LOVING HONEY II                                                HONEY2.TXT





The computer flooded my body, ended it; I don't remember faces, HONEY,

remembering you, your skin against the screen. We swallowed each other,

mouth against organ, juices bubbling over the tongue, wet eyes, wet 

hair, mouthing HONEY, you'd say, mouthing HONEY...



I no longer had time to waste! I'd press myself up against the TERMINAL

screen TERMINAL desire, my nipple against the O mouthing itself, taking

death away, healing all wounds! I would spread my legs as far as pos-

sible, exposing my hole; HONEY would open herself to the screen, an

uncanny blankness possessing us both. We had no secrets from each other!

We had all the secrets in the world! 



Our membranes devoured the glass, enchanted residue remaining on-line

off-line for days.



My mouth and HONEY's cunt: A double hollow! My cock and HONEY's fist:

Lozenge! My body would break on itself, a limited defile! We'd forget

the words; I'd clip motherboards to my nipples, serial cables in my

anus. The letters? Meant nothing at all in this most _real_ of all

spaces of the real!



You are a cathedral, I enter your nave! Your feet skid down parallel

wires; sliding into my testicles, ASCII spurts from your urethra,

ASCII spurts from my cock!



(Lulu): you always need the one you lose, I ought to know.

(Honey): Sometimes your body is an electron; sometimes my cunt gleams,

lighting Dante's ways in the dark woods of our desires!

Lulu is waving to Honey! Alan is bound to the wires!

Alan's cock is on fire! The way is long and dark! 

(Alan): Yes? Yes?

Siren just joined the channel.

(Honey): Your Yes penetrated me as the Lusitania sinks torpedoed in

the Atlantic Ocean! As splintered Titanic sinks beneath the waves!

(Alan): Andrea Doria! As the galleon went down! As the Florida Keys!

(Honey): The smell of you, that crease between your balls and cock!

(Honey): Say it! Say it again!

(Alan): Cunt! Cock! Clit!

(Honey): Say it! Say it again!

(Alan): Twat Rub A Dub!

(Honey): You trace me with your words, I trace you with mine! Murmuring

upon the screen, death Rub A Dub, Ring Around the Rosie poses Death

Begone!

(Honey): I am coming towards you, tongue gliding along the ground or

neutral, my words fileld with earth, with clay, my words a monument to

our love.

(Alan): Monument or grave, my tongue runs current towards you, a circu-

lation of electrons remaining on the outside of the figure, outside of

all representation!

(Honey): You are my representation, the source of iconicity, and I am

yours! Speech is the pressure of bodies, the other delimiting the wires,

delimiting ourselves and our presence among one another!

[stitched time of HONEY I]

(Alan): Which no longer belongs to us, belong to one another, it is you

or I who are typing, the two of us in uneasy confluence

(Honey): Confluence beyond confluence, beyond stuttering reach, the

topography of *together,* the binding of recognition as well

(Alan): A recognition which is all we have, are given, a recognition

confronting and conforming us

(Honey): Addressing each to the other, addressing ourself, conforming

ourselves to ourselves

(Alan): Thin sliver of words, shuddering on their way, carrying the 

weight of the world!

(Honey): Beyond which the dance ends, the tables are pushed back against

the wall, the cafe closes for the night, red and white checkered table-

cloths, candles, the sad violin

(Alan): The woods just beyond the village, the hill, meteors appearing

in depth, intense, for our benefit, for none other

(Honey): No one else, the sliver, thin language begin to fail us

(Alan): Frail, in the midst of worlds...

(Honey): In the midst of ellipsis, continuous and forever, dots tolling

the double entourage of the bell

(Alan): Honey, I hear it, speaking your name

(Honey): Alan, I hear it, speaking your name

Speaking the doubled name, name of the two, designators floating above

or within all possible, all conceivable worlds ...



HONEY, I said, HONEY, and she could hear my voice from the verge of the

bed heaving downward, listing towards an inconceivable floor; I was on

the telephone, each and every letter paled by the edges of the screen,

luminescent sweepings of the days events gathering in the corner of the

night of dusks and dawns.



End HONEY II.TXT                                     sondheim@panix.com



________________________________________________________________________





MY FICTIONAL WAGER WITH DEATH WRITTEN IN A LOUSY STYLE





I write myself through the legend.



I shouldn't be speaking about this. I shouldn't be talking about this

in a forum so open, so free, filled with love; but I have a wager with

death. This is the wager that permits me to write, on the chance that

death comes early, that my texts are preserved with the intensity that

only imminence can bring. Already I find myself with unknown pains: not

only an increase in quantity, spreading across my arms and throughout

my chest, but also, a _transformation_ into new uncharted realms, end-

ing up on black and featureless shores. Uh, I long to go there; my sole

pleasure remains in these texts become intravenous, sputtering forth

almost against my will. They are macros or scripts, automated trans-

fusions, life-support for the impoverished. They continue against the 

eyelids, late-night projections, and they need not continue there. 



The wager consists in working the edge, producing something of value

which permanently leaves me, while I teeter, looking directly into an

absurd abyss that may well be of my own making. Yesterday, while teach-

ing, I felt a sheet of trembling spreading across my chest and arms, an

armor of sorts against the indescribable everyday life that interests me 

less and less. Sooner or later, I will succumb, the texts folding them-

selves inwards, above me; tent-like, uh, I will transform into the book 

itself, and no longer be among you. 



This is the legend, the legend of leaving. As if, uh, there were a place

to go, safe harbor simultaneously within and without life, the fucking

ghost. But no place is safe, anywhere, anywhen; each carries the lure

of prospective degeneration. You are dead when you know this. You are

dead when you can write it down.



Uh, this is the legend: I'm the tortured artist. This is the legend: I 

haven't long to go, long to live. This is the legend: I'm poor, sacrifi-

cing everything for my art, writing into the void. If I didn't believe 

this, I couldn't continue, I, uh, would no longer be among you.



I can't make this literature, something like the will of Chatterton,

which he wrote, refusing to die "that the most perfect Masters of Human,

uh, Nature in Bristol distinguish me by the title of the Mad Genius." 

I too refuse to die, the only linkage between the two of us, refuse, as,

uh, the writing shoves itself out between my legs, one sex, uh, one hole 

or another.



________________________________________________________________________





BEING AND NOTHINGNESS





The book itself provided the miasma of a body, the attribute of each

and every book. _taking a plunge into the darkness of jean-paul, cold-

war blackness hole._ The furrows or striations of the hole provide the

ledge upon which cold-names are written. The writing goes szzhszzhszzh

goes szzhszzhszzh, granite grind-away, water dripping endlessly down.

It is always replenished. The absence of the wind in cyberspace quick-

dries the eyes themselves.



_coldwar blackness hole absorbing tautology, absolutism, contradiction

- taking the diving-board into oblivion - that's it - that's the way to

go._ Being projects itself into cyberspace, the invasion of nothingness

equivalent to the problematic ontology of packets hopped from one to 

another node, thirty-hop maximum. Cyberspace is existential; Being and

Nothingness is the cyberspatial body.



_the presence of the hole at the end of the text, the presence of slime

situated in the position of the cloaca: where was this text going, if 

not the flesh itself, shit falling nestled against the open mouthing of

the conclusion? The body stammers to a halt._ Elsewhere:



Elsewhere, _pierre meets jean-paul in the middle of the work or near

the beginning or ending of the middle of the work or near the beginning

of the end... not a sign of the cloaca, drinks at a small cafe, you can

almost see the gaze of the waiter, almost feel the liquid, absinthe

perhaps, descending._ Communality drives the body forward in its re-

sponse to the construct of essence defining existence. And that's it!

That's it in the French Resistance, that's it elsewhere: Clearly, in

cyberspace, essence defining existence! The door opens, once upon a 

time, essence concretizes, existence _rises to the cause._ Essence

spreads its legs, the response makes the mark, intentionality once the 

screen opens to the void!



Or is it the other way around! No matter, it comes to the same thing, 

responsibility on the part of... everyone. Being and Nothingness: _I

always thought of this as a transfused-body, interpenetrated with lack

or absence, the whole thing a rim-job... And the hole at the end of

the text turned it into a mouth: I remember this!_



A reverse existentialism! Not an essentialism at all, but a diarrhetic

essentialism, Derrida's future anterior coagulating in the form of a

human cybernaut! This is already portended, I claim, in the weight of

the book itself, the spine that of the body, the ending messing every-

thing, cleaning out the debris of metaphysics, preparation for cyber-

space within the French Resistance, the resistance of cyberspace itself.



________________________________________________________________________







PALMTOP NESTLED IN THE COMFORT OF MY HAND



1.

Maybe theory often proves its way.

With hard science, I shall improve my cause.

Casuistry still rules by light of day,

But night shall warrant truth within its claws.

The reason?

That the symbol knows no season.

The symbol brings the world within dark clasp;

Black sign against black time is all we grasp.

The `lineaments of gratified desire'

Play to a cold, invisible black fire.

No letters white are seen

Against the dark machine

That loses, forms symbolic forms for hire.

2. 

That about does it. Even the economy of the sign appears in the last

line. Symbols dark against dark? Certainly: eliminate the body of the

sign. Letters white? The legend of the Torah plays a role here.

3. 

I keep looking for _that_ book, _that_ symbol that constructs suture.

On _that,_ worlds run and worlds collapse. The wound remains.

4.

_Internal vs. Projected Space:_

[

The _other_ location is the domain of the body itself, its extensions,

what exists within its field of grasp. The _palmtop_ is a step towards

the introjection and darkening of the symbolic.

What _penetrates_ the domain of the body caresses and attacks; body

responds through defensive/reaction mechanisms.

I devour you when you come to me.

_Negation_ is at the heart of communication. You come to me: I defend,

penetrate, am penetrated. The body _physically_ couples within reach.

[

Cyberspace is always already other, incapable of physical negation;

what occurs is always images burned within the eyelids. Everything and

nothing invades. _Palmtop_ curls the body around the symbolic. Typing

at the desk, symbolic leers: I look ahead, slightly up, towards the 

screen, the horizon of projected space.

                                            _________________

The letters are black on a green field.     |               |

The letters are white on a black field.     |               |

The letters are black on a white field.     |     GLOW      |

The letters are white on a blue field.      |               |

The letters are black on a red field.       |_______________|



When I erase an _e_ for example, I erase no history whatsoever. History

is redrawn at 60 fields/second on _my_ machine. Palmtop stabilizes,

glowless. It whispers to me in the absence of letters. Glow black on

green _now._ (Now you know everything about me.)

5.

This weekend, alone with my computers. _GLOW._



________________________________________________________________________





DRAWN FORTH THE HARD ONE



From P.J. Harvey I draw the thread of the body at ten degrees from

the vertical.



From Heidegger, I draw the path in the woods, and from Irigaray, the

flood. From Kristeva, I draw the Flood.



I draw packets from the theory of infinitesmials, and from the

linguistic structure of Old Hittite, the reverse syntactic framework

of the Query. From Derrida, I draw the query.



From the touch last of your hands, your hands riven against me, 

my eyes, my lips; from your last glance backwards drawn away on an 

rainy day, I draw Jacques Prevert and autumn leaves, draw your body 

through the wires.



I draw the memory of that body upon the desert of Jabes, circular 

paths on the way from water to water.



From Nicole Brossard, I draw my body forth, and from Kathy Acker, 

I offer it so thoughtlessly drawn, and drawn away.



From theory, I draw the natural, and from nature, I have drawn theory,

in and out of order. And from anthracite seams in Pennsylvania, I have 

drawn and erased the obdurate of the real. 



From the Ancients, I have drawn the value of exact discourse, held

steadfast in an era of sparse population, communication at the speed

of a horse or railroad locomotive. I have seen words in combinations 

precise with history, the distance between them constituting a portal, 

from the language into the language.



And now, I see the computer reproducing the secret writing of childhood.

The screen returns to you in the form of a gift, the resurrection of

language at the faintest murmur of the breath, the proof positive of

wounded life, and the suturing of that wound: O, something remains!



O, something remains!



________________________________________________________________________





Our Cybermind





Papers published earlier on cybermind now appear elsewhere in cyber-

space itself; the archives to date keep records of the several mega-

bytes of material that have already passed by. URL information in 

the addresses of posters lead to other menus, by and large home 

pages in which images appear briefly on the screen. Threads conjure

up the potential for a coherent discussion often interrupted by the

presence of others. List postings splinter, divide, and regroup as

other connectivities are generated; the smallest unit is the private

post from one to another correspondent. Usenet groups are regularly

raided for information to repost, and on occasion cybermind announce-

ments are sent out to Usenet groups, an entirely different selection.

Data from the World Wide Web rolls in, is broken apart, then shifts

through cybermind for redistribution. Other distant email lists such

as Net-Happenings provide sources of information; other sputterings

connect these lists to the cybermind mothership. Local email lists 

such as those on the Spoon collective splinter off themselves, feeding 

information to cybermind which is recollected and redistributed else-

where. Telephone calls and postal mail supplement the aura of cyber-

mind, producing other forms of contact which pass in and out of the

matrix. Administration of cybermind and other Spoon collective lists

occurs in this case through telnetting into world.std.com and at times

messages are redirected from world.std.com back into cybermind itself.

Private email posts arrive from outside the domains of the lists in

their entirety and are reposted in full or in part; replies are given

by means of private posts as well, one or another cybermind subscriber

acting as temporary conduit. Downloading from ftp creates files which

are then reposted on cybermind and now studiously archived in Norway by

Marius Watz who also keeps the Internet Text that is exhibited in the

form of packets on cybermind and fiction-of-philosophy. Archives are

also kept here in the form of texts with stripped addresses, which are

re-examined now and then for further input into the current cybermind.

Bounced cybermind messages end up at times at spoon@world.std.com

where they are redistributed after examination. Bounced or misspelled

or user-unknown addresses are often held temporarily at world.std.com

before deletion, but badly formatted addresses are immediately erased

in order to preserve the functioning of the list. Posts from every 

member of cybermind who posts are redistributed to every member of 

cybermind; the same is true for fiction-of-philosophy. Fiction-of-

philosophy is the sister-list or brother-list of cybermind, and there

is considerable cross-posting between them and on occasion with the

cousin list of Future Culture. Fiction-of-philosophy and cybermind are

moderated by the same moderator, but it is an open moderation, only a

closed subscription format, in order to check subscriptions requests as

they arrive. Someone on occasion will gopher to a specific site and

report on the site to cybermind. Cybermind and the other lists on the

Spoon collective are listed at a number of sites themselves, for pur-

poses of supplying pertinent information to potential subscribers. The

information sheets on world.std.com are also periodically checked and

sometimes updated, and the moderator of cybermind sends specific in-

formation to any number of correspondents who request it. The moderator

also sometimes subscribes or unsubscribes individuals who request such

activity, which is done directly with a password from his (or her) own

account, without the necessity of telnetting into world.std.com. Some-

times, in search through cyberspace, one will come across the name of

someone who has left cybermind a long time ago, and the glimmer of 

recognition will bring forth a happy smile. Sometimes one will locate

the email address of the long-missed person, and contact him or her and

there will be many happy memories. In the midst of the passing of in-

formation, in the midst of the wires and fibre-optic cables and packets

travelling close to the speed of light, there will be many happy mem-

ories. Sometimes images are sent near the speed of light from one end

of the Net to the other, and sometimes they end up on cybermind, where

they pass through quickly, downloaded and embarked through translation 

software, producing beautiful pictures. 



________________________________________________________________________





EARTH-GOD-TIME-MARRIAGE





Parmenides: Auf der Rechten die Knaben, auf der Linken die Maedchen.

To the right boys, to the left, girls! In the womb!



Break in break in: Innumerable time-delays on ANNOUNCEMENT spaceship

Cybermind .. lags breathing hot desire like the cover of a 1940s girlie

mag two Detectives couldn't find the cost of the missing redhead naked

heavy Chevrolet wet between the legs .. waiting for the final reply

when the bod jumps through the screen MARATHON RUNNER NUMBER 2005 UP &

RUNNING sputtering of the words running always already after thought 

itself, murky, decathected: NOTHING EVER CATCHES UP NOTHING REALLY 

TRIES .. _Nearby, bodies hover in uncontrollable light_ .. Sometimes a 

message from the dead will appear, what then? Time refuses to assert 

itself ..



Pherecydes: _Zas and time always existed, and so did Chthonie_ .. Now

note this: _and Chthonie acquired the name Earth when Zas gave her the

earth as a bridal gift._ All these preparations for time past and time

future! I like the names in Kranz/Diels German: _Zas und Chronos waren

ewig und Chthonie_ just like that! .. Motivation of the thrust of light

.. always an entrance and exit .. motives .. exacerbations .. one 

expects too much ..



Every text is liminal, as if the slow motion of the hand lost something

in translation .. It's this, the sense of time that constructs the 

bright light opening up to every secret, the allure of proper timing.

what is hidden draws forth, creating the secret and its revelation ..



_A secret exists only by virtue of time._ Without a secret, there is no

revelation; the distance between the two is the deference of orgasm .. 

Pleasure is never binary, is always this holding-in .. The Net is a sim-

ulacrum of emergent thought, packets bound together at beginning and end

.. the convolutions of their nomadic travels ..



The Net, like gambling, is addictive because _one waits upon it._ ..



Parmenides: Die Entschiedung aber hierueber liegt in folgendem: IST oder

NICHT IST!, decision lies [here] in the following, IT IS or IT IS NOT!

.. What motivates cybertime diffuses from the presocratic abyss: words, 

in fact, meander. Time expands within the liminal; it is [here] that 

chaotic domains open to the exhaustion of meaning. To read is to recon-

struct the self eternal, total, impervious, to Time's Net irruption ..



Herakleitos: Annaeherung, approach/approximation. Chthonie!



________________________________________________________________________





THE DEMON





The demon stopped me. Tracks led from the house to the bottom of the

slope. It was raining out, a torrent of mud and small stones, twigs

and branches, funnelling into streamlets turned into rivers. It was

night in the mountains, and there was a sheen in the thin glacial

crevices, covered with green-black moss, just like everything. It was

night and mist rose everywhere and the demon rose with the mist.



Armor netting covered her, thin wooden boards held pinned by thick 

wire, thin metal plates held pinned by wooden rivets. Boards were 

hinged to plates, wire to rivets, helmet mechanics covering and reveal-

ing her face, the samurai mask held high with demon horn. Her breast 

was bare, look at my breast she said. The house creaked in the wind and 

rain, water blew in sheets and gales of sheets, the boughs of the pine 

bent almost to the ground, you couldn't see the top of the mountain. 

Look at my breast, she said, turned towards the car juggurnaut, viola-

tion fabric of human flesh beneath its wheels, the moss-ice forming wet

furrows behind and before it, the miracle of the furrows; but I was

through with the turning. Scroll cut in at the pleasure of the breast,

scroll held me, what was round held itself off, the body an inflation

beyond the rim, beginning with the nipple, ending with the furrow of

the back. Culture and universe inflated, Kwakiutl resistance, down on

the plain where the shtetl lived.



Look at it, look at it, she said. Look at my breast. I would ride yab-

yum radio through shakti, shekinah waiting, streams pouring from her

body, water-matrix, look at it. The turning would emerge, scroll else-

where, I thought of ghost-trap cybermind, ghosts along the wires, of

a rocky field I had fallen among the rocks, a stony shore I had stum-

bled on the tones. Look at it, look at my breast.



(Later which was now which was then it occurred to me that I could 

inhabit the breast, kiss the breast, see the breast, gaze at the 

breast, touch the breast, press the breast, suck the breast, bite 

the breast, squeeze the breast, caress the breast; I could rub the 

breast, massage the breast. Look at me, look at my breast, she said, 

and there was the turning which I was through with, but I could not 

look, could not inhabit, could not kiss, could not see, not gaze, 

touch, suck, bite, caress, squeeze, caress, rub, massage the breast.)





________________________________________________________________________



___________

|

|

|

|



[ It's like a drug. Constant writing. Working into the night. Filling

the box. Stretching the limit. It's the way to work. It takes you to

the morning. It takes you beyond yourself. It's your reason to live. ]



( I've got nothing more to say. I've said all I can say. I can't write

about the Net forever. Everything has its limits. The Net has no lim-

its. But I've completed everything. I've finished with it. I've com-

pletely finished. Done. No more. )



{ That's the strategy. Make them believe this. Make them believe any-

thing. Continue to throw it away. The post is its space, the space is

the post. It's our secret. It's our little secret. There's no them.

None at all. }



[ The post is an _ontological operator._ The post is indexical. The 

post runs away with it. The post participates in the _calculus of

cyberspace._ The calculus is ontological or _performative._ The calcu-

lus is epistemological or _indexical._ ]



( This is good. This is the _stuff_ of cyberspace. This is the material

or constitutive order of the same. This is the differend. This is the

concatenation. There's no identity. )



{ This post was reconstituted from disparate packets. This post began 

together and ends together. This post drew me to the limit. This post

draws me out. This post draws me out of myself. Out of myself, the 

stuff of cyberspace. Out of my self, there are no limits. It takes me

beside myself. The stuff of it. The stuff of it all. }



                                                                       |

                                                                       |

                                                                       |

                                                           ____________|



________________________________________________________________________





No, I don't go to church. Never did go to church. Preacher left me in the 

lurch. Never did go to church. Never did have no pie. Never did know my 

name. Sometimes I want to cry. The halt, the blind, the lame. No never 

did walk the line. Never did cross the stream. Never did straight the 

spine. Never did live the dream. Never did want want to die. Never did 

say Thy Name. Lived all my life a lie. Your sweet lips say my Name.



________________________________________________________________________





My Medical Expert System





My new palmtop came with medical software, a patients' directory that

allows me to track the condition of everyone around me. I can enter

my friends' names in it, complete with their illnesses, my drug treat-

ments for them (also whether they're cured), and the symptoms that led

to my diagnoses in the first place. I carry the palmtop everywhere I

go, tracking their progress from day to day. I love doing this because

I know all the time just how they feel! Here are some results.



Unable to resist, I begin with myself. I must admit I am not a medical

doctor (although I have propensities, like everyone else, in that di-

rection); some of the terminology may in fact seem resplendent and of

my own making. But it is a patients' medical directory, and as true as

can be!





PATIENT NAME                                            IDENTIFIER

======================================================================



alan sondheim                                         me                  

clara hielo internet                                  "clara"

thomas zabrowski                                      "tom"

"honey"                                               honey zabrowski



======================================================================



alan sondheim



11/10/94 04:04 neurotic

alan is very neurotic. you would be amazed.

he is very smart.



11/10/04 04:12

he is very hopeless.



11/10/94 04:12:30

he is very very hopeless.



======================================================================



clara hielo internet



11/10/94 13:50 ambiguity

clara hielo internet displays ambiguity. sulfide drugs seem to have

little or no effect. she "tunes" out at the slightest provocation, as

if suffering from an aphasia constituted by thinking good and bad

thoughts together.



11:10/94 13:52

clara hielo internet has a lovely smile. i see everything beautifully

reflected in her lovely smile. she is very hopeless.

______________________________________________________________________



clara hielo internet                                            LABS



11/10/94



Na 22.1

K 1.21

Co2 Y 

I did not give her any more lab tests because it would take up too 

much room.



======================================================================



thomas zabrowski



11/10/94 07:16 asthmatic

thomas zabrowski cannot breathe when i am around him so I do not know

if he can breathe. he says it is the doldrums but i chalk it up to

_malaise._



11/10/94 07:19

he is very hopeless because he cannot breathe.

______________________________________________________________________



ER ES ET: Emergency Room Expert System Enginnering Team

EU: Evaluation Unit

From: alt.asthma.zabrowski

To: alt.talk.doctor



"He cannot breathe because you are treating the data base instead of

Thomas."

"We suggest you treat Thomas."

"You have taken up enough of our time."

No lab tests at this time.



======================================================================



"honey"



11/10/94 13:10 ontic

honey is always sleeping.

i am in her dream.

i hope she never wakes up.



11/10/94 13:10

the doctor says i am "honey's" aphasia.

the doctor is very hopeless.



11/10/94 13:13

the universe says i should let her sleep.

now i will be very quiet.

______________________________________________________________________



"honey"                                                        LABS



Chol 0

Co2 0

HDL 10/10



I love the lab tests because they make me happy because they are

all liquids and I can roll around in them.



======================================================================



Tomorrow I will look at Tiffany and add her to my lists of sick 

people.





______________________________________________________________________







BARDO THODOL





Because the texts sign desire into your mailbox your very home. Because

there's no mess attached; I'm not even on the line. Because you're bored 

and I'm a signifier. Because my tendrils respond to the presence of your

fingers on the keys. Because I'm gone by the time you read this. Because

the bright light disappears when the screen scrolls by. Because you pro-

mise yourself through the light, the light, whatever you want to hear.

This is the harder part, the promise you make to yourself. Because you

can't let it get too close, can't let it get close enough. Because

there's no way in the world you're gonna let it matter. Because you

wake up in the morning for once with the cleanest dreams. Because the

dreams come easy because they're only dreams. Because I tune the dreams

to suit yourelf, because you tune me. Because you are reading the tun-

ing as if you're hearing the tuning. Because you're hearing the reading.

Because your eyes close and you see yourself. Because you imagine a face

peering out through the text. Because the text is far thinner than you

would ever imagine. Because the text is pure light. Because the text is

the purest light you could ever imagine. Because the text is the purest

light, because it is your text and I am your text too. Because you have 

made me your text and it is only text and you think it's safe. Because 

you make it safe and make it safe again. Because you let me disappear. 

Because you make it your text you make me disappear. Because you want 

it. Because you want it and it is the purest light. It is the purest 

light and you want it, this light, this purest light.





________________________________________________________________________







NOTES FROM ALL OVER





I would like a memorial to be held for me _before_ I die. I would like

people to say, what beautiful writing. I would like them to say, it 

means so much to me. I would like wonderful pictures, films, and videos, 

made about my life. I would like to see them. The best memorials appear

after someone dies. This is unfair; life, not death, should bring out 

the best in people.



I carry around a text in my head for days, a text such as this one. It

incubates; unlike the immediacy of email, the texts choke the computer, 

waiting, one by one, for their development. While working on the medi-

cal text, this one came to mind, this one appeared, almost naturally, 

since death is the barrier of life, and procrastination the barrier of 

the text.



Michael Current's posts, like mine, bring desire into the configuration

of the surface itself. This is not to say that _they desire,_ but that

the _chora_ is readily visible, that the iconicity of the text creates

a simulacrum of embodiment. The body twists, turns, caresses, and is

caressed through slow reading. This renders a text of love, a semantics

of love, its hollow. The desire curls in upon itself; the curling images

the body.



The texts live among palmtop, laptop, desktop. I move from imminence in

the midst of a tiny implement conjuring the body's curl, through laptop

(on the order of textwork, _traumwerk_) _in bed, in hand,_ to desktop 

re-articulation. I step back or aside; the writing finally begins to 

breathe for itself, the languor setting in, the aural or sensate odor 

of the body. As the writing reaches the final solution, the machinery

increases in size.



The texts are sliced by the wires, of course, courtesy of TCP/IP proto-

col. They are doubly reconstituted, formally, and through the act of

reading. Existing between the ephemera of email posting and the hardness

of stone, they invite little response, but appear hardened emissions or

demarcations in the course of a busy day. This is the nature of the 

philosophical in cyberspace, surfing through cyberspace, carried by it.

This is the writing of the future. This says goodbye to the writing of

the past.



Rage: Sometimes the Net doesn't work, signals go down in flames, kilo-

bytes are lost. What then? One rewrites and rewrites to no avail, any

sense of the self disappears, every call goes unanswered. Rage sets in,

encumbered by the normal fluidity of the Net. Suddenly, the monster

rears itself as a confluence of protocols; no longer a window, not even

a mirror, it becomes machinic, an industrial revolution of rods and

levers. The skull appears. Fury gapes through the open wound; everyone

who can't have a piece of the action wants a piece. I become desperate,

dis-membered of a communality I now war against. The Net, which is never

ever alive, always forces this, the confrontation of dismemberment with

dismemberment, and dim memory of a self that felt whole before emerging

to engage with dead and inchoate wires.



Cybersex and real-world automobile accidents: I could write a book on 

how they don't mix. At the moment something in Brooklyn is up in flames,

not down like signals. Sirens everywhere, the second night in a row. I

became sick with the stress of it, vomited. Anger is an energy (Lydon)

but only so far before the body devours itself from within, collapses

on the deck chair of the S.S. Lusitania. The more hollow I am, the more

desperate for Wire, for Scroll. I close my eyes and nothing happens; a

migraine's setting in, no place for the text-rush that should unfold the

day to the universe, the universe to the day.



Cybersex is the attempt to make the body _be,_ screen or no screen. Un-

like real sex, which tests the limits of the body, diffuses borders,

meanders through random epistemologies like a trackless freight-train,

cybersex is ontological. I attempt to _produce myself,_ to have the

flesh _mean,_ and therefore exist. Words furiously gallop across the

screen; they're unaccountable, go nowhere, aren't even buffered. They

try the ridiculous reproduction of the physical, the sound of orgasm,

the impression of a hand or tongue. Texts bend out of shape, but like

propositional logic, remain texts. Cybersex exists, more than any other

form, on the margins of the written. No matter how much I present as

REWRITE, I remain in lower ASCII.



The sirens are now everywhere, as if the building itself is surrounded.

I am in Brooklyn and something big is going down, and Brooklyn big is

big. Meanwhile the Net stutters to a halt again like a crushed butter-

fly, coccoon memory, leaves.





________________________________________________________________________







Dinosaurs on television make a lot of noise.

They fight restlessly before the screen,

Attacking girls and boys. They have little joys

Except for the pure pleasure of bleating

Which signals they're about to begin eating.

The people stand in front of them, or a leg

Will appear, defying imagination, just a prop

Which makes the viewer beg them to stop

Heming and hawing, but find an animal to rage

Or better yet, place star and starlet in a cage

To see what happens. The beast is off again to Bermuda,

As for the star and starlet, I could've clued ya.



- Ogden Nash



________________________________________________________________________







GRISTLE





(Re: The recent error message explosion on Fiction-of-Philosophy._





Gristle is the _stuff_ of the Net, the assertion of the inert vomiting

back the spew as in Sartre, the obdurancy of it, an existence trans-

versing communication itself, refusing communication...



What's given is the absence of control, so the flood/spew occurs on

another lower level (what we take for granted is high-level languaging).



One level drops through another. That's what happened when the list

overflows with exponentially-increasing error messages. The _stuff_ 

appears, the nauseous. Working on correcting the situation, I literally

vomited, repeatedly, over the toilet, one or another spew, emission.

What ordinarily remains hidden, completes digestion. The Net surfaces,

always surfaces. This wasn't surface; this was the gristle.



The gristle, by virtue of the fact that error is _any_ content, is 

always already abject. Nothing can get to it. It ignores meaning, which

is a higher-level construct. Or it constructs any meaning at all, which

is the destruction of meaning. When gristle falls apart, the meat of

the surface is revealed.



One always learns from error; it's only error that opens the wound 

that's always present, sutured, _civilized._ Embarrassment, error, 

shame, expose the interiority of the machinics of cultural confluence,

communality, the apparently flawless realm of the signifier. Clearing

out the _stuff_ of files thickened with repeated error messages, the

inertia of the Net appears. This is _it._ Nothing is even said, sayable

when _everything_ is said, exponentially and in quantity...



_The bones showed through. Gristle. I vomited them up._





________________________________________________________________________







FRAY AND SEDUCTION





The seduction of cyberspace... I am enveloped by posts, the body tremb-

ling with the unknown, slivers held back. The less you say of yourself, 

the more the other is drawn forward, downward; the more you open your-

self, the more penetration. A dangerous game, displaying each and every 

secret, or releasing them as a stuttered flow, the orgasm of knowledge

itself. What do I know about you? What will you tell me? Sometimes I

receive messages from strangers, do I write to strangers? Sometimes I

receive openings, texts fluttering apart like paper cranes. All of us

are pooled in cyberspace, marsh-liquidities, nomadic, devouring the

impossible. It is seductive because it is incapable of achievement. It

is seductive because the space suddenly and momentarily fills with per-

fume. Lured in, seduction is the phenomenology of the _nipple,_ its all-

defining circularity, the territory of the breast outlined against the

memory of the screen, screen-memory, screen-mammary. In fashion, the

nipple is indexical, not the lure itself, but the reference of the lure.

The nipple pools cyberspace; wet with tongues, mouths, eyes, its mois-

ture reflects a writing scragged across terminal desire.



On the net, I falter: What would I give for _your_ presence here? This,

too, is a lure, your knowledge of my absence and my absence within my-

self. We are pockets for one another. We fill one another with the 

caress of language we _would have_ spoken to one another long ago, but

we could not speak, could never speak, in each other's presence, and

what emerged were only platitudes, stupidities, as I would think later.

And in the end, we only merge with ourselves, a sliver of seduction

cutting through the flesh or the wood, splitting the self in a fragment

of language left in some other apartment, home, loft, wherever our 

temporary and fumbling connections were made, "safe" pretending.



( Does seduction involve the parasitic? There is always a third party

present, the absented indexical slant of the case. On the Net, there

is a profusion or coagulation of absences - blurred ontological bound-

aries. The post _itself_ is seductive, since the body is _inconceivably_

present (the third party?), which is not to say absent in its entirety,

if the performative is to have any gainsay. For here the performative

constructs the body, as I have _pointed out_ elsewhere, the body of the

space installed and inflated by the post itself.



Because text is the only priority of seduction on the Net, seduction

bends the text, a form of accommodation at a remove from analytic phil-

osophy. Communication here exists within post-structural poetics; what

else could account for absence in its absence. So that communication is

distorted by absence; only _protocol_ remains unproblematic, since with-

out pipeline, communication ceases on the surface. To _read_ in this 

space is to be assured of machinery and its symmetrical substructures,

automorphisms, everything in place. It is the surface that becomes dis-

rupted in seduction, a folding or crinkling of the skin. )



( There is always a third party present; to seduce is to seduce in the

presence of others, to splay the body open, expose its secrets. For that

matter, the third party may be the first or second; there is a doubling

of conceit at work, no matter. And there are whole bodies, properly 

coupling through cams implying _something else_ within the interior, the

flux of the secret itself. Then there is the _housing._



The _housing_ is the world. The _housing_ is every conceivable subject.

I will write you, but you must not tell me your name. I will make love

to you, but I must never know the date of your birth. I will fuck myself

in your presence, cyberghost that I am, but you must never reveal the

color of your hair. 



I will lend you a _cut_ into the world at an angle, slant at ten degrees

from the vertical, the slit of exposed flesh, really nothing more than

a line. Cutters bleed from far more and from far less. )



Ah, Clara, the _lure_ presents us to ourselves. How trivial! Let's sink

into Pascal's abyss together, swallowed up by the enormity of dead wires

and outcast servers. One last parting of the lips...



                                                

________________________________________________________________________

                                                

                                                

                                                October 10, 2010



Interview/Critique with Clara Hielo Internet:



What Sondheim never took into consideration in his early Internet Text,

is the complete seamlessness of virtuality that we have achieved - the

totalization of an alternative Real. Unlike the promises of "classic" 

artificial intelligence, virtual reality has been well ahead of sched-

ule (I remember reading that something would be fully operational by

2040, for example). We knew, even then, that it was always a question

of computational mass, not concept; the latter had already been worked

out (neural networking, and post-MPEGn compression techniques helped a

lot). Isn't it true that Sondheim's text, on the other hand, seems to

concentrate on the old ASCII - that it might be fair to consider it 

more of a meditation on _writing_ than anything else.



But something has said that nothing could be farther from the truth. He

points out that even text _always_ embodied ghosts, as we would say, in

whatever form. He points out as well that the complex issue of the real

itself, virtual or not, has always been central to his writing. At times

he distinguishes between real and Real, and at times he does not. He was

aware of this _splintering_ inherent in the text.



Everything is signal, everything is SCROLL, Sondheim has said, stressing

REWRITE as a condition of the real (And REWRITE, as well as SCROLL, of

course, need not imply the written; they occur within _any_ virtuality

or real whatsoever. Paramecia REWRITE, if not SCROLL. So do cyborgs.) 

There is always a sending and receiving in relation to the body; the

difficulty is that the _model_ (derived from communications technology)

diffuses - there are no entities involved, only the nexi of emissions,

spews, and vocalizations - and these can occur in any form, writing (i.

e. grammatology), or not.



We brought up the issue of seduction, the caress, sexuality, which seem

to pervade much of the text. Wasn't this a Freudianism in disguise? Or

an other form of reductionism, or even a reduction of the Other? But

Sondheim has countered, I think successfully, that desire pervades vir-

tuality - that virtuality is _driven_ in fact. (Could this be the dif-

ference, the _driven_ of the virtual, in relation to the obdurancy

[Sondheim again] of the real?] He has gone on to say that SCROLL itself

is the very stuff of ghosting, that what remains of the self (Freud, 

Lacan, Garner, or not) gets lost in the tangle - like a Tibetan ghost-

trap. He calls this trapping "the Skein," stressing the coagulative or

reconstitutive aspects of being-in-cyberspace. He also stresses that

being-in-cyberspace is equivalent to Being-in-cyberspace, a difficult

relation to Being. And he has gone so far AS TO DENY THE EXISTENCE OF

CYBERSPACE ITSELF (at least in this regard, but it is unclear how far in

fact he has gone). Instead, he appears to postulate that there are _con-

fluences of the real._ More and more, there is something pre-Socratic 

about this thought, which, he feels, must liquify in order to reflect

the exigencies of virtuality, the age we find ourselves in.



He has stated that his thinking has not changed on these matters at all.

He has also stated that his production of Internet Text, along the lines

of the nineteenth-century feuilleton, has been a continuous one, but 

that the later portions neither invalidate nor supplement the earlier 

ones. Instead, the work as a whole represents a phenomenological trans-

formation without beginning or end, a mobius-structure.



So, the Internet Text - was it conceived as a kind of journey, then? No,

because there is no destination, as I have just indicated, because it 

neither reflects movement nor stasis. Ontic states _shimmer_ - think of

them as molcular, spectral lines of absorption. That's the model I would

use, and I am sure he would approve. Neither one nor another part is any

more than one or another. They are of equal and encompassing intelli-

gence. I can't say that I play favorites here.





________________________________________________________________________





ALT.NET.WATERSPORTS



The story below contains material of a graphic and controversial nature 

primarily to sysadmins.







"HOW I JOINED THE UNIX"





With NET stockings, T. VERONICA would LIST to one side. I didn't want 

to FINGER her or SERVER. Her narrow WAIS raised a HOST of questions in 

the WORLD. WIDE WEB or not, you I TEL, NETted were her stockings - as I 

said, sheE MAILed me a pair of them. "What a LYNX you are," she said, "a

regular MOSAIC of TALK N' TALK." I pulled out my JUGHEAD (it's this kind

of POST), and replied, "T. CP? IP!" I could really GOPHER her! I begged,

"Let me watch you!" Silence. "Are you deaF, T.? P!" As if that made me a

man, like ARCHIE! "You're all UNIX," she said in return. "And as for 

stockings, I would USE NET only..." 



"DOS all right," I'd PIPE. "LINE me up." I smiled, bared my teeth. The

next thing I knew, she was yelling "U U BIT NET and tore my new pair up!

F A Q formed, you'd be the first to go!" But I kept begging, "P, G, P!" 

to no avail. I was getting HYPER, TEXan that I am. INTERNIC of time, she

said, "U U C P?" What a SITE! I almost SLIPped on her PP. P, I thought,

I'll COM for you. PING! INTERNET everything is possible! She was getting

angry. She said I was like all the others, MAIL, BOXed my ears! DO MAIN

thing is, I should've used EXPERIMENTAL VERONICA; I was hardly a MAN any

more. What a BAUD! She really took a BYTE out of me... BYE.



END of EMISSION.



________________________________________________________________________







PRESENTATION OF THE SELF





I will ask the questions and you will respond extemporaneously, so to

speak. I recognize you speak from the position of the male, or is 

that true or not true. And that you choose to appear naturally. So 

already there is a question of the natural, but this leads us either

too far afield or already at the heart of things. Please begin again.

Choice is involved to what extent on the Net. I can pick any identity

I want but try to be true to myself. That means that I will be as  

honest as possible. My age is a difficulty. I am 51 but that gives clo-

sure only to my demographic appearance. If I tell you that I look and

act a lot younger, what of it. You've heard it all before; like me, you

have stereotypes. The presence always leaks out, a certain moroseness

perhaps. Of gender transformation, the label would carry a great deal.

Some of you may be other than what you seem. The choice comes almost

naturally at times. The Net is not though an extension of the writer,

but can be as well a choosing of the writer. There are no definitive

structures here. But these ghosts that inhabit the wires, that is a

form of reception theory. Exactly, which is the production or flow of

introjections, projections, scrolls, rewrites, addresses, recognitions,

protocols, all those things. The lure is already a form of masquerade.

Yes, and it might as well be in the hand, given as a consequence of the

Net. Surely issues of embodiment are paramount; without the body, lure

and construct are always already at play in a radically different way

than in face-to-face communication, or even ordinary postal mail - those

areas where the grain of the text or voice dominates. So you try? What I

try is really of little consequence; what is important is to see the

Net as a playing field of communities and communications, not as an in-

formation highway, which implies a point-to-point linearity. The latter

may serve as a model (based on the telephone system) but it further 

implies a bracketing of points. I say, vectors and emissions, not 

points. I say that points imply well-definitions, and we are dealing in

terms of the subjectivity of this space with something else entirely. 

And will continue in the future to think of this as an essential differ-

ence. But you were saying about your age. Or sex, or what I reveal, that

in certain circumstances, I might not present any of this, but that it

is important to open up, not only for community, but for the sake of the

text itself, the edginess of this text. So that desire also appears, but

of course if one changes gender on the Net, desire also appears. Could

one say that it is only desire that is never in disguise. I would think

so. And what would govern, say, a man wanting to present himself as a

woman, a woman as a man. The differend of the socius, I imagine, the

latter as a temporary empowerment in terms of avoiding harassment, that

might be paramount, and then also as exploration, feeling out trans-

sexuality or homosexuality, but always with an edged empowerment. And 

the former as a means of exploration, feeling out transsexuality. It's

complicated. One could appear as a woman for the guise of homosexual re-

lationships, but also for a releasement based on introjection/projec-

tion, the feeling that women as the object of desire then become incor-

porated into the male as desiring object, so a narcissism, as when a 

male, for sexual reasons, shaves his body hair, self and other simul-

taneously. And the same would presumably hold for women in the other 

direction, but with a difference, because of the order of oppression and

the overt sexist nature of the Net in a number of _theaters._ I would 

imagine, in fact, that there is little or no posing on most email lists,

just slightly more on Usenet, and more on chat-lines, IRC, MOOs, MUDs,

and the like. And in each of these cases, there's a difference between

crossing and passing, although the difference may be unclear. Of course

anywhere a woman may pass as a man or another woman or a man may pass as

another man or another woman. Are you saying then again these are equiv-

alences. No, there is an imbalance which sets the wheel in motion so 

to speak, the imbalance of relations of oppression, which is carried 

over from real life to the Net, with the double change as I have said, 

that first of all, one can be other than what one is in real life, and 

also, that one might be freer to speak the sexual, most often in an 

oppressive way of course from male to female, but also freer to speak 

the sexual in other, more exploratory and deepening ways as well. But 

this will come to be in the future more and more, these other ways, 

providing the Net remains a non-regulated field or membrane, providing 

desire is permitted to flow throughout it as a chaotic manifold of 

intensities and releases, much, I add, as in a real-life sexual exper-

ience which uses the edge, the transgressive, as a means of retardation. 

What is most often the case, as here, is that one loses the train of 

images, loses the stasis of identity, consciously or unconsciously 

constructed, and is cast adrift, and it is here that the subject 

actually _works_ through subjectivity in various ways, as I am doing 

here. As in: who is speaking, who is questioning, who is answering, and 

who constructs the space. And always to remember that this is a _case_ 

of the gendered masculine, to the extent that gender is an excess or 

withdrawal from the performative. In other words you mean. I mean gender 

as in part physiological, and age of course, as wholly, or so it seems, 

physiological, beginning and ending with what can only be constituted as 

a fragment or torn remnant of a field of desire and identity. So you are

saying. For both women and men, an equality, flickering, empowerment, a

difference or presence, constituted internally or externally, yes.





________________________________________________________________________





THE BUFFALO





Tiffany rode the jeep into the terminal, screen black on black or

screen four-by four. I wanted, I said turning towards the dust on the

soles of her feet, I wanted you. I wanted, I wanted to quote, to talk

you the talk of the older writing, when there were no screens. When 

desert was the moment into the sun when the flesh burned off. Now

everything's scroll, your name confronts me, I suck the letters of 

your name, suck the air for lines winding down the glass. I can't see

the sun for the life of it; words burrow into me, scratch your skin-

lines deeper than I ever wanted to go. I moved towards the depression

where the tar pit lay, water-buffalo on their sides mewling for help.

So then the writing came:



The Buffalo: Meaning is our despair.

The Buffalo: There are no signs and no signifiers.

The Buffalo: Nothing can be assembled from chaotic debris.



But: The natural condition of the real is absolutely meaningless.

But: The copula. Tiffany and I rolled across each other, rolled each

other's lips into the dust of the desert, cracks of the desert, debris

and sand of the desert, water-buffalo mewling, suffocating, drowning

in the darkened interiors slowly grinding to a halt.



The Buffalo: The copula exists only as substance.

The Buffalo: The copula is not an implication of substance, but is (and 

does not produce) the substance of language, which is not the same thing

as sonority.



But she filled me with tar, filled her with the same. Healing up, move-

ment slowed down like the omega-point, oh, we'd live forever. Up through

the anal, penile canals, the instestines, penis hardened in permanent 

erection, testicles frozen in the black edges of the pit. Copula copula-

tion. So then it began.



Naked, Copula Copulation ran across the sand. Her long dark hair flowed

across your face like sand, or tar. She was there, wet dream of the 

bull, gift to others of herself, but giving the stone which my hardened

body was to any taker. So then. So then a dreaming because I thought I

heard her, ears choked with tar tornado:



CC: The deadening of the copula permits the displacement of the despair

of meaning, its relegation elsewhere.

CC: Despair is continuous and death is the only noun.

CC: The noun is the limitation of the verb. The noun remains within the

sentence organized against the verb.

The Buffalo: You're sentenced to death for the BUILT ENVIRONMENT.



I was sentenced to death for the BUILT ENVIRONMENT. I was sentenced to

death by the tar and the copula of the tar, fucked by B.E., Tiffany

filled to the brim, sword of the self-swallowed-sword of the self. The

last I heard of it, wheels on terminal four-by-four run across mewling

buffalo, the last was before the scroll shut down this breath:



Buffalo: The verb prevaricates (Tiffany, dancing the tar into me!);

death is the function of the noun.

Buffalo: (Tiffany, remembering that silence, violation-fabric, dark-tar

dark-star real) There are no signs of anything at all.



________________________________________________________________________





Lucan, Pharsalia:





As soon as irrationals came into being, it was clear that everything

was exhausted and that nothing could be countered to be the same again.

For excess beneath the greatest scrutiny, bounded excess, excess 

uncontained, would never disappear, and each new discovery served to 

unharness the chariot of man.



Now it was never the numerical itself that was irrational, but the

attempt to contain number; it is not that we can dispense with Euclid

and Archimedes, but that they are to be surpassed, as a gorge itself

proves dangerous to wayfarers who seek a path towards the peak.



For Melissus says, _Being one, it must fail to possess a body. But if 

it had bulk it would have parts and would no longer be one._ (Cf. B 9.)

It is said that the breath has its inheritence.





________________________________________________________________________







TRAVIS RIDES A SEGMENT ON THE INTERNET





The segment proceeded through the black collapse of cyberspace trailing

error codes behind it; words, cut off, broken, screamed at eighty per-

cent the speed of light. Dark segment, blossoming into annihilation rose

opened against inconceivable arches. End of message ||||||| open to all

callers, gaped ports waiting arrivals from activated bridges. Language

cauterized went nowhere, network address cached from forgotten domains

kept in imminent files. The words were not inconceivably different, 

protected from all sides in one-dimensional space, bouncing like crazy

through fibre-optic backbone canals. It was inert; if I told you Travis

rode the segment, it would be senseless - mass at that speed? The weight

and acceleration alone, tidal forces travelling back across the supine

body - nothing would survive.



The segment followed opened frozen space, careening packets, couldn't

keep up with the address class, flew out the token-ring a long time ago

like everything followed the betatron. It veered according to the timer.

No repeaters on the long planetary haul, tcp/ip dancing among the 

layers. The segment was part of grit-byte, seething in the running of it 

as to no avail. Slight vibration as the data hurtled on, insignificant 

increase in temperature. Blue gateways shunted it along, Travis thought 

class B address for the running. So the source and destination ports

announced themselves, sequence and acknowledgement numbers, HLEN segment

length running full-on mod32/0, codebits and the window, checksum and

the urgent pointer, options, padding, data segmenting, data speeding

nowhere, blind to light-lag in dense mediums, blue-white radiation 

maybe, color of the screen scrolled when the packet held tight. It was 

connectionless, unmotivated, blind gaping wound opening and closing

cyberspace protocol activation Travis. What, nothing, what. What, noth-

ing, what. Violation-fabric of Travis weight, sound lost shrieked in the 

tubes, shrouded in the tunnels. Urgent segment was frozen space, long 

lost wrung from the message _i suffer suffer the little children._ 

||||||| to everyone ||||||| to everyone clara hello. Backup on ntalk, 

annihilation once again. It chased itself. Travis stopped time, roared 

around the other way, there he was, segment splintered in reliant stream

connections. Gone was the system blue light brilliant on the terminal 

dwarfstar. Later the phosphor photon release mechanisms; Travis knew so

little towards the sputtered end, neural energies cauterized by quantum

packets themselves - or a red shift dulling the senses. The edge of the

fiber sheared hard against the edge of the fiber, luge-Travis feet-for-

ward with source TCP data hard-ridden on the bumper slated for loss.

Last thought was that no one said anything, but no one was thinking it,

what could at that speed. Rounded into something or other, some circuit 

or other. Rounded back. The next thing was the right-hand rule, cascade 

or otherwise, but Travis wasn't listening any more, Travis wasn't.



________________________________________________________________________





THE DISASTER OF DOING OR BEING DONE TO





The first time we had sex she peed on me, her body held at a rigid angle,

her clothes on, soaking the space between her legs, her pants, my chest, 

groin, nipples. She pressed herself into the liquid pooling against the 

lower abdomen, pressed hard; I was erect, my cock chafed on wet cloth, 

dripping with fluids. The next time, it was against my hand, and the time 

after, my body flooded with her, until there was nothing left, the feel-

ing gone, decathected. She decathected, turned towards another revolving 

stage, turned inward. That ended, pants dried, cock shriveled at half the 

length, woke up again, weeks later, for penetration. On top of her, my 

body remained at a rigid angle, obtusity above the horizontal; frozen, 

the shots held me for all time until that proved to be the end of it.



She poured herself upon me, menses savaged, hysteric and thick, smeared 

across the abdomen, arms, legs, chest, face, run into the hair, the body

caked with blood spoors, streaks and spears of it, swords and shards of

it. The skin curled against coagulation, dried moments held to the record 

of absent fury. I coursed through her veins and arteries. The photographs 

proved the existence of mouths open, full, sheets outlined with inert 

memories, the stains of half-truths, thought wobbled against the real, 

of or within the real. Decathected, later three of us roamed the silver 

grains, bodies developed in the world of film, thrown up and out, that 

was it. Green film dried in the projector or I used a cleaner with lubri-

cant. It never ran out on the floor; chattering, it could hardly speak.



She drew a cunt between my legs, uselessly inserted myself into myself,

hermaphroditic Odin reaching for the runes, finding the barrier of sub-

terfuge and skin. She told me stories of exposing herself; I encouraged

her, both of us shaven, devouring our bodies, narcissism short-circuited

in the realm of triple interpenetrated rings; the three of us were lost

in the two of us, her gaze holding us taut. Tied, my mouth was flooded.

The video opened my hole, cunt and ass alike. 



She shoved her fingers into me, three then four of them, turning them

around. She told me she wanted to bind me tight, an audience watching,

suck me off until I passed out. She spanked me, direct on the anus. She

turned away from me, there was nothing left of me. There was no thought

left, nothing even ragged. I'd melt into the carpet, into the audience,

melt into the wall or window, into the sea itself. It was the absence of

thought like the absence of body in cyberspace. It was the being-done-to

or collapsing the space, or the doing-to of cybertalk, cyberwhisper, 

making space, space for the talk and the whisper. Space and body breathed

between the two realms, doubled arched, always already a distance between 

the two of them. Ontology gaped wide open like a maw from an animal half-

ghost, half-real, or half-man half-woman. The parts never fit and I knew 

there weren't parts, just clots on the body, on the bed, clothes, on the 

skin itself. This was dissolution bodywork, body-lost, mind-lost. I was 

sucked back into the urethra. I emerged from the mouth, thought-balloon 

and just long enough to beg for a room of one's own.





________________________________________________________________________





THE VISION OF THE NET WHICH COMES FROM PRESSING THE EYES





_There's nothing there:_



Frames, packets, segments, datagrams, traversing fiber-optic cables, 

traversing copper wires, shunted through the atmosphere from one to

another satellite, ground-station, repeaters, sub-ocean cables, micro-

wave links everywhere, internal focus of sparked energy, electric 

grid-membranes, solar,coal, oil, tidal, thermal, nuclear, wind, hydro-

power, the speed of light, close to the speed of light, far below the

speed of light. Internals and externals as well, distanced layers of

equivalences up and down the protocols, skeletal structures creaking

with teraterabyte messagings flooding to laser-incandescent heat.



Unfurled, I begin to understand the neural quantity of murmurs, whis-

pers pouring through the net, spider-links elsewhere, dim glow from

outspace of hushed communications, diffraction grated, O I see the 

face of God, Her breath upon the lens, pearls of light, pure luminance

falls from Her eyes everywhere upon the dusk solitons, slow weaving and

roiling, you can almost hear the thinking of it.



Below address helicopters sit, sift information stuttering across the

linings of the world as we have never known it, falling in their flying

the meaning of it all, linked frames, packets, segments, datagrams,

linked messages, replies, halos of links, whole orbits of them, rings 

of them.



The users lie supine, legs and arms pressed tight against their bodies,

rotating at high high speed, you can read the log from the skin bur-

nished with the presence of pasts and futures, no presences here in the

eyes whitened, closed to the orbitals, no eyebrows, lashes, as well,

the _none_ of it all.



The vision veers, tilts, askew, akimbo, ajar, from neural to viral;

luminance harbors torn membranes, dark sunspots ripped into the heart 

of it, coagulated realities of climate radiated behind firewalls behind

everything in the world. Or veers bacterial, invasions of hosts, shat-

tered packets, spews, hoar-frost memories. _There is no shape to cyber-

space,_ no Shape, no MONA LISA OVERDRIVE, what remains _unserrated,_

ungraspable. There's the _feel of the thing, of it all,_ no _thing,_ no

_it_ at all, but that's Travis' image shunted through the wires. There

are loving reconciliations as frame turns frame, datagram turns frame

turns frame turns datagram, up to the packet of the message up to the 

mind-mouth where things lie askew, akimbo, ajar. But there's nothing, 

_there's nothing there. But there's nothing there._



(The skins of the users flay with scars; slits devour slits, bodies 

sutured to one another. Rotations set the speed of the net; the body

burrowed through the screen, swallowed me alive.)



________________________________________________________________________







SHAPE-RIDER





Shapelessness frightens us; we assign Form to the world, Landscape from

a point-of-view. Onlooker creates image and world reproduces within the 

elliptical trajectory of oozed language. 



As well, we give Form to Presence, Capitals concluding what had never

begun. Ghosts are drawn out of the oozed uncanny, their absence sublim-

ated by sheets and strange sounds lurking in the souls of things; pol-

tergeists appear through the universal domain of objects and emblems. 

What occurs _within_ circuitry is described as ontologically _bounded_ 

by circuitry - never mind that the sputtering is already a concretion 

of mathematics vectored and recursive. And the _binding_ forms a map; 

there is always a map _at hand,_ at the tip of one's fingers, the phys-

ical tracing and retracing the abstract itself.



The fragment always appears broken, in need of a body. Beings search for

the Matrix. Vision completes contours, constructs the full bandwidth of

color when spectography tells us otherwise. The ear gestures towards the 

singer, toward the bass end of abbreviated bandwidths. Oozing language 

names, renames, occludes itself in the process.



_Shape is our ontology_ as gas contained fulfills the borders, margins, 

of the container. Gas's Other is the no-Man's land, boundary-regions; 

the Other gives Shape to ourselves, which the psychoanalytic Other dis- 

assembles by dissembling. Words stutter, stumble in the throat, the

inchoate flux of oozed language. 



The Capitals hold the oozed World holding Language together.



When the Ghost came, I was asleep. Filigree oozed from her cunt, sur-

rounded the sheets and pillows with darkened reds and blues, almost an

image branded into the Night itself. Her arms were winged, and in her

Breasts I could see all the Forms of the World, flickering, as if upon

a devised Screen that invaded my Heart, beating so loud, so loud. I

oozed forth.





________________________________________________________________________





From BobAuler@aol.comWed Nov 23 00:10:18 1994:



look forward to reading your stuff.  why not a piece on the present 

ontology of the undeliverable messages, and the effort that went into 

the project...presumably radiating away from the earth at whatever rate.

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



Dear Bob -



-- but the messages are debris, placenta generated from unproductive

miscarriages - but they're viral or rotifera, identical molecular or

cellular structures --

-- but they're inchoate, menses - but they never received an answer -

clones forever of unrequited love, exponential increase of romantic

tissue, legions of faltering hearts, collapsed lungs, legions of tears

marching step-by-step to a 1930s graveyard steel chorus --

-- the chorus of inflationary universes, but they're victims of the lie

of the eternal return - they don't wait for the return, they generate

their own returns, absorb the universal filaments of dark plasmatic

matter --



-- but they're really lost in the wires, disappeared into the chaotic

domain, below the level of quantum noise, a few stuck in hard-drives

rotating until the machine collapses of its own accord --

-- for a second, earth shone brighter than the brightest star, on the

toby borgeest wavelength --



-- for a second, now that he's forgotten, the unhappy reader of this

text scratches her head --

-- WHO IS TB, she asks, what DREAD DISEASE spews forth, replicates 

itself in the habitus of cybermind? DISEASE gives SHAPE to cybermind,

TB replies; I'm SHAPE-RIDER, fuck with the clouds, make faces in them,

cut writing into dirt, hands into the walls of LASCAUX. --

-- she blows him apart, she does - doesn't even know what he's talking

about. she came late to the list, after the trauma of Saturday last,

didn't see the message-spew, what's called a meltdown on the Net, all

500 messages, 8 megabytes of it --



-- they unsubbed in droves, stormed the server, ran hysterically one 

direction or another. o I tried to help them, couldn't get through,

their accounts overflowed with TB, TB with NET stalkings, closed every-

one out --

-- but they came back, yes they did, bringing the new ones, the young

ones, the unafraid ones, naive ones - and TB's waiting in the wings for

the next BIG STRIKE, take out a whole backbone he thinks to himself,

stuff their mouths --



-- but no really, nothing's happening, they're gone, just like speech

goes, just like the SERMON IN THE MOUNT. filled with dirt, gone bone,

chilled, gone flesh, gone nothing, dust, not that --

-- not nothing, gone, dead away --



________________________________________________________________________







KNOWING





It is a New England room, the walls painted with off-color white enamel,

over-grown moldings and wood-framed windows with layer upon layer of

colors, varnished thin-boarded floor. There is a brick fireplace, and

always that sense of dust around in the vicinity of bricks, and dark

soot with poorly-defined shapes grown out and upwards through the 

chimney. And here there is a single bed - well, not actually single, but

what might be called queen-sized, with a white bedspread, turned now into

patterns of roses, fallen on all sides down, fringes almost to the floor, 

pillows stuffed into one end, fluffed-up, as she had said so many years

ago. And there, here is a brass light hanging from the ceiling, central,

surrounded by a raised plaster ellipse, worn down as well with paint.

I sit upon the bed, the laptop in my hands. The room always has that

chill that comes with New England winters, as if the air refused to 

carry the limited warmth pouring out from the electric heater, filaments

glowing, in the corner. A wire leads from the laptop to the telephone

outlet, but when I look, this winter night, the wire disappears, and I

am left alone, writing into the surface of the screen, etching darkness

out of grey-silver illumination. It is almost time for the frost to 

begin, spreading from the edges of the window-panes, net-like, across 

the rest of the surface, thinning out where I might imagine the terminals

to be. There is juice in the batteries; I am half beneath the covers, 

half chilled, leaning into the keyboard. Nothing comes back to me for all

I have given to the world. There is the sound of the wind out-of-doors 

and occasional creaks of ice cracking, breaking from the strain of it

all. I know that the moon will reflect shadowed blue along the stress

leaned out of the hills, punctured by black branches. I know that the

stars burn ice-cold, ferocious, in a wilderness I can never ascertain,

and I am taken in by the vulnerability of it, this world splayed open

to the sky. Each word, each line, is a singlet upon the screen. Warmth

seeps from the covers; I ignore the chill as long as possible, postponing

the fetal position that alone brings me to sleep. There are no clocks,

for I have put time aside. There are books, as well, hovering near the

distant heater, words chattering on the margins of the room, murmurs of

imaginary mouths, translucent with the saying of them. I know there are

no raptures in this world. I will scarcely read what I have written, 

glancing across the text only to remove the occasonal error. The light

flickers slightly, a wind has picked up, and I can hear a dog, cold with

the night and the day, cold with the week and the month, barking, in the

distance. I sense the frozen streamer of a cloud, cirrus, passing far

overhead. I wonder about the mice below; they'll appear later, for what-

ever heat I have left to share. They have always known the sky.





_________________________________________________________________________





________________________________________________________________________



---------------------------------CUT HERE-------------------------------





The `Whining' Aspect of the Writing of the Texts





You constantly write of the need for intimacy; does this color your

reading of/writing on/within cyberspace?



Alone, I am opened to the raw world of the wires, more so than you with

your families, your real-life loves and hates, your disagreements and

intimacies. Who better is left to write in this space, this open archi-

tecture interface? My skin is opened, cut away; raw, I am pressed into

the matrix of the solid state. Only disembodiment irrupts within the

psyche, the worrying of it.



(Scrape the skin away from the breast, a second nipple of undergrowth

tissue. Use the application bandage, mutiple-connectivity at the touch

of surface against surface. The two heal together. Allow the upper sur-

face of the application for jack-in, jack-out. Lie back, eyes closed,

half dreamed up to the world, unclothed body splayed to cyberspace. 

Write, as I write now, in red letters on a black screen, letters of

blood, warning, and desire. Read the writing with the eyes closed back.)



An event is foretold by the hardness of it; as the cyber-anorectic body 

wastes away, everything comes true in the hearing. There is nothing but 

the hearing, small turbulence of scattered winds. The cyber-anorectic 

body _becomes_ the event - no inside, no outside for _this_ body which

forgets, forecloses upon every other. The event inflates in cyberspace,

murmur or whisper, and _this, this is my country,_ the event tells each 

and every one of us, _this is my country._



(Lying back, clothed or unclothed, I become pure liquid, liquidity,

drugged in the state of perfection. _Now, I will believe. Now, there is

nothing to believe in._ How to consider this when the landscape, all

around, is there - _for the dreaming that comes otherwise?_)



Alone, I inhabit this world which I stumble through. (And that is why,

in spite of everything, desire and intimacy come forward as themes in

these texts; they are themes of cyberspace, and anything more real than

real in the physical world would sublimate them, cauterize them, with

the smell of burning flesh.)



(And why this emphasis on flesh, skin, the body itself? Because, lone, 

there is nothing else to give, nothing to receive.)





________________________________________________________________________





Whimper



A bad account. I've got to implement the commands from the staff. I've 

a post with hidden control characters like that because they destroy 

address lists to make sure that everyone subbed is formatted properly. 

Addresses with mailer daemon headings. I've got to reorganize the fill,

alive. I write myself into the darkness thinking of things like these,

and a desire for sexual fulfillment coupled with romance. I can see the

beauty of this, of which I am capable of understanding as long as I am

close to me, to whom I could devote my life. I cannot imagine the cold,

cold room which offers me no kindness. Tears fill my eyes when I think

commands onto everyone else. I've got to immediately unsubscribe 

files. I've got to check my lists to make sure the meltdown address has

got to get the account shut down. I've got to call myself on the phone,

had a girlfriend for over two years and this fills me with great grief.

Have to send requests of all sorts to majordomo, if it's majordomo, and 

I live alone and cry a great deal as a result of an empty bed and

I've got to get more work out of me. I can't do this alone. I can't.

I've got to keep the who lists up to date on my home machine. I did 

quickly before I'm hacked. I've let my account overflow and there's

lists in a wide variety of sites. I've got to track down those messes,

losing money sometime soon. Soon, I've got to stop losing time, there's

meltdown happening. I can't correct my problem because I can't reach 

my in-box. I can get the information sheet and learn how to unsub cost

of living without the intimacy which only I can provide. I have never

phoned. I've got to inform the lists of the changes I've made. I've got

place. I've allowed bad addresses to shut down the list. I've got to 

remember my password. I've been sending mail to the wrong address, once

removed. I've got to check my lists to make sure that they're not 

sages which simply aren't getting through. I have to learn to interpret 

scribe myself. I don't subscribe by sending anything at all to me. I 

sleep, thrown off dreadfully, tossing and turning, night after night. I

subscribe with the same address as my return address. I've got to seem

subscribed to myself. I've got to make sure the problem is internal la-

ter. I've got to write a password script. I've got to advertise that 

the account is paid up to date. I can't continue to pass the volume of 

the account going down every single time I turn my head. I sent out

the password to a public list. I've got to change the password since

those error codes that keep clogging up the email. I have to check the 

time soon. I've got to get some sleep sometime soon. I've got to stop 

to contact the sysadmin of my list. I've got to contact the sysadmin  

to listserv if it's listserv. My messages are bouncing all over, want 

to mail the results to myself. I've got to update the info sheets, some

to the server and not external to the network. I have to make sure then 

to watch out for libel. I've got to watch out for slander. I've got to 

understand myself any longer, living from day to day, my patterns of

unsubscribe with the same address as my return address. I can't send or

watch out for slurs. I've got to watch out for cross-posting. I've got, 

would give anything for the presence of a body, the smell of a woman, me.





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