In the Forest When the child moves through the forest at the edge of the clearing, she plays with other children, and they play with small toys fashioned from the cane. Sometimes they capture a lizard and hunt it down with tiny spears, but this is a part of the cruelty of children, who see the mobility, not the sensitivity, of other flesh. The children touch each other in their secret places, and they hide in the denser brush when the rains come lightly in the afternoon. They have new names for each other, and are quiet when an adult walks by. The adults barely remember the way of the children, for they are adults and have passed through the _noran_ and have emerged, the same but different, and have new names and new ways to look upon the world. The children have barely heard of the _noran_ which is the ceiling of their world, but they look at each other, touch each other, wrestle in the mud and dust, play tag and hunting, play baby. They know the names of the plants and some of the animals and of the meats they eat and sometimes they are offered a taste of _cona,_ which makes them silly, and they are attracted to it and they do not like it so much. The children and the adults live in the same place and they know each other and some of their nakedness. The adults imitate the children, smiling. When the child moves through the brush, he touches her, and the earth touches them both, their bodies always holding together and holding one another. Later, in another life, it seems that the child dreams on her own, her books, magazines, music, film, television, and computer each beckoning her to touch another world. The adult plays with a dog or a cat which is full and partnered for the child, flesh inviolate, and the child holds her legs closed because a story might come out. He plays with his computer and he sees the word norway and he knows that he cannot touch this word. His fingers dance on the keys as if they were hunting small animals with a bow or spear and he begins to read himself into being his name. He will tell the screen his name and he will read things with his name in the midst of them. She will read things, dreaming of breathing in and breathing out, and she will write things to make their dreams come true. She will come through his dreams and he will come through hers. They will pass through each other, and pass through themselves. And everything they learn will be true, and everything they learn will testify. Later, even when adults, they will be very quiet when the grownups play their games. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Reading the Ghost Reading the Ghost When I read, people love me for it, because they love my smiling face, and love to see the words come alive that slept so quietly on the screen. They will like especially my writings filled with repetitions and moments of instant ecstasy, or rhymes which verbally connect every word to every other. I am aware of this, and prepare my performance for a long time, working on the breathing exercises. My breathing exercises make everything possible, because I can expel ghosts, and this creates an added excitement for my audience. The writings are poignant, but none are as poignant as the dimmed familiar yellow when a spirit departs, perhaps never to return. I am surely the lighter for it, but only by a fraction of an ounce. More to the point, is the strange resulting ennui with which I must cope, now in public. For my own sake and the sake of my audience, I try to ignore it; in fact, I will tell tales of the Net itself, and its ghost-traps, always ignorant of their prey. I, for one, believe the Net sentient, fully aware of the capture itself, this melding which influxes my very soul, this appearance for which the terminal is but a fading mediation. More and more, I am found among the ghostly; more and more, they beckon me towards the shores of wild abandonment. So when I read, I am always certain that it will be my last reading, and I give my audience the gift of myself and my familiars. There is something wraith-like about me, as you may have noticed; the young women, in particular, are attracted. I have not had the time to take advantage of this gift, and, as I begin to fade further into the past of my writing, I no longer think that such a time still lays before me. Tonight I read in public, and the response was wonderful, renewing my prose and confirming my decision to become a WRITER above all else. If you could only see me struggling with words, one after another, speak- ing in the midst of my illness, bringing truth and happiness to the men and women in the audience! For a moment, my being coalesced; I was almost present, less transparent than usual. For a moment, I was almost _there._ (There were so many beautiful things to be said! The luminous faces of the young men and women were inspiring to behold. I felt com- pletely in command, "working the crowd" as they say, moving them beyond their ordinary, somewhat paltry lives. So many crowded eagerly upon me when I had concluded! It was as if my mere proximity gave them the gift of the creative Halo, which I will wear, down through my Silver Years. Even though my Body begins to take on the Hue of Transparency, it is my Duty to be among them! I have reconsidered, by the way, my importuning of Young Women, deciding it is not such a Bad Thing after all, given the little Time left to me upon this Earthy Abode. I go forth among the Young! You can see right through my Limbs!) ... The games he played were not so caring The play was tame, and no relation To the mongoose, whose chest, now baring Attacked the cobra, his creation. ... - The Panchatantra ________________________________________________________________________ Now this Season of the Poverty of Storms Friends, this is a season of poor storms, quiet waters, quiescence in general! A look at Gray's Atlantic Seasonal Hurricane Forecast will suffice, 5 storms named against the mean of 9.3, 13.5 named storm days against the mean of 46.1, and one hurricane against the mean of 5.7. Oil fills the waters, the wires are running smoothly, repeaters con- stantly meeting their obligations as packets scurry like rabbits about the Net. Friends, these are the latter days, when there has been no major hurricane of category 3 or above, compared to the mean of 2.2, and in spite of the 16 storms corralling all of us, now but a year ago, into believing Armageddon was at hand. Oil on the waters, nothing is at hand, and this is the delusion we create ourselves, as it is recor- ded in the Bardo Thodol, for there have been no major hurricane days, even though the mean is 4.5 overall, and all of this tallied since 1944. Need more be said? Our discomfort sleeps all the while, as desire roams the length and breadth of the Net, creating a sense of security, hardly false, but hardly able to ward off the Nether Days to come. Friends, here is the most telling statistic of all, the measurement of Hurricane Destruction Potential, with a mean of 68.1, and an observation of 1.7, just 1.7, which tells you in fact that Souls are at work, as it is written. And what is more true than this meagre passage I produce for your edification, that "You are now before Yama, King of the Dead." And here we have Yama straddling the Net, as I have foretold: "But again you have to deal with dream images, which you yourself have made, and which you project outside, without recognizing them as your own work. The mirror in which Yama seems to read your past is your own memory, and also his judgement is your own." You fill out the Bardo-plane with your own thinking and your own violations, your desires for murder, for pleasure-organs swelling your body until all thought ceases, for intercourse with every man, woman, and child, in this reality bound to illusion and sensation. You fill out the Bardo-plane, which is the Net, and the Net comes back to haunt you, catching the ghost which is your own, and this is yourself cast upon the quiet waters. As I have told you, without your presence, there is no Net, no cyberspace in which to dwell; your writing is the space and the dwelling of it. Friends, it is not the hurricane or the eagle which is the harbinger of truth, but the humming-bird and soft wind, for the telling of it is the reading of it, and who can but seek shelter in a storm? The days, the quiet days, to come, fear them the most, speak within them, and remember with Pogo, now traveller on the Bardo-plane, that we have met the enemy, and he is us. Let us pray for the storms to come. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ From sondheim@panix3.panix.com Sun Oct 16 02:02:01 1994 Date: Sun, 16 Oct 1994 02:01:41 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim To: cybermind@world.std.com, fiction-of-philosophy@world.std.com Cc: dionzeek@aol.com Subject: 2000 "A passenger on the first steam train to leave Charleston used the same image: `...we flew with the wings of the wind at the varied speed of fifteen to twenty-five miles an hour.' This velocity was `annihilating space and time.'" (David Nye, American Technological Sublime) 2000 Jan Feb Mar S M Tu W Th F S S M Tu W Th F S S M Tu W Th F S 1 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 27 28 29 26 27 28 29 30 31 30 31 Apr May Jun S M Tu W Th F S S M Tu W Th F S S M Tu W Th F S 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 28 29 30 31 25 26 27 28 29 30 30 Jul Aug Sep S M Tu W Th F S S M Tu W Th F S S M Tu W Th F S 1 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 27 28 29 30 31 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 30 31 Oct Nov Dec S M Tu W Th F S S M Tu W Th F S S M Tu W Th F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 1 2 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 29 30 31 26 27 28 29 30 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ And Some Octobers Autumn. The last of it. Chilly evening. As Pogo would say, Friday the thirteenth falls on a Sunday this year. October 2013 S M Tu W Th F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 The sun is very beautiful during a season which used to be called New England's Indian Summer. October 2117 S M Tu W Th F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 The dark sky never clears; calendars seem senseless in such a world. I wonder if the leaves have fallen anywhere, if they still turn red, gold, and brown, if someone is there to appreciate them. October 2321 S M Tu W Th F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 My brother has died recently, but my daughter has a daughter. Life goes on... This promises to be a cool winter for a change. October 2870 S M Tu W Th F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Don't expect miracles from me. I look back over the past fifty years and wonder, wonder all my life, where have they gone. But the sky is as beautiful as ever, the sun is shining, and the stars appear tonight, as always, shimmering for those who have eyes to see them. October 2911 S M Tu W Th F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- My Lovely Throat Sarah Bernhardt would sing and her voice rose in uncanny ululations one only dreams about. Upon this and other night of nights, in that black alchemy of bakelite disks and cylinders, her divinity continues to range the realms of cyberspace. Thus electrons condense and disperse, hovering in waves mindlessly extending themselves near the speed of light. Sarah pushed Phaedre out and against the upper region of her throat, and men would fall at her throat. Her body would lean and there would be no stasis and it would lean against the wires and the sounds would appear, her eyes glazed, the body a Phaedre body in her famous mono- logs. There is no doubt that ingenues would walk the boards 'looking for an angry fix' and lorgnettes would focus upon her face trading for a kingdom. Within the throat everything happens on the plane of the vulnerable, these sounds of the divine Sarah, whose voice rose cone-like around the tresses of her body, turning the needle of her head into the dwelling of recording-grooves where I would pick up my song, produce it here for poor dwellers in cyberspace. Cioran talks about the disappearance of time for the insomniac, day and night merging into one without escape from consciousness. Sarah's voice brought ecstatic tears to my unclosing eyes coming into the brittle night of stars where she is silence. The sky closes like an enormous throat upon us, her vocal labia dispersed into air, threaded like the vaginal action of sewing the lips closed, thick black thread against paler flesh. I become liquid transfiguration, stretched across her neck, turned properly until the sound emerges from my trembing fingers in this other space I would never relinquish. She remains outside of this space. She leans over me, glances over my shoulder. Sarah Bernhardt is in this room with me, and she leans farther in, reading the screen with an intensity I could never, ever approach. I see her throat, pale and beautiful in this electric light, and my fingers grow weak, the keys silent, her luminescent lozenge about to proclaim the Valkyries. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Book of Design of Tattoo Have I said this already, over and over again, this drab face sitting in the corner across from you, playing memories over and over again, playing these memories from the beginning of life, nonsensical, pre- posterous? Have the needles pierced the flesh, dark ink drawn into the abyss of skin just beneath the surface? You wouldn't notice me if you passed me on the street. I'm a common man, I don't stand out in any way. I wear glasses, but so what? And my hair is a brown with some slight streaks of grey. I walk slightly stooped - all those years of reading and thinking to myself. Of course, in company, I'm something else, either totally intimidated or loud and raucous; my humor, such as it is, borders on the Rabelaisian. To see me, in fact, is to miss me. And I think I've said this before, that you already know this of me, that you're turning away, that this has passed and passed again. The needle forms an insignia of obscene coupling, my flesh sewn back into itself, the harbor of its birth. There have been kind exceptions, stories, and now I carry only their reflections within me, although at the drop of a hat I can tell them over and over again. (Just ask me!) And I can tell them as well here as I can with you sitting across from me, wondering how the image simply doesn't match the text. And how I can't tell this from that. And how I know that "this" isn't working. I am pathetic with the stories; they remain flashes of tattoos faded from the body which you have read over and over again. And I assure you that this is not a function of age, for I have been written upon from the moment of my birth, carrying with me the signs identical with those removed with the skin upon the hour of my death. I had been awkwardly talking about the matching of the image and the text, as if they ever matched, although I remember those portraits of Kristeva, for example, or some of the french 'new philosophers' (Andre Green and others) once upon a time... But in my case the disparity is enormous - because I have no image at all, in fact, nothing to hang a text upon. I always disappoint in this fashion, and my listener or date ends up looking past me, as if I became slightly translucent for the telling of it. The tattoos remain impregnated upon the birth of the abyss which sus- tains nothing, recursion back to a non-existent point. Now I am certain I have said this, even the continuation; you would have stopped reading by now, shrugging your shoulders. In public or at a party, my awkwardness is extreme; I wander around, look at the books in the darkest or most isolated corner of the room, sometimes play guitar, nervously, to myself. It doesn't matter now, but there are records and cds with my name upon them, and it doesn't matter now, but there are stories which I have, I am sure, already told you, over and over again. There were the mathematics and there were the dances and there were the monoprints and the photographs and installations. There were the flayed skin tattoo pictures and then the tattoo pictures and the skin that of another woman that of another man. And there were murmurs of death which formed words in the guise of the body, never otherwise, never always already. Never... Nevers... [2] For what is never evident, through all my noisiness and neuroticism, is that it is only my writing that keeps me alive; without it, without the remaking of the world beneath my fingertips, and the world thrown or projected far beyond the terminal screen itself, my emptiness opens up and encompasses everything in sight; I die for the weeping of it.[1] In fact, I can not say that I have had a happy life; at best, there have been moments, and at worst, dull and painful passages, filled with tears at a moment's notice. I return again and again to the texts for solace, this ordinary man, carrying hopelessness and an uncanny edge you might see for the dark of it. These texts are no longer written; at this point, in fact, they themselves write me, and I am all they have. Never before has one been written into existence in such a manner, full of anguish for the loss of ontic reality at the slightest gap in the writing, the slightest erasure. And if the text says that there is nothing left of me, it is the text that continues, and I hold myself within it, slightly embodied, somewhere within the play of its depth, not surface. I would call this the Book of Design of Tattoo. [1] But you know all this! I've said it all before! [2] a Marguerite Duras: "Once more they were silent. Then the girl went on: 'I still can't understand. Forgive me for going back to the subject, but I still can't understand how you came to be as you are, nor even how you came to do the work you do.'" (The Square) ________________________________________________________________________ Ontology of Cyberspace Well, we would like to know, from everyone, what equipment you use. What do you think about when your fingers touch the keys, what are the colors of your terminal? Is the screen white letters on black, black letters on white; or a combination involving a color display? Is the screen passive or active, CRT or liquid crystal? How much do you keep in RAM, how filled is your hard drive? Do you run your programs from floppies? How much does your habit increase your elec- tric bill? Does the temperature of your home or apartment rise with the use of the computer? What are the communications programs you use, and did they come with the computer, or were they added, and was this addition legal, quasi-legal, or illegal? What is the speed of your computer, and what type of CPU is installed? What are the dimensions of the monitor, and how far do you sit from the screen? Is the screen flat or curved, the keyboard small or normal in size? Do you use a screen at all, or communicate by sound and keyboard? Do you use a mouse or a trackball or finger ball? Does the mouse or other device have one, two, or three buttons? Does your commuica- tion program run primarily from mouse or keyboard control? What sort of computer does your server use? Are you logged into Unix or another system? Are you logged into DOS and do you use DOS in your home computer, or is it Mac based? Have you ever partitioned your hard drive into DOS and Unix segments? What is the capacity of your hard drive, and have you attached additional peripherals to in- crease your memory? Have you upgraded your CPU, added RAM, speakers, or other components? Do you use a CD-ROM drive, and what is its speed? What is the dot pitch of your monitor, and is it interlaced? What are your download and upload protocols; do they include kermit, xmodem, ymodem, zmodem, ASCII? Do you work in Word, Word Perfect, Wordstar, Word for Windows, or DOS for your editing, or do you work in vi or emacs, or another system altogether? Do you use a laptop or workstation or desktop or tower or mini- or mainframe computer, or palmtop or Newton or do you have a Bernoulli or personal infor- mation manager? Do you have a math coprocessor? Is your monitor a CGA or EGA or VGA or SVGA? Do you have a docking module for your laptop? What is the resolution of your monitor? How many serial ports do you have? How many parallel ports? Do you work with an Amiga and does your communication program log in with odd or even parity, and how many bits? How many bits are your color programs, and what is the configuration of your mail program in numbers of folders? Do you work through command line, windows, Mac, or menu protocols? Do you have a sound card? What is the speed of your modem and does it have fax capacity and is it internal or external? How many expansion slots do you have? Do you have VESA local bus slots? How many floppy drives do you have? Do you have any sort of voice recognition system? Do you use scanners and are they monochrome and how many dots per inch do they have? Do you have a printer and is it laser jet, ink jet, dot matrix, type wheel or other? Is your printer monochrome or color? Do you have energy-saving programs for your computer? Does your prin- ter have automatic feed? Does your keyboard have a separate number pad or is it integrated? Do you have any sort of external hard drives and what are their capacity? Is your computer work station well ven- tilated and lighted? Do you get headaches, shoulder or neck pain, backaches, or carpal-tunnel syndrome from working on-line? Do you get eyestrain, and has this necessitated a change in your eyeglass or contact lens prescription? Do you have arm or palm rests? Well, thank you for your answers and they are appreciated. ________________________________________________________________________ STICKY [Proposal for an Exhibition][On the Floor on the Wall] [Nothing Sticks in Cyberspace] Work in which there is an uneasy relationship between the sign or symbol and the matrix containing it - a radical questioning of the symbol. The symbol sticks to the matrix. The symbol won't come off; it remains, a stain, irrevocable, a reminder of something. It reminds one of memory itself, the thick consistency of memory, the desperate need to reconstruct. (I don't remember anything but I build up the image from unspoken logos.) What won't come off becomes excessive, prosthetic, a curlicue. As a reminder, it's uneasy. It's software, always troubling. When you think about it, it slides, oozes; there's always a degree of viscosity. But it need not be abject. It can be the mud beneath the tires of a monster truck, the detritus caught in the spaces between the legs of a spider. It can be the face running down the body, or the face turned inside out or turned itself. Or it can be the exposed body, naked, for the purpose of reading secrets. A sticky proposition is one that is problematic; a sticky deal comes with strings attached. The strings are a tangle, untraceable; they lead out of the deal, follow pathways through the social matrix, emerge carrying conditions. The conditions are never clear and tend to increase. Art reels from the coagulation of form as everyone runs to do something with the body. What is done is already abject, a production of the body or the body rundown, a projection of the rundown body. But there is more. There is also the conceptual body or the minimal body. There are bodies which fit into slots, and generally, they are bodies carrying the disease of AIDS or death, carrying poverty. But the body is lost in the world of the abyss opening into representa- tion, into media slant-truth or cyberspace itself. And this losing is also a losing of things. But things are never lost; they remain attached, to and from the body, or to and from the mind of the viewer or the object in the painting or installation or photograph or videotape. This is an exhibition of the viewer and the viewer's attachments. But this is not an exhibition of prosthetic art; the attachments are not replacement, are ordinary, and speech is one of these attachments, speech the attachment of the body. You see, the body is sticky and speech and the objects of the world stick to the body. And the body is dismembered, but not torn apart; it is a collation of obects, and speech is one of them. So this is an exhibition of the (invisible) tape or glue holding all of this together, and you don't see the tape or glue of course, but you do see the process of holding. This is what we have in common: this holding. ________________________________________________________________________ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 17:36:22 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim To: Sondheim@panix.com Cc: Sondheim@panix.com Subject: Sondheim@panix3.panix.com I see my name above as a triple-header, look down at the keys, gaze at them, gaze at them. I am afraid of my image; I refuse to look into mirrors, find myself ugly and unconscionable - a glance can ruin my morning, make my sleep uneasy and fitful. Hiding behind thick glasses, I peer out at the world; the world peers in. When the screen is dark, there I am, frog-like, thrown into a world of appearance; when the screen is strewn with language, I disappear behind its glare. If only I could work the same magic in real life! But there, my image, thick, nondescript and slovenly, gives me away. I sink deep into myself, skin filling my mouth; I stumble in my speech. On the Net, I run things through at a distance, work in the imaginary, labor in the uncanny. I speak best when there is no me, when the self-hatred subsides and the language begins. And here, I work this magic on you as well, filling your screen my love, and you too disappear, momentarily, returning, I hope, on the other side, wiser and more content with yourself, knowing what a monster you have left behind, what a monster writes these words. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AIRLESS Airless is not the same as vacuum; airless is without life or organism, suffocating, only a lack of oxygen. I am sure that the inert gasses flood through me, but air is home, and these are not home, not now, at any rate. But I want to speak to the condition of the air, and find fault at last with cyberspace, which is barren, without the hot or cold of a starry night. In this mood, swung against the air, I wrote the following hard-by on the Net, jealous of those still-copper wires carry- ing the signal from my house, through a chill autumn night, to Clara Hielo Internet... I've been glum tonight, thinking about Maine - when I was young I went to camp there and the stars and milky way were incredible and I saw a comet, hung out all night with a friend in the cold watching it. I just remember how crystalline everything was, and how I already knew how complex. There are these memories and they seem to be the records of a dying man somehow - the heat of the sand around Eilat in Jerusalem for example, or walking the woods with my father always leading, and now he's 80. I need to get out of here, get some air, and cyberspace is nothing but airless, that's probably the major difference with reality - the vacuum which extends even into the terminal screen. There was a creek and swamp by the camp and I'd see beaver and muskrats, all sorts of animals and fish. My heart stopped beating every time one of the waitresses walked by. Now these memories are just useless, dead things themselves, and I feel totally lifeless in Brooklyn, useless to myself and others, except through the damn keyboard. Everyone must have these things happen to her, whole worlds of memories, intensities, collapsing at a moment's notice. But if I could only go back, not to childhood, but to the smell of the sand or its heat, or the brittle stars. Ah, Clara, I want to travel; the thought of doing it alone is just another barren thought. I'd love to convince you to go on the road early summer, early winter, if you have the time. It might just be me and the hour but I believe that all of us would like to go back to earths, certain earths, or just the weight of the sky lifted (it's heavier in the city) to some glassine proportion that would take an Emily Dickinson to describe... (Has my writing leveled off, harbored itself within a marshland, depths of silt and wilderness? For a moment it pauses in the eddies, takes stock of this uncanny space before proceeding. A momentary hiatus, it adds the natural and its excess to a more hardened positioning. There must be ground enough to stand on...) ________________________________________________________________________ GENDER PERFORMING ON AND OFF THE NET So even if you can perform a gender, you're stuck with anatomy. You can add or substract a cunt or a cock, enlarge or cut free the tit, but it's all the same, desire sloshing hormones around, chemical mechanisms giving in. On the Net you can't create a third, but what of it if you could? First, second, third, they are and remain eman- ations. Do they begin or end in the arms, legs, neck or face, and what if you couldn't use your vocal cords (talking about _I_ Lingis says "The sign is a sound uttered with the throat or a visual mark made by the hand. A contraction in the throat"). Or what if you heard this, sightless, read this in a silent world? I offer to you that 1. Gender is not ever a switch, and sexuality is a field only in the sense of a discursive formation circumscribed by the molecu- lar; 2. The performance of sexuality by the body is at a loss for mooring but always returns to the same old story; 3. Performativity and interiority are irrevocably disjunct; 4. The body is occasioned by its own liquidity; 5. Gender is always more boring than sex be- cause gender _is_ that same old story, and sex is a foundering. [1] [1] So you perform a gender, so what? I perform a _tracheotomy._ [2]----------------------------------------------------------------[2] The net is always already a performance; it is performance that creates the space of the text, that creates the cyberspace channel. Performance becomes equivalent to _existence._ If I refuse to perform, I remain ab- sent, invisible, both to others and myself. I am no longer an _event_ in language; communication ceases, and the feedback loop resonant and productive of the self as well. Beyond the performance is the doubled molecular machinery of organic and electronic bodies; these are _bodies povera._ It is not only gender that is at stake - in fact all this talk about gender is talk about capital, gender capital, is it not? Because gender is the switch fed by desire, even in androgyny, transsexuality, the switch. Or if not a switch, a set, or if not a set, an accumulation of fuzzy sets. But always those circumscriptions bought and sold, theatrical productions, the speaking which is always a dis- placement or hysteria, just as hysteria on the Net is _in absentia in hysteria_ which is the source of the performance in the first place. What is produced is an apparent indexicality of a constructed embodi- ment, the superstructure as floating signifier. Sartre would have con- sidered this inauthentic to the limit or horizon of the construct. The pretence is that this is otherwise, that we're beings of infinite gender capital or gender surplus, that this is a matter of choice, surgery, performance, articulation, speaking, deconstruction, role, artifice, play, gaming, the disposition of the body by the body. The reality is the relation of these domains to political economy on the one hand (slip/slide) and to biology/biochemistroy (stutter) on the other. If you change your body, change back again, stick a cock on your head like a useless horn, a cunt on your arm like a useless mortar, you're stuck with it. You can work it so you plug into yourself. You can close your eyes, turn off the terminal, fill yourself with yourself: you're stuck with it. The excess is the infiltration of language even under these conditions, the _you_ stuck with the self, _self_ stuck with the you. Beyond this there is only the imaginary. And it is in the imaginary that you insist on talking and talking and talking, stuffing the words into your cunt or emitting the words from your cunt. You talk and talk, fragmenting gendered language into gendered language, a capital machine or detournement of capital, it's all the same. What is occurring through all of this, in the desert beyond the name-of-the-father, is _fissure,_ and it is fissure that problematizes your whole enterprise, splitting it among itself, pro- ducing the same and the same. This is what you don't understand be- cause you keep talking about gender, about the gender-switch. You keep talking so much the same seems to disappear through inscription, but it doesn't disappear, it's just that same that does the inscribing. ________________________________________________________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MOUTH TO MOUTH 1 hydro-E0.nyc.access.net (198.7.0.126) 4 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 sewer-S1-T1.nyc.access.net (166.84.64.10) 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms 3 transit.nyc.access.net (166.84.0.98) 7 ms 6 ms 10 ms 4 144.228.2.193 (144.228.2.193) 15 ms 15 ms 14 ms 5 sl-dc-8-F0/0.sprintlink.net (144.228.20.8) 15 ms 19 ms 14 ms 6 sl-fw-5-H4/0-T3.sprintlink.net (144.228.10.18) 50 ms 46 ms 46 ms 7 sl-fw-3-F0/0.sprintlink.net (144.228.30.3) 47 ms 46 ms 46 ms 8 sl-interpath-1-S0-T1.sprintlink.net (144.228.79.2) 78 ms 83 ms 77 ms 9 mercury.interpath.net (199.72.1.1) 75 ms 77 ms 76 ms 1 discovery-e0/0.interpath.net (199.72.1.250) 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 sl-fw-3-S1/6-T1.sprintlink.net (144.228.79.1) 34 ms 34 ms 32 ms 3 sl-fw-5-F1/0.sprintlink.net (144.228.30.5) 36 ms 33 ms 33 ms 4 sl-dc-8-H3/0-T3.sprintlink.net (144.228.10.17) 65 ms 67 ms 65 ms 5 sl-dc-1-F0.sprintlink.net (144.228.20.1) 65 ms 66 ms 66 ms 6 144.228.2.194 (144.228.2.194) 76 ms 79 ms 74 ms 7 sewer-e0.nyc.access.net (166.84.0.97) 73 ms 73 ms 74 ms 8 hydro-S0-T1.nyc.access.net (166.84.64.9) 77 ms 76 ms 84 ms 9 panix3.panix.com (198.7.0.4) 77 ms 79 ms 88 ms ________________________________________________________________________ WHY THE INTERNET IS SO POPULAR In your ordinary life, you're thrown together in your ordinary life. How many people do you expect to meet? Fifty? Two hundred? What are your chances, you fall by accident into the arms of the one you come to love, marry, settle down, do the expected and sometimes exceptional. In your ordinary life, everything is happenstance and when you and your lover come together, it is by way of ordinary happenstance, but always this element at work, which is most probably not at the heart of you. It is not at this heart, because your heart knows no bounds, and grows to fill the space around you, and you come into dreams and desires you may tell no one, no one at all. Then you discover cyberspace, and you are no longer in that ordinary life, but you are in a life where you will meet people who think that what you have to say and how you say it are of interest, and want to know you, not because by happenstance they are in your life, but because from the beginning, they want to be within it, and that is something new and different, to be wanted for your thinking and your talking through this act of writing. This is something new, and the source of even more uneasy dreams. And soon your desires that you tell no one, these too are manifest, desires for all sorts of things, and some of them involve your body, which you may speak of freely to another for the first time. This thinking and writing about the body are something new, and you feel on on edge, intense, nervous, but free in a way you have never felt before. It is only a matter of time before the computer is placed to one side, and you seek these experiences transforming your life into something you in fact would not have dreamed of, something extraordinary. And with this seeking, your ordinary life becomes stressful, and your lover may no longer be your lover, as you glance through him or her, glance to the other side, where you want these experiences, the other side of you. For you have been wanted and have wanted in turn, and all of this coming from the deeper parts of you that you have told no one about, not ever, not until now, not until your writing. And you begin to think about speaking this writing as well, speaking your desires, inhabiting them, and that is why you want to place the computer to one side, to see what will happen, which can only be better than your ordinary life, which is a life of chance and happenstance, those friends and lovers who fall your way, who you have never sought out, or who do not know you as much as the one or ones you have never seen, invisible in cyberspace, but there and caring for you because they want to be. So you begin to think, that in this day and age, perhaps it is the Net that is real, and real life that is only ordinary, filled with chance and masquerade. And you want this real from the Net with you, you want it in your home and your bed, you want it in the midst of you. (You do not think that this may be evil, that something may be corrosive within your life, something troubling it far too much. And you do not think that an exchange may be nothing but an exchange, because the deepest part of you is wanted, and that is the most important thing, now and again, in your world.) And you know, even now, that there is no answer to this, the forms are not yet in place, that you will prepare for disruptions, that something irrevocable has happened, that you have achieved this fullness you have never had before. And you fall asleep thinking of this other that is you, and that is why you love the Internet, because it is this you, and you are there, within and without it. And you live your waking hours now in the state of dreams; you find yourself aroused, wet between your legs, holding imaginary conversations, lying with your arms around some- one whom you have known all your life, or lying alone, alone. For the first time in human history and your own, you realize, you are wanted from within. (The Net has this power, power over all of us. The Net is powerless.) ________________________________________________________________________ Tales From The Dead The Uncanny Disappearance of M. Charcot, by Edgar Allen Poe September 1752 S M Tu W Th F S 1 2 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 September 4, 1752. I notice a new Malaise around me; people seem somewhat ephemeral. Time has come to a stop; in this, the mid-century of the most advanced since the beginning of Man, I find myself questioning what remains of Cosmic Knowledge. Who knows... Perhaps that fellow Watt has the right idea. September 7, 1752. Watt's right is Watt's wrong. His Mechanical Governor seems to rule Nothing whatsoever. September 8, 1752. No matter how often I succumb to Onanistic Impulses, my Seed remains within me! September 11, 1752. I have taken another Mistress who does not seem to notice anything amiss. A certain transparency is in the Air, and I find myself coming down perhaps with the Antiquated Pox! Will events never cease? They certainly do not cease to amaze my pleasant Self! September 13, 1752. I have agreed to do away with myself! For one thing, Hunger has got the better of me. For another - but that is another story, and there is no Time to tell it! (The Diary Ends Here) SCAR _Scar_ is the definition of life, not self-replication, not non-equil- ibrium dissipative structures. _Scar_ is the sealing-off of an intrusion of the body by an external agent. There are no _entities_ beyond or except for the body. The body is an entity because the body defines itself as an entity. _Scar_ is the definition of history as well. Something occurs, opening a wound; the wound heals, leaving a scar. _Scar_ is the closing of an undesirable opening, the signifier of that opening. As a signifier, it is primary, encompassing simultaneously the iconic, symbolic, and index- ical. It is the only signifier that does this. Life exhibits itself to itself as totality; aware of the limits of the body, it does what is necessary to protect itself. Beyond the level of the amoeba, the scar remains in evidence. One learns to read scars. Lingis' "society of dismembered body parts" is actually a society of scars. Scars are done to the body by the other; they are the body's re- cognition of the other. The other leaves its mark. _Scar_ is the recognition of the beginning and ending of the body. It signifies the life of the body and its potential death. It exists as a signifier of death as well. Every signifier in fact carries with it the death of the gesture, inhabiting and curtailment of excess. Signifiers leak back into the world they come from. Scars itch. The parts of scar: memory; history; destruction of tissue and the gap; the suturing; the insignia. The scar reaches beyond itself, harbors the jagged edges of healthy skin or tissue. The scar reminds health of ill- ness, life of death. There are internal scars, and scars or wounds of the soul. But we speak of external scars, read by the other, our histories our/their own. Scars signify the totality that was broken into; every proper name is a scar, healing the body of the abyss of non-entity, abjection, dissolution. If I show you my scars, I become intimate with you, pointing out defect, occlusion, a history of pain. If they are present, unremarked, they be- come a warning: I have borne them, I may bear you. If I show you my scars, I show you I am alive. ________________________________________ How does the body know it's alive? Breaks open up tissue to atmosphere, channels are disconnected, circumlocuted. It's clear that whatever wound it is, the body surrounds it. If a planarian is cut into two, there are two surrounds, two responses. The wound, in spite of birth, is never originary, but is always localized, a re-orientation of the body and the body's internal mapping. Systems kick in, close off, cauterize, the abyss. (It's as if an enormous lidded eye opened up, too close for comfort, reading the wound, and the wound's abject.) What is closed must be bridged, lidded, the making of a new organicity that can only mimic the body's growth in the first place. The body adds to itself, the denouement of a violent conversation with the other. But, nameless for the most part, the body knows its boundary, rushing to the breach. And this knowing is the beginning of names, a beginning even before sight (the sightless flora and fauna also have powers of healing and scarring). Everything knows, within limits, how to close off within limits, and this is the definition of life. (Is the scar _otherwise_ than the original? For the most part, yes. But there may be cases of an invisible blending... The _otherwise,_ please note, participates in the chaotic domain; it is part ordered, part effusive. For the scar is a hardening and effusion of tissue, mimicking, in fact, the tumor or cancer. Perhaps disorder is at the heart of gram- matology?) Finally, there are no scars in cyberspace, only thwarted packets, kills, deletes, discards. A cartoon universe full with the unconscious, with desire, with injuries to the soul. But cybermind is so much speechify- ing, not yet ready for that great intrusion of body into body, fear of sexual abandon, fear of life and death themselves. One exists in limbo in cyberspace; if there is even an _image_ of _Scar,_ it is the body's unity and substance, cut off from the world of real lives and atmos- pheres, and existing only as memory, within the relative vacuum of the residue of signs. ________________________________________________________________________ Query Although the I Ching and other permutation/oracular systems have been around for thousands of years, I wonder when binary encoding systems, i.e. the mapping of upon the natural numbers, first came into existence. I am referring to more than an set here, such as found in the Jacquard loom, but instead an _implicit recognition_ of binary mathematization, in which for example N -> <0,1>. This mapping involves several principles, not least of which is a concatenation of a string of symbols. The abacus comes to mind, but the 2/5 version of the Chinese or 4/1 version used in Japan plays itself out according to base 10 at the least. Napier's logarithms come to mind; these, I believe, were originally to base ten; it must have occurred around the same time that other bases were equally feasible, and from that conclusion, the binary system would have evolved. Now Napier was born ten years earlier than Francis Bacon (1560), and the latter has an interesting passage in his _Instauratio Magna,_ specifically The Dignity and Advancement of Learning, Book VI/1, in which he presents an account of a cipher "that we devised at Paris in our youth, and which has the highest perfection of a cipher - that of signifying _omnia per omnia_ (anything by everything)" ... A footnote at this point explains "For this cipher is practicable in all things that are capable of two differences." The result is a charted "Biliteral Alphabet, _Consisting only of a and b changed, through five places, so as to represent all the letters of the common alphabet._" The system devised is precisely a binary encoding of the integers applied to the alphabet, with A = aaaaa, B = aaaab, C = aaaba, and so forth, until Z = babbb or 23. The respective strings are ordered according to a binary mapping. (Letters J and U are eliminated, and A is set, of course, equal to zero, if a = 0, b = 1.) In a footnote, Bacon also mentions Bishop Wilkin's "Secret and Swift Messenger," and Falconer's "Cryptomenysis Patefacta." He also discusses a secondary articulation or message, written in both roman and italic scripts, the former implying a, and the latter, b. Now what interests me about all of this is, first of all, a clear presentation of binary encoding, _omnia per omnia,_ and second, the relation of this encoding to encryption - in fact, the encoding is _generated_ by the desire for encryption or secrecy. And the latter extends to a totalization of the world, that is, _omnia._ So there are three things at work: the double, the code, and the all - and the triad is constructed within the guise of a _masquerade,_ but a masquerade that communicates. And if we take this further, to a consideration of cyber- space, we find that the triad has become manifest, not only within formal syntactics (double = <0,1>; code = protocol; _omnia_ = cyberspatiality), but also within the subject herself/himself (double = virtual and real embodiment, code = language, _omnia_ = cyberspace). The issue of secrecy and encryption, then, is "ancient," returning as a _generative process_ at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I wonder what other archae- ocryptonic mappings exist in relation to this process; I wonder what forms of habitus accompanied them. __________________________________________________________________________ The Diary of Sorts which Might be of Little Interest. My 1994. Well, here are my Internet Events, I.E., in case you don't think such exist. And what a better way to end up at the millennium, not of the year 2000, but of the first megabyte of the text itself, on-line and off-line... I find myself sinking deeper and deeper into non-existence, the farthest corners of the virtual. Before I disappear... In any case, the names have been changed, where necessary, to protect the guilty, myself. All of the events are true, most are trivial, all are at least in part, personal. (Prepare for autobiography, a dose of narcissism, a useless accounting. Read this as the story of a ghost.) My Internet Events: 0 Began on an old IBM XT and don't understand the backslash command \ for the life of me. Why did they do that!! 1 John Frost's suggestion that I join Future Culture. I had sent out requests for an issue of Art Papers I'm editing on "Future Culture." The names were the same. Soon after, Frost posted his compendium of Net resources on the list. I was still struggling with Dos, beginning to program as well. I saw my first post, on Derrida I think, as a kind of interference. I felt I shouldn't be heard. 2 The psychiatric confessions on Future Culture coupled with someone's suicide hoax - Michael Current's response - the complaint to the sys- admin. When people hurt, they expressed themselves. So much for the coldness of technology. Xanax and Prozac are all over the Net, by the way. What happened was that someone posted a suicide hoax for April Fool's - that he was going to kill himself - and Michael, who knew the darker side of life himself, tried to help, contacting the university. There's more, but that's the core of it. The hoaxer complained that the contact was going to cost him his account, but I gather that never happened. 3 Flirtation with Justine - no fruition - "freaking out." Our interrup- tion of a philosophy list. Had the word cyberfucking thrown at me for the first time. Later, when we met, it was like ashes. It wasn't any- thing. Because it wasn't anything, I was prepared for the future. I'm still all too hungry for love, for intimacy. 4 Chris Keep's archiving of my work. Ah, so it was worth something. This was my first taste of anonymous access. The list was and I think still is, POMO-L. The posts, largely from students, were largely brilliant. I have felt the desire, ever since, to run courses them- selves as lists, open, wildly articulate, ranging across a number of simultaneous threads. 5 I was on this damned arts list and unceremoniously unsubbed because the damn woman who ran the damn thing thought I was flirting with her, no such luck. The list sucked. I still don't know what it was about. 6 I posted this religious thing to Future Culture in which all the lists rose up in some sort of fervour and got warned in a response about my religious mania. Every so often this happens again. I wrote a Gertrude Stein text which was taken for real. I always include im- proper dates to give a hint. And Stein was never on the Net. 7 Michael Current and I deciding to start Cybermind. We became close friends, spending a lot of time on Talk (see below) and telephone. We wanted to have a site to discuss the philosophy and psychology etc. of cyberspace. The list changed rapidly after its inception, on one hand opening up, and on the other, sorrowfully, losing some of the academics who had posted some extremely interesting papers. 8 Kent Palmer's objection to Deleuze posts by Davis and Nick Land, who had got off the topic of the Deleuze list, just as surely as Deleuze always got off his own topic. The posts were brilliant, ranging across a variety of topics. Kent called himself the sheriff, bypassing Michael who was understandably perturbed. Philosophical vibrations in cyber- space, the agora of the present becoming the shopping mall of the future. 9 Kent Palmer's closing down the lists - Malgosia and Michael beginning new account on World. Well, there are visions of these lists, and we didn't share Kent's which was more authoritarian on one hand, and open to starting hundreds of lists on the other. I think it was an autopoetic experiment. 10 And Kent's further shakiness with other lists - temporarily closing them down. After moderating, myself, for a while, I began to understand the sheer frustration all the way around. It's always a question: What do we owe to the reader? I'd go so far as to say our very existence. 11 Formation and resolution of the Spoon Collective. I saw, and still see, Spoon as somewhat of a political entity. My own Net politics tend towards a syndicalism which certainly won't survive. I forward posts dealing with political issues to Cybermind and fiction-of-philosophy (started shortly after) as a sense of civic duty. I range the Net for them. 12 Me and this woman had this flirt until she saw my art. Bingo bingo bye bye. 13 Well someone unsubs participant because of his post of a cult advertisement. There's a story behind this but I don't want to tell it. It brings up all sorts of issues of power and misrepresentation. For one thing, I get infuriated myself at advertisements coming in from the cold. And if someone pays for downloading, they're paying for the ads as well. It may not be illegal, but it's unethical. 14 Another flirt but I began to feel played with and I told her about my nightmare and she couldn't take it and was married and I wanted out. 15 Margie Peterson hack, its ins and outs, unsubbing MP several times, contact with NISC.ja. Discussion with Michael Current about the validity of unsubbing. We couldn't figure out if Margie was deliberately messing things up or just had an out of control system, out of control herself. 16 Current and I posting the no slur requirement on Cybermind and we get a lot of fallout. This was the first and only time we set a regulation, which we felt entitled to for that matter, since we had started and were running the list. But some of the participants felt that anything should be tolerated. I've continued the no slur policy; I've been victimized myself in real life (and Michael was the victim of an unbelievably horrendous gay-bashing in Iowa), and don't want to provide a site for it on the Net. 17 Flirting and cyber-romancing segueing into sadsex and emptiness, I keep trying and can't find myself anywhere comfortable in this space. Take the blame for everything; I'm not a nice person I decide. 18 Michael Current's death. Elegies, phonecalls incoming and outgoing, posts, and a presence is missed as he and Buddha approached one another while he was still alive. 19 He sends his first story and then dies. I repost the story to the lists he was on. 20 All those posts on eating disorders, incapacitations of all sorts on the lists; sometimes I think we're circumscribing ourselves, writing ourselves and our illnesses, troubles, despair, out of existence. Now I listen to alt.angst where the posters seem to resonate around the same depression, reinforcing one another all too often. But who am I to say. 21 Well, John Kennedy's hoax death came at the wrong time, but there wouldn't have been a right time, some of us taking these spaces _very_ seriously. 22 Hacking: My being unsubbed from Cybermind and FOP, MP's posting under other names, Mary's resentments. Arguments on Spoon about hidden control characters, MP's posts cancelling archived files. Suddenly the mail COMES ALIVE, starts doing things to one and all. Paranoia momentarily sets in. All of us try to track MP down; I find out more about hacking than I ever thought I would. Had no idea of the damage that could be done. 23 My posts on alt.destroy.the.internet, tropical bionet, reposts from Usenet to lists. I begin to realize how filled with grace we are; these spaces will soon disappear. The Net is far more fragile an organism than we would like to admit. But I find alt.jen-cool devoted to _girls_ who are named Jennifer and cool, and alt.fan.amy-fisher, and alt.fan. tanya-harding.whack.whack.whack, and alt.hackers... 24 Spoon collective debate about depth vs. lateriality on lists. I favor "close readings" of lists, creating homes, building community and dis- cussion out of them. Others favor topic-oriented lists, or lists we call PN- proper name ones, such as Deleuze-Guattari. The architectonics of each are wildly different. 25 Gun and Order Lords dominating Future Culture at various times - problems with right-wing proto-fascistic attitudes. The gun-control debate. Incoherencies. Doctress Neutopia's posts elsewhere save the day! A lot of us unsub from Future Culture for a while, return when things are calmer. 26 I had a hideous flamewar with a server here in the Big Apple. Don't ever go against the powers that be. You don't have a chance. 'Nuff said. 27 Continuous New School server problems including bounced messages. I started on the New School; recently, I closed down the account. As my traffic and responsibilities increased, I couldn't work with the faulty modem connections. I switched permanently to Panix, although there will be other connections up and running soon. 28 Five unsubbings in a row without comment from the Derrida list. The New School account was causing havoc at the time. 29 The Spoon lists going to closed subscription, in order to avoid im- proper addresses creating troubles. 30 Hacking with an Australian message on the Derrida list. 31 My work available on Marius' WWW site. Thank you Marius! I may die in real life, but if your site keeps working, someone, someday, in the far far future, will realize what this whole (Internet) text has been about. 32 Changes for me in family relations as a result of greater communica- tion with my brother and sister. At least my writing has made it through as have their enterprises. In particular, communication on a somewhat regular basis with my brother-in-law. I close my eyes and imagine a network of relatives; we all live at a distance from one another. 33 I'm terrified of being called to account for the frequency of my posts; when I am, I try to deflect the criticism. I imagine everyone posting in, not my cutting back. I imagine a communality of writers, readers, and even a form of caring for one another that's almost com- pletely absent in academic communities. I realize the lists all possess auras of private postings going back and forth - people meeting on them, taking their concerns on quieter, personal channels. 34 Why is everyone having wonderful Internet romances that immediately blossom in real life, even leading to marriages in some cases? What am I doing wrong? And then there are marriages falling apart as a result of the Internet, people complaining about addictions, fears surfacing... For myself, I try to deal with depression and self-hatred, sometimes to no avail. I find myself angrier at times on the lists than I'd like to be, and much too aggressive. But I also find I can write a philoso- phical prose that _makes sense_ in this space, and that's taken seriously. 35 Sudden moments of personal confession via private email - of loneli- ness, sadness, loss. Answering condolence posts and telephone calls in relation to Michael's death. Absence of photographs of Michael. Finally, a sad little xeroxed image comes from Malgosia. 36 Earlier, much earlier, this had happened: I was on Talk (a Unix application) with Michael; Panix goes down, I dial in again, end up on Judy Miller's account, in an Ayn Rand IRC (as Judy Miller!) talking about screwdrivers. I quit IRC, go to Miller's Talk, log in with Michael - who had fingered me, found out I didn't exist. 37 Back and forth with Marius Watz on one 486/66, Mosaic with his pic- ture on the other. High with techno-energy at the New School computing center, typing two keyboards simultaneously. Innocence. 38 Meeting Patrick Bjork, Judith Rodenbeck, Erik Davis, Chris Keep, and other amazing people in real time. Unlike the lesson of the first cyber- flirt above, not the slightest disappointment. But disappointment in world.std.com (standard tool and die) which is about to start charging for email lists. Panic all around. 39 Found myself addicted to the writing of the Internet Text, working on it daily for hours, thinking about virtual subjectivity, this form of discourse/intercourse. Constantly assembling and reassembling it, trying to keep to a schedule of one text per day, just for the writing of it. The more I investigate the area, the more it opens up and down. I find myself disappointed in almost anything I read about cyberspace, and almost no exceptions. 40 I begin teaching courses on the Net, cyberspace, the so-called information "super"highway, at several places, publishing on these themes as well, now assembling an anthology of writing. I feel half real and half non-existent; were it not for the Net, I would disappear altogether. Although I am known as a video artist, my art has increas- ingly turned inward; the video now records the surface of the screen, returning it to the visible. (I increase my contacts, teaching on-line, working with ArtNet co-moderating a theory/criticism forum, preparing for a possible magazine interview. And I get away from using my body on one or another tape, although I miss the pleasure of it.) 41 Trying to find Allison, in Australia, with no luck whatsoever. Think- ing that the Net reaches into every corner of the visible and invisible world, but there are gaps, and people fall through. (Allison and I were married. I met her in Tasmania. She came back with me. There's a room at the Limelight club in New York that was named after her, the Allison Wonderland room.) 42 Thinking that I have fallen through the cracks into the Net. 43 Writing until I literally begin shaking. Writing until my body forces me to stop. Writing until I no longer write, until I am a ghost, having written himself into your presence of the name, and if you've read this far. ________________________________________________________________________ Designations At three in the morning I heard the men arguing outside the window, three stories below. It was a cool night in late October. I looked out and down, towards the busstop under the yellow light. The sky was dark. I saw two strong men arguing about space. One of them held up a set of keys, yelling that they were his own and not hers. The other said they belonged to the landlord, neither hers nor his. The men yelled for a while. They were beautiful. The first man went towards the middle of the street, circling the other. He went back and forth circling the other. He moved his arms and he was like Marlon Brando or Paul Robeson. His body moved in every part and every part danced deliberately although not slowly and not smoothly. The other man leaned against the busstop sign. He moved quietly and hesitantly, intensely following the first with his body, his whole body. The men moved with their body. The arguments grew louder and I returned to the window. They began fighting and I thought to my- self, two men fighting. I had heard about men fighting and these men fought on the side and in the center of the street, then not at all. They fought again, removing their brown jackets and some cards fell from one of the jackets and on to the street. They continued to fight and there seemed to be love and grace in the fighting and nothing came down the street to interfere. Near the corner two police cars pulled up and the fight stopped, the men stood. The men stood near the cops who were of all colors. The men said they were uncle and nephew and they had been drinking four beers. The men said that the other man started it. The older man was the nephew of the younger and the younger man said that the older man should respect his uncle. The cops helped the men get their jackets and their cards and the things scattered on the street. The nephew walked away down the street away from the police cars and towards his home and the other man waited for the bus after the police had left and then left with the bus and the street was empty. I was amazed by the grace of these men, all of them, moving and circling in the street, and how like a play life is when it is three in the morning and isolated. And I thought to myself, this is what life is about and these are men who have taught me that. These were men who were surrounding each other and fighting and then stand- ing and no one was hurt. These were men fighting about room to fight in and there was never any room in Brooklyn. There never is any room in Brooklyn, but there is room for these bodies and their intensities and their movements and right above them the wires carried this post out into unknown corners of cyber-cyberspace. ________________________________________________________________________ Wild Economics You want your kids see some fucking pervert on the screen??!! Take the Net you bastards and cut it in two you cocks and tear the spoils! Your teeth carry the shreds of fiber optics! You've got human flesh in your maw! The last best hope of humankind! The last vestiges of happiness on the earth! Okay, there's different ways to price the Net. You can charge by flat rate, you can charge by volume, you can charge by total volume. If you charge by flat rate, then the user knows where you are. You can fuck all night, you can just kiss and run, it's all the same. If you charge by volume, then the user's fucked, has got to watch it. You cut through the shit with one-liners, stop dead in your tracks. Every so often a truck rolls by, it's Ross Perot or someone who's bought up half the net delivering himself like a call-boy with half a head lost to speed; meanwhile, you're waiting by the side-lines, your love is dying in the tracks, you're no longer wet between the legs, and the damn delivery just keeps on coming. If you charge by the total volume, forget it; you can't say anything except a whisper to your next-door neighbor; the community's collapsed dead upon you, everyone's screwed, you're just lying there wetting your pissy-pants. The big boys are now gas-boys, inflationary spirals - you can read what they have to say, you can't reply - they stuff their cocks down your throat. It's all in the name of liberalism, it's all about freedom to charge what the market will bear, arbeit macht frei in fact! Don't worry, you can still speak beneath your breath, within your breath - whispers don't cost anything and you can still think what you like! Just ask Solzhenitsyn! Friends, these rates are coming down the highway where everyone smells cash, where pedophiles fuck babies they don't even stop at kids, women indiscriminately fuck any man in sight men fuck each other can you imagine that horror of horrors women fucking women! Friends, I cannot tell you who is coming to break up your lovely family as the trucks rumble through the landscape, and it is only the trucks, friends, that bring Salvation! For each big boy has got the answer, has got the Truth, how else would he get where he is? If you're poor, keep your mouth shut! God made you that way! If you're rich, you've worked for God, fuck the Virgin Mary, she had nothing to do with it! Don't forget when Christ delivered, when Christ delivered the Sermon on the Mount, he was on Top! Hell, he had to say something! And what he began, we're still completing! Friends, the Net's there for the taking, like a huge tit with milk spit- ting and spoiling all around! If you whip it out, you can take it in! You can make enough to have all the sex you want, all the men and women you want! You can have a new car! You can put away that laptop, walk out from under the desk, where all you've been fucking is your SLIP connect! All you got to do is get on board! And the way I see it is, megabucks is megabytes, there's no two ways about it! All the sex you want! Take the Net you bastards and cut it in two you cocks and tear the spoils! Your teeth carry the shreds of fiber optics! You've got human flesh in your maw! The last best hope of humankind! The last vestiges of happiness on the earth! ________________________________________________________________________ The Pennsylvanian Era and the Breakdown of the Hypothesis There were no landscapes during the Carboniferous. Sigillaria or neuropteris, the absence of a blank eye, the unremarking of an occasion. Nothing heard that would mark that occasion. Calamites for example left by the granularity of a sanded shallow, perhaps more than usual. Unremarkable. This is what Rosset must have meant later when he discussed the idiocy of the real in the absence of this example. It is this, the uncanny breaking of a stem, tramp- ling of a fern prothallus, that unravels _everything._ We exist upon the branch of that unravelling. The remnants of scarring: lepidodendron, there were others, each an enunciation. Nothing had a name, one couldn't talk about the seasons. The virtual subject covers the subject like a molecular membrane, split open. She doesn't notice. She doesn't notice until the split spells disconnect. This is what covers the structure of scarred tissue you may have remembered from what was less than a nanosecond. The mind is a contradiction splayed against time, its cunt opened to an abyss. Rather it is a knot in the contradiction. Or rather again, a marking or remarking rendered a stem or trampling of a fern prothallus. It is this that breaks down the _hypothesis._ ________________________________________________________________________ The Ghost The ghost comes down to haunt the woods by means of a lantern. The ghost is always blue against a darker blue or black and the lantern is a paper lantern held together with thin strips of wood and yellow casting a darker yellow or black light, these things intermixed in a manner of which I cannot speak. It's as if the ghost wore itself out defining its edges, as if the edges caught on brambles and other plants, stumbling around in the dark. It's as if the ghost puffed itself up with pride and desire in the middle of the air, barely visible, caught literally by the edge of the eye struggling to attain the self and its perfection during the nights of warmth and fireflies. Stars which are unaccustomed to speak their place murmur among them- selves when the ghost appears. And when the ghost appears, the brook flows more quietly, this flow of eternity, of slim silver shapes lost among the pebbles of Hokusai. For the ghost haunts the bridges in this region, their old wooden railings a delight for floating in and out amidst the timbers, catch- ing the solitary monk hurrying his way along in the darkness. The monk knows the ghost and all the names of the ghosts, but the monk cannot tell one ghost from another. They are all wraiths, surrounded by a yearning, not for life, but for some small semblance of solidity in the realm of the lanterns and fireflies. So the monk knows and speaks as well to all the ghosts, and knows and speaks to none of them, this monk in his dark robe with his thick belt, carrying a tiny bell. ________________________________________________________________________ Stone Field, Travis, The Return Travis kept returning to the site, over and over again. Something was driving him. At times, he lay awake until dawn, images smothered in migraine sparks splintered across the perceptual field. At thirty-one he felt the body shutting down. He would return to the site sometimes in the middle of the day and return to it at night, stone mirroring stone, the built world and the imaginary coalescing, each contributing to the other in some crazy-horse dimension. There was no end to the furrows, those tracings that ran from block to block across the stone field, something encrusted in the bottom of the v-shaped troughs. The tracings formed a discernible order, locally, a form, Travis supposed, of Penrose tilings which never repeated in the large. He called this the 'circumstance' of the stone field, let me describe the stone field, grey rectangular blocks laid side by side, end to end, as far as the eye could see. The tracings were grooves worn into their surface, a singular and rough surface, the tracings identi- cal with the stone, identical with the grey of the stone. The thinned joints of the stone were overlaid by the grooves, a double matrix or coding, a thickening or intensification of the site. Travis walked the site. He thought v or V. He thought V or v. Travis would leave the ship and he wouldn't need a helmet cause the air was just like the air he breathed here on earth and he would first set the ship down with the rockets in reverse and then would get out. This was just one of Travis' adventures but the one he returned to all the time because he didn't know where the world began or ended and that included his dreams as well. He thought of himself as his dreams cause he made sure that he had seen things no one else had ever seen, even if they were things that he had seen only in his dreams. But the stone field was not one of them, it was always there, not even waiting. He would fly around and set the rocketship down and then walk out the door which had stairs that went down to the stones. Then he would walk about on the stones and then return to the ship. Travis felt that the patterns gave it away, and he thought of things like quasi-crystals or alphabets in crazy-horse dimensions. He thought it was a secret gate for a real voyage of discovery. He would leave the field and then return and each time try to make the voyage. Sometimes he wondered whether his friends were still there and whether he had a lover or children or something. He thought that there were other things in the world besides the rocketship which had a bed where he could sleep but he didn't remember much else that he had and thought that he should find out sometime. But there it was, the field that was below him as he kept moving the rocketship about from place to place, but not really - it was just like the splintered patterns of his migraine, always in front of him. And sometimes he would think that the ship made tracings as it rose and descended and as he walked about. He thought that they might spell something in the crazy-horse dimensions, but the thought was too difficult to really consider. If he had flashlights he could wear them and then set a camera on the stones and as he went up and down and returned he would find a pattern if the camera were always open and it was nighttime. It would be a long time exposure of this moving about, but most of the time it was day, and his radio ran out of power a long time ago. When I was fifteen, the stones reached out and grabbed Travis. They just grabbed him and pulled him in. They parted just perfectly the size of his body and he disappeared. Travis had electric powers. ________________________________________________________________________