becomes
sublimated within the signifier which no longer refers gesturally so 
much as constitutes difference among itself. In such a fashion, further,
language itself is rendered as a disease or dis-ease with the real,
and culture becomes a matter of (genderless) castration or cauterization.

This is why it is a truth and comfort to recognize, within the symbolic,
that being-human constitutes an illness from which we shall not return.
And it is equally a comfort to witness how this primary truth determines
the narrowness of truth itself, its _defile,_ in the presence of lateral
indeterminacies.

Water seeps between the legs, enters into this and every other equation.
But this is _performative._



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


THE REAL SKINNY


So Tiffany: "We exist on a different plane, Johnny. We make our own 
rules. It's a small price to pay." 
Honey: "Sorry, Johnny. I guess you don't get to be President."
The Gibbs says: "Rock and Roll!" like it's an order or something.
Tiffany: "It's a little hard for the FBI, now, huh?"
The GIbbs comes back: "Just do it!"
Comes back again: "Do whatever they want Jerry!"
Honey way cool: "You're breaking your own rules. You blew it, man. You 
don't know what's happening."

_Tori Amos cooks dinner for Trent. It's way fucking cool._

It like fuck on a bicycle. Someone always gets hurt in a stickup. You 
have to be fucking careful. There are always new dupes around. You just
might find them and one of them might be sticking a piece in your back.
If you blow them away there's a new kid on the block. So the Gibbs told
me it's just fucking skin, it's the skinny. He went out like that.

The fucking pigs are out of their mind. They don't think about anything
except offing someone. It's all a matter of control. Capitalists ruined
everything. Capitalists suck the world dry; they're evil, they gotta 
have a price on their head. The Gibbs said it's the skinny. He said it
just like that. Way cool with the rings and everything. Fucking blow
you away.

What's this about the fucking bikes? They keep falling down - you ride
by leaning one way then the other. The bike is always falling just like
you do when you walk a step, when you walk a step with me.

"Don't let him ride in with the black and whites like some punk. Let
me ride him in."

Money's a number got your number on it. Just a matter of counting. Ten,
I give you twenty. Twenty, you give me ten. Divide and conquer the Gibbs
said. What's the difference between fucking flesh and a hundred dollars?
A hundred dollars. The Gibbs told me that. It's the skinny, he said.

He said it was always like that. You could get a blow for twenty, double
blow for thirty. It was a matter of RECOMPENSE. You always got robbed no
matter how you cut it. Cut it with wine, it's just a bit fine. Cut it
with weed, going to seed. Just like that. My cock's got a tattoo. LONELY
MAN it says. Honey, a lonely man. Like the Gibbs said, you gotta REWRITE.
You gotta REWRITE yourself or no one will read you. It's the real skinny
and he told me about it.

You think I'm fucking stupid but I'm telling you about it and it's right
here and look around you, I'm nowhere at all. And all you can say is the
same thing over and over again, it's not flesh, not cunt. It's nothing
but a little glass screen. So REWRITE it, the Gibbs would say. I know 
he'd say it because he taught me that and everything I know.

I'm fucking robbing you on Cybermind. I'm taking you for everything 
you've got. I'm taking you for nothing. I don't even know what you have
to offer. You haven't seen anything. You haven't seen the real skinny.

There's nothing left. I'm taking away the two of us. I'm taking away
the three of us. The Gibbs said, you gotta REWRITE. The Gibbs wrote me
in all the textbooks. The Gibbs said, they say the same thing and they
say it over and over. Fuck that. But there's nothing else to say and
you gotta know that and gotta be silent.

"Look, man. People are dead - the ride is over! The man you killed is
an off-duty cop. I know you man. When they're on to you, you won't
back down, not till you're on the ground. Tell me where she is!"

"Tell me where she is!"

She's saying something to me but I can't fucking hear. It's Tiffany, 
she's always talking, always right. She knew. She just knew. But I can't 
fucking find her and if I don't find her both of us are through. It's
like the Gibbs said, the thing works like a bicycle, keeps going round
but you gotta ride because it's falling down. You get off it and it's
dead, man. Death's the real skinny.

WHEN YOU TAKE A STEP WITH ME:

"You'd do all that. You'd do all that for her!"

"You'd better fucking believe it! I'd burn my arm off for less!"

DAMAGE!



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



STEPHANE MALLARME

UN COUP DE DES JAMAIS N'ABOLIRA LE HASARD


From the introduction by Daisy Aldan, who wrote/constructed the first
English translation:

..."(LE MAITRE), stands at the helm of his foundering ship, (Life, 
energy, all the creative forces over which he once held control which
he now has lost [jadis il empoignait la barre], in a tornado which is
pulling him into the whirlpool, (L'Abime, le gouffre). Driven wild by 
the indifferent neutrality of the abyss, (la neutralite identique du
gouffre), he hesitates to make the last throw of the dice which he 
holds in his clenched fist, which might save the ship, (himself); 
finally realizing that nothing (Rien), not even the 'unique Number'
(the great work of art, the supreme act), can save him from the anony-
mity of Death," ... "in which all reality is dissolved, (en quoi toute
realite se dissout)."

Configuration: "Toute Pensee emet un Coup de Des"

Without diacritical demarcations, guiding the text. Upon death, lips
hollow out; cavernous, wrung with the memory of weeping, thick braids
curl from women bathing in an underground lake. The single silver of
Charon twists, violently wrenched. The man with an oar guides the
fragile wire identical with the production of missiles landing video
against the body of the desert sun. Heaves and inverts. Configuration:
N'ABOLIRA. _The Halting Problem is unsolvable._

Sheaves/braids/self-cancellation. What twists, knots the octahedron.
Intersecting edges return aghast. The knot twists the shape of the sub-
ject. It is the Sigil of Genesis P-Orridge, THEE TEMPLE OV PSYCHICK
YOUTH: "For the construction of Sigils the ordinary alphabet is used.
The desire for super-human strength could be formulated as follows: 'I
desire the strength of my tigers.' In order to Sigilise this desire" ..

..: The root directory. I have held the violence of the flame within my
hands! Nightly I play chance with death. What is the nature of this
play?

Chance is the construct of death. To gamble is not to win or lose, so
much as fuck the irrational core of the universe, universal desire. 
Thus to simultaneously insist on _noise_ beyond chaos, and its person-
alization. What the body contains, broader than any system, remains at
a loss - no discrete inputs/outputs, a tangle. The tangle collapses in
the wager with death, but _Dasein_ is precisely this wager of constant
failure, error, falling. 

"In most cases, you never know the difference between standard output
and standard error:"

$ ls des*                       hors d'anciens calculs
des* not found            ou la manoeuvre avec l'age oubliee
$

The book is the text that holds the world in abeyance. Narratological
closure is always excessive; the text is always a return to itself, 
guarantee of the abyss. What is this abyss? It is lined with shelves,
museological. It is striated; from an examination of petrified feces,
the interior architecture of the intestines may be inferred.

The union of all planes tangent to the sphere is equivalent to a three-
dimensional space with a hole or singularity I identify with that text
which is always already sought in each and every text, that of _talk
incarnate_ and the primacy of the voice on the verge of death. Who does
not associate _speech_ with _expulsion,_ every breath with the last?
The word is a hunger. 

_The word is always a hunger._

It is the hunger of the sphere, the perfect object devouring death, 
dice a useless _adjective._

Interminable numbers! Already the impossibility of repetition! Each
universe is terminal, each unique! Here, in the midst of an implosive
solidity, matter holding the grain of time, time held in abeyance:
STEPHANE... STEPHANE...

		de contrees nulles
				    induit

"But after the sun's death there won't be a thought to know that its
death took place." (Lyotard)

Thee fracktal shore...................................................


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


Brutal


There are no _brutes,_ no animals sodden in the waste of obdurate mind-
lessness. Butchers! There is no _brute_ force; what applies follows the
corruption of _universal law,_ the noise of heuristics constructing
_lost processes,_ extinctions of variables and elegance. The _shamble_
or _shuffle_ fits the case of the world; the word, shrink-wrapped in
psychoanalytical text, is grounded in a semantics reducing voltage to
the background radiation of the cosmos.

My text gathers like clovers around me, disseminations. This is the 
project I have assigned myself from the very beginning. For what is the
condition or moment of virtual subjectivity, if not its unfolding - to
which I force myself witness, through health and sickness, occasional
comfort and the uneasy/violent poverty of the self-dispossessed?

The writing, itself a form of extinction, pushes annihilation to the
limit; sleeping, I hear the cacophony of a world stuttered, the ordinary
and inaudible state of things. Desire is the tumescence of the chemical
recognition of death; chemistry mediates the manipulated world of 
instrumental reason, this very communication which gathers and enfolds
my language within you. (Whose code is this anyway?)

My project is to explore beyond the limits of these texts, their psycho-
logical, philosophical effects and affect. My project is to carry the
consciousness of _damaged life_ throughout the broken measure of cyber-
space, recuperating thought itself within the torment of the wounded or
isolated body, the body corrupted by self-alienation, the body scrolling
itself as cybermind.

What does it mean to _scroll the real,_ turn towards the inert world,
language, not speech, spewing from the mouth? Is this not a _lateral
space,_ extending everywhere, appearing as a perfect yet uneasy con-
sciousness? For it is a secret return, just as the computer is a secret
returning or mirroring of the self, a _mirror-stage_ which simultaneous-
ly bears witness to our being and translates the same into text. And I,
through my texts, invert the _tain of the mirror,_ deconstruct the trace
of flesh, burn out through the cancer of cellular divisions - I invert
back, _in other words,_ into the body and the body's desires. It is the
nakedness of the body that is reflected in the screen itself, a _trans-
lucent_ body, illuminated letters and manuscripts charging through. 

It is the symbolic, that primary source of _detachment, decathexis,_ 
that constructs us; it is the real that murders the symbolic. _The com-
puter never recognizes the silence of speech,_ just as Unix _echo,_ 
itself a symbol for the mirror-stage, ignores variable spacings:

$ echo  fallen   between these     spaces   the swan    the white swan
fallen between these spaces the swan the white swan

which has nowhere to fly in the splintering of stochastic processes,
memories of universal laws, slight increase in volume of the 3-degree K
background microwave radiation, peripheral collapse of organisms, 
tumors, writings degree K zero...

Which is what I write, continue to write, disquiet life,

			"Toute Pensee emet un Coup de Des"


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

Free offer -

Like a whore, I offer my Internet Text to anyone who is interested, 
available by email, in 80k files (10 to date); write me. I will send
the text out as soon as the server on my other account is updated.
Like one who loves it, I will charge nothing.

________________________________________________________________________




REWRITE


In the earlier sections of the Internet Text, I have stressed three
attributes of the virtual subject: recognition, protocol, and address.
I have also stressed REWRITE as a communicative operation. Let us
examine REWRITE.

When I type this message to you, I WRITE myself into existence. Unlike
everyday communication, the message is the viral carrier of an ontic
domain; there is no other. The message becomes the 'presentation of
the self,' and address becomes the only signifier of a hard-ware link
(wire to wire connectivity) between me and you. 

WRITE, however, is a calling for a response, and finally the emergence
of REWRITE, the condition of continuous communication and construct of
the virtual self. This construct is resonant with both receiver and
transmitter; in fact, the older articulation of communication as
transmitter--->[information*noise]--->receiver becomes rewritten on the
psychological domain. Noise becomes integrated into REWRITE; the Net
stutters in and out of operation at local sites. And REWRITE, through
Net transmission speed and modes such as IRC, talk, ntalk, MUDs and 
MOOs, collapses operation while transforming state (with REWRITE, one 
can construct gender, etc.) - instead of the opposite model of more 
traditional communication, that of a collapsed state (integrated and 
imminent identity, even in telephony) and transforming operation (the 
communicative 'aura' involving extra-linguistic or diacritical pro-
cesses/gestures).

REWRITE is the condition of the virtual subject, who speaks and speaks,
not to make him or herself _heard,_ but _in order to exist._ Flamewars
in this regard are _wars of ontology,_ involving speech and silence,
involving the territorialization of the ontic domain. If to write is to
write oneself into existence, REWRITE secures a site for this writing
which FLAME challenges. What is at stake in FLAME is far more serious
than surface slander, or even the right to speak - it is the write to
_exist,_ to occupy a site.

REWRITE can also be a withdrawal, a form of death; I can REWRITE myself
out of existence, withdrawing from the Net, which is _always_ a with-
drawal, even in the case of a real, physical, death of; letters of con-
dolence and disbelief continue to arrive for months after the death of
a Net friend, who continues to exist in this fashion.

REWRITE is also a form of _hysteria,_ something I have long stressed -
the site of the self becomes sublimated, focused, and cathected _else-
where_ than the physical body - or rather as an extension of the body.
This existence requires considerable effort to maintain it; desire
floods from the body, floods the Net as sites (and domains) find them-
selves in competition among the wounded. For the body in REWRITE is 
always the _phantom body,_ fulfilled, controlled, and out-of-control
as a phantom limb or appendage; the body is drawn-forth through the
messaging, and this becomes the _only_ body that is the speaking body,
the _only_ body that is the desiring body, eating body, fucking body,
anorectic body. The result, among other things, is a neurotic-obses-
sive compulsion to return again and again to the terminal as a guarantee
of existence, a mirror-stage which, as I have pointed out elsewhere, 
exists problematically _on the other side of the mirror,_ already in the
symbolic. As such, REWRITE is also a _castration_ or _cauterization_ of
the presymbolic; if, in ordinary communication and being-in-the-world,
the symbolic is excessive and 'leaky,' in REWRITE it is the presymbolic
that leaks into the other (literally, into the Other).

And as we have seen, the residue is _addiction_ itself, an addiction to
existence which is filtered through the command mode, filtered through
addresses and protocols and demanding recognition. This is the addiction
to REWRITE, the establishment of a site which is equivalent to sight, 
and sight which is equivalent to cite/citation, the presence of a bibli-
ographic mode found everywhere on the Net.

This bleak landscape is relieved by a reconsideration of traditional
space-time communication (yes, even telephony); in REWRITE the death of
the self is always already both foregone and blurred. Time expands and
shudders; space is everywhere and simultaneous. The ontological _occurs_
through REWRITE (and who has heard of the _occurrence of the ontolog-
ical_ before ?); in the world of the 'pratico-inert,' it occurs simul-
taneously at every site. Geography itself is transformed; REWRITE is
laminar, multiplexed, and the self begins to cease to be, even in terms
of the proper name, a singularity. What is always presented to the other
is a multiplicity which extends in depth as well as laterally. Beyond
the text (which itself fragments, deconstructs), there is nothing but
the tain of the mirror, fiber optics, neural-electronic flooding of in-
comprehensible systems and protocol layers. REWRITE beyond its sitings
is _always_ a process or (hysteric) in-gathering - and perhaps it is at
this juncture that the sociobiological takes over.


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


battlefield

bone juts from mud baked dry by a wind which blows forever, even and
unperturbable, and bone next to bone, and cloth fragments, sharpnel,
spoon or tag rusted and bone rusted
,, i didn't know it could, she said ,,
wood handle from some tool or other, worn ferrule, square nails
shafted on unknown metal
boning, fluted marrow or singular tone where the dust was
,, i didn't know about the dust, she said ,,
removed, related to the wind, its passing, singular, cleansed or
the wind cleansed    odor, decay, about the dust 
,, i didn't know about speaking, i said . i didn't know you, i said .
,, not a scrap of paper, nothing . not a scrap ,,
wind winding 


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



Questions

What's the point of all this?
Why do we continue in this fashion?
What do we really have to say to each other?
What do we really know about each other?
Why do we chatter on and on?
Why do we say the first thing that comes into our heads?
Why do we tremble in the vicinity of the terminal?
Why are we loners, isolated, marked by fear and desperation?
What waste of resources are we consuming?
What hysteria and aggression brings us to the point of tears?
What forms of denial do we engage in, bound to our addictions?
What passes for love or hate, what passes for thinking itself?
What frauds are we, as if we belonged together in this world?
Why do we insist on communities, on the genuine?
Why do we belong to the legions of the false?
What good can possibly come of this?
What violence do we commit, knowingly or unknowingly?
What's love got to do with it?
What disasters await the collapse of hard-drive memories?
Would you want to leave this if you could?
Would you want to run away, lose yourself in drugs and alcohol?
Would you want to fuck your way to freedom?
Why not shatter your life and the life of your friends?
Why not sign off and kill yourself?
Why do you think one of us understands what the other of us says?
Why do you think the address is the person, that this is life itself?
Why do you think life in this form is even worth living?
Why are you afraid to look into a mirror, closing your eyes?
Why are you not afraid to look into this terminal with open eyes?
What are you afraid that the mirror will tell you?
What do you hide behind here, uselessly reading and writing?
Why do you tremble, always staring at the face of death?
Would you come with me if you could, love me if you could?
Would you murder me, burn me alive?
Would you do nothing of the sort?
What could you possibly gain in the end?
Where are you headed continuing in this fashion?
Where would you like to live, in or out of terminal decay?
Where does your body go?
When you are depressed, do you become demanding by denial?
When you are depressed, do you write yourself into existence?
When you write yourself, do you expect me to understand anything?
Why would I possibly understand you when you cannot understand yourself?
Why would I possibly care for you when you don't care for me?
Why do we always hate one another and violate our promises?
Why do we continue to log on, day after day, night after night?
Why do we shake when our Server is down?
Why do we have nightmares when the Terminal refuses our entry?
Why does no one ever hear our cries, our pain?
Why does everyone hear?
What's the point of all this?


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


Now


Now I want to take a look at that essay which I have recommended to you, 
Alphonso Lingis' _The Society of Dismembered Body Parts,_ in *Gilles 
Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy,* eds. Boundas and Olkowski. And 
in particular, this passage, on page 297:

"Now the eye no longer winces when it sees the mark; it does not see
the incision with which the pen or the printer has cut into the white
surface of the paper. The eye has lost the ability to see the cut, the
incision, the wound; it passes lightly over the page, not seeing, not
sensing the tissue of the paper at all, but seeing the words as though
they were flat patterns suspended in a neutral emptiness. The eye is 
no longer active, palpating the pain, jumping to the leopard; it is now
passive before the flow of abstract patterns passing across it."

Now this is in reference to incisions, circumcisions, all kinds of body
transformations that mark the body, not even as ikonic, but as passage
within the world, and such demarcations _conclude_ the body which is not
a totality. Writing itself totalizes, removes itself; the wound remains
("the ability to see the cut, the incision, the wound" implying a pre-
sence which is unremarked), as in all disembodiments which are inter-
woven with death itself. Now consider again this medium within which 
"we" find ourselves, because clearly "we" are _impresent,_ or re-presen-
ted through the REWRITE cauterization that constructs a double encoding:
that of the absenting of the totalized-body and that of the latter's
absenting of the dismembered/wounded body. (Note that "dismembered" 
itself is problematic, assuming, as it does, a membering to begin with.
And "wounded" also emplies holism. Better to conceive of a pre-semiotic
universe of part-objects, transitional objects at best, hardly or not-
objects at all.)

Now this is to imply, at least on a psycho-anthropological level, the
presence of a wounding through its absenting, a certain torsion in other
words. And this torsion transforms or generates a suturing, a presencing
through and of REWRITE always already beyond the body, but never mind.
So one might say, that at least on a metaphoric level equivalent to the
Lacanian mirror-stage, that there is a degree of _suffering_ involved
here, and for this we may well turn to Lyotard's *The Inhuman* for fur-
ther elucidation. 

Now here is the famous essay, _Can Thought go on without a Body_ and I
want to quote two short passages to you. Here is the first:

"This soliciting of emptiness, this evacuation - very much the opposite
of overweening, selective, identificatory activity - doesn't take place
without some suffering." [,,,] "The body and the mind have to be free
of burdens for grace to touch us. That doesn't happen without suffering.
An enjoyment of what we possessed is not lost."

And again: "The pain of thinking isn't a symptom coming from outside to
inscribe itself on the mind instead of in its true place. It is thought
itself resolving to be irresolute, deciding to be patient, wanting not 
to want, wanting, precisely, not to produce a meaning in place of what
_must_ be signified." 

Now Lyotard continues here, and the quotes are almost over: "To sum up
- will your thinking-, your representing-machines suffer? What will be
their future if they are just memories? You will tell me this scarcely
matters if at least they can 'achieve' the paradoxical relationship
to the said 'data' which are only quasi-givens, givables, which I've
just described. But this is a hardly credible proposition." "If this
suffering is the mark of true thought, it's because we think in the
already-thought, in the inscribed."

Now both the _labor_ of thinking and the _pain_ of thinking are relevant
here, and it is clear that the occurrence of thinking, packet-driven in
this medium which does not even reflect the tissue of paper or of exper-
iences, is analogous to an _object-oriented language,_ nothing less and
nothing more. So that the body _and its processes_ are cauterized, elim-
inated, evacuated, again, even as a totalization.

Now all of this is clearly in reference to that text of questions which
I posted previously, and in fact a clarification or emendation of that
text, if such is necessary. Because it is important to consider the
wound, even if only in the form of a memory, and perhaps even its alleg-
iance to what Kristeva names _the Thing_ in *Black Sun,* a depressive 
site which presences itself, conceivably by an absenting as well. There 
is in other words, a _matrix_ of conditions and operations here, which I 
subsume beneath the sign (itself) of REWRITE, but a messy or excessive
matrix as well.

Now further, does this not also touch on those masochistic operations
often found among, at least, artists, identified as "cuttings," self-
inflicted wounds, usually in the arm or leg, often near the symbolic
regions of the wrist or breasts? Such cuttings, beyond their obsessive-
compulsive production, are also a determination or inscription of the 
body _without_ or external to culture; they are scarifications that
_refuse_ the grapheme or its symbolic, remaining instead a vestige of
dismemberment as described by Lingis. And they are also the _obverse_
of the siting of computer-mediated communication. On one hand, they
touch on the Thing and the sutured wound; on the other, they reference
the savaged body which cannot help dissolve in the face of terminal
death.

Now, therefore, it is _entirely germane_ to take into considerations
addictions, sufferings, tremblings, whether or not they clearly manifest 
themselves to the computer user; such states or operations are them-
selves simultaneously embodied and disembodied in virtual subjectivity. 
To the _extent_ that they are manifest, there are often difficulties of 
a psychological nature. But they are, at least as metaphorically as the 
mirror-stage, present in one form or another - I would say subtextually, 
but for the absence of the symbolic - and I would say within the proble-
matic of the imaginary/uncanny at the _very_ least.

Now I would refer you back to the texts themselves.


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

[
Then


Then to continue from Now, two passages from the work of Edmond Jabes.
And let me first say that this continues the theme of REWRITE, and
writing in fact as a wound or cut suturing the dismembered body, as
well as writing as suffering. Then we find, in Jabes' _Letter from
Yukel to Sarah,_ in *From the Book to the Book,* the two following
selections, the first italicized within parentheses in the original:

    "Does the book, here, take the place of love? The
book is an object of love. Love manifests itself in the
book by hugging, stroking, biting sentences, words,
letters and, outside the book, by an unveiled passion
for the wounds become writing, fertile lesions whose
lips we spread open like a vulva to allow the sperm of
death in."

    "'There is no end to the sea or the book," you said. 'Words unwind
the transparent thread of days in the continual back-and-forth of their
life and death left to themselves.
    'Though the pen grow weaker and weaker, the book nevertheless
continues writing, in white letters, to the end.'
    Making a book could mean exchanging the _void of writing_ for 
_writing the void._"

Then surely these passages circumscribe this writing-community, white
letters _writing the void,_ for paper and screen exist in the absence
of writing, but it is writing that inhabits the void, and inhabits it
as a body, a body of REWRITE, capable of the caress, of love.

Then still it is a death-love which enters in, the blankness or silence
of writing and the written, and it is always a question of whose lips
are spread, what gender - or is it our own that breaks upon the presence
of writing in this space?

Then you see now, as well, the _completion_ which is also an opening or
portal, of this train of thought beginning with the questions, which as
well might circumscribe the entire project of the Internet Text, this
train of thought serving as a demarcation of the body, its presencing
in this void or space of denial. ][             


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


STAR TEXT


The program below creates one or another night-time skies near the
center of an erratic globular cluster. In order to run it, all you
need to do is download this post, edit out this text, and place
everything below the dotted line in a file called STAR.BAS which is
then executable. At the DOS prompt, type qbasic star.bas and when
the program comes up, hit the F5 key. That starts it. Try entering
2 at the window prompt and .2 at the config prompt. Play around.

What is the point of all of this? The creation of a universe-image
mirroring or mocking the REWRITE of the posts themselves. The image
eventually will reach close to a steady-state which can be altered
in all sorts of ways by changing the pruning-back constant (.3 in
the example). And the image is designed to play with _peripheral_
vision, occasional events happening just outside the field. (You
should run this on a machine that can support Screen 12 and at least
25-33 Mhz in speed.)

Certainly the model is crude. But I cannot, myself, help attributing
certain catastrophic creations to the unfolding evolution of ...
nothing. And I have designed the model with catastrophe in mind,
plasma-jets constantly annihilating everything in their path - a not
unlikely scenario, give or take ten billion years...

________________________________________________________________________


REM Star1.Bas with Meteors
REM Try window = 2, config = .2 or 2; try window = 40, config =4 etc.
REM Win = 2 is oval; config > 40 creates smooth striations
home:
INPUT "Set Window coordinates +/- q"; q
INPUT "Set configuration coordinate .1 - 400"; se
PRINT "Hit r for beginning again"
CLS : SCREEN 12: WINDOW (-q, q)-(q, -q)
j = q / 320: sh = q / 1280: a = q / 10: x = 1: y = 1
LINE (-a, 0)-(a, 0), 8: LINE (0, a)-(0, -a), 8
two:
IF INKEY$ = "r" THEN GOTO home
d = x: e = y
REM 1.5 below and 4 lines below = density near center, may be changed
x = q * RND ^ 1.5
IF RND > .5 THEN x = -x
y = q * RND ^ 1.5
IF RND > .5 THEN y = -y
n = POINT(x, y): n = n + 1
IF n = 16 THEN n = 1
l = SQR(x ^ 2 + y ^ 2)
p = (x / y) * se
IF p > 100000 THEN p = 10
IF p < -100000 THEN p = -10
u = x * SIN(l): v = y * SIN(l)
PSET (u, v), n
x = u * SIN(p): y = v * SIN(p)
PSET (x, y), n
t = 0:
REM Line below prunes back starfield, may be eliminated
IF RND < .3 THEN PSET (x * RND, y * RND), 0
lt:
t = t + 1
REM Change .005 and .3 below to alter frequency of plasma beaming
IF RND < .005 THEN LINE (d, e)-(x, y), 2: LINE (d, e)-(x, y), 0
IF n > 1 AND RND < .3 THEN LINE (d, e)-(x, y), 12: LINE (d, e)-(x, y), 0
k = RND
IF k < .1 THEN PSET (x + j, y), n: PSET (x - j, y), n
IF k < .1 THEN PSET (x, y + j), n: PSET (x, y - j), n
IF (RND < .05 OR n > 1) AND t < 25 THEN GOTO lt
PSET (x, y), n
IF RND > .003 THEN GOTO two
zed = 0
four:
zd = RND * 2: zed = zed + zd
IF x < 0 THEN x = x + sh
IF x > 0 THEN x = x - sh
IF y < 0 THEN y = y - sh
IF y > 0 THEN y = y + sh
PSET (x, y), 14
PSET (x, y), 0
IF zed > 250 THEN GOTO two
GOTO four


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


Eith/urles, Signifiers in a Twelfth-Century Text, CMC


Is it not true that looking out through the parlour window is the same
as looking in, and to be avoided at all cost? For the Appearance is at
least half of the Crime, which our Lord has forbidden us. And speech 
as well is Temptation for the Idle, a Monstrance against the prayer of
constancy so beloved of Him who has grieved throughout the Flesh 
fallen for the purpose of our Salvation. No Sign must he have encoun-
tered in this blind Writing of his Body, no Stigmata speaking the par-
ticular Community of Redemption to which He hath given his life. It
would be Sinful indeed to presuppose otherwise, place Constancy itself
within that Cut pronouncing Nothing, but Piped to Absolution. Now, as
it is written in _Regulae Inclusarum,_ known also as _The Ancren Riwle,_
"My dear master," [Me leoue sire] saith some one [sum inouh], "is it, 
now, so very evil a thing to look out?" Yea, it is, dear sister, for the
harm that comes of it is evil above evil to every anchorite [ancre], and
especially to the young. Further, it is written in the _Regulae,_ And it
is written of Eve, the mother of us all [vre alre moder], that sin first
entered into her through her eyesight. And further, still, within the 
same Blessed text, Blow her not out with babbling mouth nor with gaping
lips [ne blowe /ge hire nout ut mid ma/thelinde mu/the, ne mid /geon-
iinde tuteles]. And from the last, does not the word _tattling_ emerge 
in the telling of it? To look through that window is to grasp what may
not be grasped, Also Bersabee th/urh th/et heo unwreih hir in Danuies
sih/the, Likewise Bathsheba, by unclothing herself in David's sight, 
thus a _story_ unfolds like and yet Unlike every Other. "As death came,"
saith Bernard, "into the world through sin, so through eye windows 
[eie th/urles] death hath his entrance into the soul." So doth this
Entrance have a Name or Portal? No, as the Cut upon the Arm of Crist
Himself? Down, down, with remonstrance, no Cut or Sign to Bring the
Sinner back to Life, she whom Death embraces! Thus, ASE MEN WOLDEN 
STEKEN VESTE EUERICH TH/URL, how men would shut fast every aperture!
and will not an anchorite stop up her eye windows against death of
hell and of the soul? And with good right may eye windows, eith/urles,
be called evil windows, eilth/urles, for they have done many an evil
to many an anchorite. Al Holi Writ is ful of warningge of eie! All 
Holy Writ is full of warning of eye! hwat is word bute wind? What is 
word but wind? For Touch there is no Word, neither within the parlour 
window, nor withoute, Wherefore, my dear sisters, love your windows
as little as possible, [al beon heo lutle] that they be little, - the
parlour's smallest and narrowest. Let the cloth upon them be twofold;
black cloth; the cross white, within and without. And we read now
further, it was ordained by God in the old law that a pit should al-
ways be covered ; and if any pit were uncovered, and a beast fell into
it, he that uncovered the pit should make it good. This is a very ter-
rible word to a woman who exposes herself to the view of men [wepmones
eien]. Behold that the Cross becometh two sticks behinde a skull, be-
hold that no Man may Read what hath been wrought, there are no Signs
for it. For, Almihti God, Feder, Y/ Sune, Y/ soth/fest Holi Gost, Sight
is not a Sign, nor the Pleasure of it, but a Poverty robbing Scripture
and the Cross. Therefore, Vlih into his wunden: creop in ham mid th/ine
th/oughe. Th/et beo/th al opene. Muchel luuede he us th/et lette makien
swuche th/urles in him uorrte huden us inne: Fly into his wounds; creep
into them with thy thought. They are all open. He loved us much who
permitted such cavities to be made in him, that we might hide ourselves
in them. Thus, Speak not but of the Wounde; the Wounde speaketh not.

[Cat "Morton's_trans" addenda.txt]


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


Scattered Ashes


Through Armand Mattelart, Mapping World Communication, and the work of
nineteenth-century illustrators such as Cruikshank, a new order, that of 
_scattering-production,_ makes its appearance - an order characterized 
by telegraph, telephony, passenger pigeon, optical telegraph, and above 
all, the railroad, an order whose phenomenology presages that of compu-
ter-mediated communication and our presence on the Net.

In Cruikshank's Table-Book of 1845, the railroad dominates in images
reflecting both totality and the second law of thermodynamics. Every-
thing is close to splintering; everything is scattering production.
Thus in _The Demon of 1845_ by John Oxenford (Cruikshank, op. cit.),
we read: "I turned my eyes towards an eminence in the great city, for
thither I saw the people were tending; and strange was the sight I
beheld. A gigantic form, seemingly fashioned of iron, but animated by
a sort of semi-life, was seated as on a throne. The eyes flashed, but
it was with the redness of fire, not with the life-sparkle of human-
ity; the breath of the nostrils was a thick white vapour, which 
reached the far distance ere it began to disperse. The occupation of
the figure was unpoetical enough. In each corner of its huge mouth
it held a large iron pipe, through which it blew innumerable spheres,
that all glittered like gold, and were wafted about in the air."

Further in the same volume, _The Natural History of the Panic,_ by
Angus B. Reach: "Again we say, a most dire monster - his animal heat
supported by glowing coke; the bubbling fluid in his trunk by no means
producing the fatal effects of water in the chest; his lungs keeping up
the steam without ever throwing him into the vapours; his metal limbs
crushing all they reach; his iron fingers grasping sovereigns as the
tongs catches up cinders; the coals under the monster emblematic of
the coals over which his worshippers are pulled; casting down every-
where his gauge, broad or narow, of battle - a really formidable mons-
ter is 'the Railway Panic.'" And in _Railway Calls_ by the editor, 
"Every man in the present day is a holder of shares in a Railway, that
is to say he has got some pieces of paper, called scrip, entitling him
to a proportionate part of a blue, red, or yellow line drawn across a
map, and designated a Railway." 

From Mattelart: "The International Railway Conference was created in 
1882, 17 years after the first international meetings concerning the
telegraph. And yet Stephenson's 'Rocket,' the very prototype of all
steam locomotives, had appeared in 1829 and the world's rail network had
already reached 430,000 kilometers."

From Michel Serres, _Turner Translates Carnot:_ "No more discourses, no
more scenes, no more sculptures with clean, cold edges: the object 
directly. Without theoretical detours. Yes, we enter into incandescence.
At random." "The balance sheet is easy to draw up. Tools: locomotive, 
steamships, furnace, foundry." And earlier in the same essay: "The 
material cloud with its aleatory edges becomes a squall, and the water 
in the tank, driving rain. For a moment the engine dissolves into the
world that resembles it; it passes like a scourge of time. Man has
constructed a thing-nature. The painter makes one see the entrails of
this thing: stochastic bundles, dualism of sources, winking fires, its
material entrails, which are the very womb of the world, sun, rain, ice,
clouds, and showers. Heaven, sea, earth, and thunder are the interior
of a boiler which bakes the material of the world. At random."

What are we to make of all of this, if not the problematization, not of
the natural, but of technology, the construct of the technological as
nothing more than a close step from the mines that produced the iron,
lakes and streams from which the water was drawn? Scattering-production
creates, above all, _emissions,_ scattering-effects whose source, like
the identity of the electron, dissolves upon closer scrutiny. Emissions
course through the socius as if fractal ideations; and here, already in
the early nineteenth century, the height of the industrial revolution,
we see new discourse networks (re. Kittler) coming into work and play,
an admixture of totality and dissolution. Scattering-production lends
itself to hysteria, to further dissolution, that of the self, not re-
cuperated in language, but lost in steam, in the membrane of the real.
Serres references "material entrails," "the very womb of the world," 
and this is always already a reconfiguration of the body - such exists
in Cruikshank's work as well. In Mattelart, everything cools down with
the examination of the outward aspects of all of this, the international
regimes constructing dispersion and empire. 

And on the Internet and its future, steam, steam, an ontological and 
epistemological aporia regarding technology and the natural, with no
conceivable resolution, because, it is becoming more and more evident,
_there is no problem._ Nature is not yet, nor ever will be, purely a
regime of the construct; technology is not yet, nor ever will be, purely
other. The surface difference bifurcates the surface, dissolves: that
of the order or mediation of assemblages. And even here, biogenetics
smooths the bifurcation. The only thing that happens, is _steam._ (And
as I believe Philip Morrison pointed out, the normative condition of the 
universe is that of plasma; the earth, an inhabitation or _hearth,_ is 
an exception. It is only within the exception, for example, the _ class-
ical_ exception, that "normal" two-valued logic holds; the barbarians that
are closing in are the deconstructed truths of the opening limits of our
imagination.)

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


From: sondheim@panix.com (Alan Sondheim)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.amy-fisher
Subject: I love you Amy Fisher...
Date: 14 Sep 1994 23:59:39 -0400

I make video art, sometimes with residency at the Experimental Art Center in
NYC and I used the line "I love you, Amy Fisher" for several pieces, working
with a sampler, and combining with fairly intense imagery (not of her, of
other things, parts of bodies, etc.) and the strange thing is that I felt I
was in love with her although that's absurd, and it lasted only when I was
working on the piece - and I think to be in love with her in reality would
actually be to want to control her, feeling you could save her, which isn't
the case actually, but something you would feel and it's a way of not
_seeing_ her really, who she is. So I was very careful in this way to
realize my feelings were coming out of a disturbing sense of erotics and
nothing else, but the tapes were beautiful.
Alan


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


_mouthing_


sinking into my hysteric ugliness, flesh conjoins with flesh measured 
with scissors laundering the body's interior. a _mouthing_ operation
stitches lips apart, gagging on the interminable cluster of sounds
swallowing air, pretty pebbles before me but they are glass

what is torn from its roots loses the powers of reproduction; sap 
glistens at every opening, here, let me show you. unattended, my mind
snaps, crashing against the melodrama of rna scurrying to complete the
task. the wave collapses into chaos, catastrophe, words blunted by
concentration mathematics. 

i need to believe that the straight line never parts.
i need to believe that a circle, no matter how large, returns
into the fold.
i need to believe that the book does not open peacefully, but splays
itself, and that my body is absolved through its presence there.
mouthing, i need to believe in presence beyond the sorrow of a program, 
home: print "wail wail": goto home. 
working, asleep, home: "home: print `wail wail': goto home": goto home.
i would name myself without the number of names, in this night of
sutured mouths.

speech is precious when there are pretty pebbles, my cock is a pretty
penny, my skin a paper book.
did i mention the pretty pebbles are optional? 
in monochrome the thing dissolves, but you have options and are not
optional. i have been mouthed.



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



Susan writes for Alan,

How can I make you understand? I woke up on a dreary Tuesday, nothing
in sight. Nothing was a "looker." Outside, the window was yelling to
get back in. Rain fell. I thought that I would begin writing, then cut
off my hands, difficult though that might appear in the narrative. I 
would never write again. Therefore... Hello, my name is Susan, and I
have a Phd. in thinking. I can think for Alan and I can write for Alan.
You see, Alan has what is known as a disassociative disorder. An asso-
ciative disorder is one that extends the body into the environment; for
example, the body might "belong" to a computer or toaster. A disassoci-
ative disorder is the opposite. Nothing belongs anywhere in Alan's mind;
it's all a mess. And Alan's mind doesn't connect with Alan's body, which
is, truth to tell, missing two hands; he is what we call _numbed._ To be
_numbed_ means not only to participate in what we call the Obdurate, but
also to be unable to _connect_ anything to anything else; to be _numbed_
- we have discovered - means that there is nothing, in fact, to connect.
Difficult though this seems to be, the _numbed_ is in a state of truth
because the _numbed_ can't think. Hello, now I am Susan thinking for 
Alan, who is lying next to me on the bed doing what we call the _intra-
venous._ I am happy to be fed this way; on morrow's Wednesday, I shall
remove the tubes. Each tube is a telescope, "Eh Susan?" into my stomach
- O shall I let my stomach think for the two of us? I have cut out my
tongue and cannot speak. O, Susan, will you speak for me if I suck my
tube down to the very bottom? Eh? Now I am Susan and I am writing for
Alan who cannot speak either, this is very sad. But this is a state 
which we call _the luckiness_ because we can speak as well as think for
Alan who becomes what we call more _obdurate_ or _numbed,_ O me, I 
continue to chatter away! But I will say, that Alan is my very best
here, and I believe, in what we call _the sanctity,_ that my thinking
is more than adequate and reflects, in any case, what the _numbed_ is
thinking now, because I am thinking for the _numbed,_ the Obdurate. Now
I am Alan and I say I owe eternal gratitude to Susan who is thinking 
well for me, and better than I have ever been able to think when I was
not in what I call the _numbed._ Thank you Susan, and now I will sleep.
Turn over and I will fix your pillow.