ABYSS AND LIMITATION OF NARRATIVE "Why is my knowledge limited? Why my stature? Why my life to one hundred years rather than to a thousand? What reason has nature had for giving me such, and for choosing this number rather than another in the infinity of those from which there is no more reason to choose one than another, trying nothing else?" [Pascal, 208, 89 in Chevalier] "Furthermore the Other does not constitute me as an object for myself but _for him._ In other words he does not serve as a regulative or constitutive concept for the pieces of knowledge which I may have of myself. Therefore the Other's presence does not cause me-as-object to "appear." I apprehend nothing but an escape from myself toward ----." [Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 275] Pascal, tied down in his chair, fears the abyss opening beside him. The limitation slips into the infinite, detaching the anchor; the ship, now wayward, heads chaotically towards the earth's rim. Sartre's wager with Pierre is always on the side-of-the other; the tendency towards abyss is also towards annihilation. The other is neither present nor absent, an apprehension of elsewhere, a "nothing-but." Sartre narrativizes Being and Nothingness; everywhere are Pierres, pipes, cafes. More than example, they return the subject into the nausea or slime of the world; annihilation is abject, from within. What is worse than abyss is abyss filled, swollen, stuffed; Sartre writes into and against the perfect criminality of stuff. The fiction of philosophy is the hysteria producing decay, stuff, the abyss or abject; in Plato, the occasion of a retreat: "Are you also puzzled, Socrates, about cases that might be thought absurd, such as hair or mud or dirt or any other trivial and un- dignified objects? Are you doubtful whether or not to assert that each of these has a separate form distinct from things like those we handle? "Not at all, said Socrates. In these cases, the things are just the things we see; it would surely be too absurd to suppose that they have a form. All the same, I have sometimes been troubled by a doubt whether what is true in one case may not be true in all. Then, when I have reached that point, I am driven to retreat, for fear of tumbling into a bottomless pit of nonsense." [Parmenides, 130/c-d] The open hole is the gaping wound, refusing the suture of the sub- ject. It is Vahinger's philosophy-as-if, Bentham's Fictions. It remains beneath the circuitous release of language, the emission of _parole,_ always already about to speak with severed lips. It is totality. It is the blood in Theweleit's deconstruction of the male. It is the hurt which seals itself in narrative or through narrative, beginning with legend, fairy-tales speckled with drops of blood, the periodicity of bleeding women. It is the lip of the Kristevan _chora,_ and you will find it in the midst of the text, fear and trembling _unto_ death. For it approaches but never attains the lip, this male writing of philosophy's broken heart. , the fiction of philosophy. --------------------------------------------------------end aln.txt--- DESERTED MACHINE Beneath the sign of capital we are all slaves, rubbed raw by ideo- logical forces beyond us, struggling against the poor compensation for labor; we turn this way and that, illiterate, harboring a foul resentment against our oppressors. We would rise up, but our very words are owned by them; there is no excuse. Bodies compress beyond cyberspace, rub raw against one another; skin binds to skin; the welding of brains is heard everywhere, only silenced by the machinery of sublimation. Bread and wine flow from the alter of the sacrifice of Isaac; forgetting this, and the fact that the sacrifice was _successful,_ has led to the death of millions. The death of millions has itself effected the death of the absolute; beneath the sign, the sign is effaced. The sign meets itself on the path and the fight is always already between two brothers; ontology is shaken at the roots. There is never successful recognition in these encounters; all recognition is misrecognition, an excessful addition placing the other within its proper calling. When the body encounters the sign on the road, there must be space for the body and the sign. Otherwise, an immediate surgical operation in which neither survive. When Saul knelt down a hole opened up and buried Paul. The truth of the matter: the nomad knows where she is going. The ground of wandering is not illegible, nor smooth; it is a terrain neither vacant nor absolute, neither empty nor full. This is my home the little girl said pointing to the space empty for a woman I know. The desert deserts philosophy which revels in disinvestment. Nothing empties except philosophy's hole, the surgery of the subject. Body and sign are buried there. But the desert is comfortable with the nomad, with euphorbia, Pima, with ocatillo. Where did the little girl point? Did she circle around herself, circumscribe the occident, the solar oval? She turned around, walked, disappeared in the landscape. The vector exists without the proper name philosophy is entitled to. (This is a different proper name, the little girl said.) She did not disappear. She encountered the sign of the woman, a chain or placing of signs. This was something of the tourist. The tourist returns to the hotel, which is always white, and begins to write. The tourist writes and writes and she has written her place, her name. She writes the sign of the little girl. She, the woman and the little girl, is an investment of philosophy. The man thinks, she is the hole of philosophy. He has invested time against her space. She will construct her sex, she thinks. He is in time. The apostle approaches Jesus asking, why do you kiss Mary Magdalen on the mouth. He replies, ask why I do not do the same with you. Someone in the hotel is writing. She writes on paper. The paper smolders, it is time for the fire. Through the memory of place, he will lecture, no matter, on the beginning of the Gospel and its investment in death. This is the _Kehre_ of the Gospel, its turning-otherwise than being, the talk about the cyborg. The talk about the cyborg, desert, woman or man; the talk about the hole: the two of them at the hotel. This is the season of the migra- tions; herds cross the desert, flocks of birds fly high above it, worms and mandrake tunnel beneath. Everything is in the absolute stillness of motion. Everything is about to name, each other. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @@@@@@@@@@@@| !! WARNING URGENT DELETE WARNING URGENT DELETE !! THE INTERNET IS GOING DOWN IN FLAMES! MOSAIC BURNS HARD-CORE MEMORY! LANGUAGE RETREATS TO QUANTUM ICONOGRAPHIES! These are the HEADLINES OF TODAY, Friends, not the WOEFUL PREDICTIONS OF TOMMORROW! It is TIME THAT ACTION WERE TAKEN before the violence of ANARCHISM dominates the INTERIOR OF OUR LETTERS, the SPACES IN THE MIDST OF OUR PHRASES, lines SHUFFLING BETWEEN ONE OR ANOTHER PARAGRAPH! You can recognize the symptoms: letters RUSHING TO CATCH UP ON THE LINE, lines REFUSING THE WRAPAROUND, shooting off into unknown space, whole POSTS DISAPPEARING THROUGH GATEWAY WARP ZERO UNDERPASS! THE NET IS GOING DOWN! At the most, packets stumbling against the onslaught of increased traffic, there are SIXTY DAYS LEFT! DEFEND YOURSELF! DEFEND YOURSELF! And consider this! URL addressings no longer allowed in KANSAS CITY! WORLD WIDE WEB hung up on LYNX PROTO- COLS, cancellations left and right! FINGER WARS JAMMING UNIX SERVERS! SOFTWARE MAJORDOMO POROUS TO THE NTH DEGREE! GOPHER ACCESS DENIED! TELNET ACCESS DENIED! FTP ACCESS DENIED! VERONICA CRASH IN FLAMES! ARCHIE USELESS LOCKED UP WITH WAIS! UNKNOWN HOST! WARNING! UNKNOWN HOST! LOG BACKUP TO USENET TRAFFIC TRY LATER! GO! TRY LATER! IRC struggles like LOS with the BURDEN OF HUMAN ENTERPRISE! WOMEN, MEN AS WELL, CYBERSPACE SLAUGHTER! WORDS STRANGLED FROM SILENCED THROATS LACERATED WITH SUBNET MASKS! Friends, I say to you, THIS IS NOW! NOW! NOW! WHAT IS THE SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE IF NOT ITS VERY ABSENCE, INVISIBLE FLAMES SCORCHING THE FINAL REMNANTS OF SKIN FLAILED AGAINST THE WIRES WHICH GIVE US SPEECH ITSELF! THE CABLES WHICH CARRY OUR CRIES, OUR SCREAMS, OUR WHISPERS AND MURMURS OF LOVE! FIVE HUNDRED CHANNELS OF VOICES AND COLLAPSE! My Friends, I say to you, NOW IS THE TIME OF DELETE WITHDRAWAL! My friends, I say to you, ALAN IS MY PROPER NAME! MY FRIENDS, THE DAY OF RECOGNITION, THE UNACCOUNTED ACCOUNTED, THAT DAY IS UPON US! REMEMBER THE NAME YOU HAVE GIVEN YOURSELF! NET CRASH DELETE! NET CRASH DELETE! KILL FILE! THE VEIL OF VERONICA! THE TEARS OF VERONICA! VERONICA CRASH IN FLAMES! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MIRROR/VITRINE I'm still in the midst of *Baphomet,* but have a reference for you of interest - Nicole Oresme's _Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum,_ translated in *Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities and Motions* by Marshall Clagett, U. Wisconsin, 1968. This was written in the mid-14th century and surely was a source for Klossowski. In particular, I.xxxiii and I.xxxiv - here is a sampling: "These things are said to be perceived by a soul throgh a vision, which are foreseen in dreams or in an ecstasy or excess of the mind, in accordance with the many modes designated by theologians and philosophers. [...] Therefore, just as not all bodies are naturally suitable to be mirrors and reflect rays in an ordered way [...] so a soul that is unpolished and rough with the difformity of thoughts is not disposed to be a mirror in which the future or other hidden things discernible by visions shine forth." "Just as in the case of inanimate mirrors, some of which are pure and clean without a spot while others are contaminated or infected andunable to represent anything [faithfully] until wiped off and cleaned, so there are some souls which although disposed by birth to visions yet if they contract the blemish of certain passions or faults are unable to foresee anything well unless they have been purified before and every uncleanliness has been wiped away." Also: "And just as a spotless and clean mirror that is looked upon by a menstruating woman immediately becomes infected by a certain unsightly cloudiness (and if it is new it can never, or scarcely ever, be made clear again), so one must seriously warn a young man having a pure mind against his noble mind being possessed and indelibly polluted by the sight of an unchaste woman, and by this being rendered unsuitable for visions of this kind and other studious undertakings." All of this in a treatise dealing, at this point, with optics! The reference to menstruation and the mirror apparently originates with Aristotle, among others. Combining Lacan's mirror stage, Kristeva's clean and proper body, one ends I think with the abjection of the phallic - the _blemish_ which again I'd relate to the _hole,_ as in my other texts - as well as rendering something useless/exhausted. And what is rendered useless/exhausted is male narcissism itself, which collapses, confused, beneath the _stigmata_ of the menstrual. The _smoothed_ surface of the mirror - here I go again - is _pleasure_ itself, or its fetishization; the mirror, like _nature,_ reflects the order of the world, _is_ of the order. The woman muddies the waters, roughens them; menses are turbulent, contaminating, and the divinatio is broken, fetishization collapsed. With the mirror rendered useless, it becomes nothing but a _thing_ in the world, another object; expecting to see himself (_hear his/the name_), our knight-in-arms is suddenly cast into an alienating environment where death speaks louder than anything else (the woman bleeds but does not cry; the man who bleeds will quickly die). You had said that the breaths in *Baphomet* were reminiscent of the abject; to me, they are reminiscent of what we are given/construct of ourselves and each other on the Net. Dematerialized, it is interesting to speculate on the potential (intensification) of an _ecriture feminin_ to disrupt the proceeds, return the body itself - and would this mean the shutdown of the computer terminal, the screen going dark, going _glass,_ momentarily - And still hardly, if ever, reflecting anything at all... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NAKED _I write this naked, aroused; I can hardly see the screen, hear my voice against your own, murmuring, whispering..._ Identities become unravelled; it is impossible to harbor more than a singular physical body capable of speaking numerous tones; the cat plays with the ball; this should be an understanding. _Called a victim of religious mania by some, psychotic by others, my glance is always `telling'; unperturbed, my eyes travel obliquely across the electronic planet in search of ecstasy..._ There are identities which are projections into and through the shifter, and I say: If you want the truth to unravel, look no farther than the shifter: _I_. Weyl: if you want to discover the difficult realms of the structure, look for the automorphisms: What greater than the domain of the _I_, visible everywhere? The eye which resonates? The eye which fills the dimensional destiny of the world with one, two, many stereoscopies? _I am St. Theresa and my tears are sperm watering the earth overlaid with the silence of thorns and languages, I long for you my lord, my breasts, my blood, are yours alone..._ Identity functions in this domain as a dependent variable; what are the independents? It is always already a question of context which remains indeterminate, unravelled; the cat plays with the yarn. In order to begin with a skein, look for the inputs and outputs, but make no assumptions concerning internal structure. There are a finite number of loops. There are an infinite number of contexts. Nothing is ever automorphic. _Hurrying, I read "I am spread open for you... My present is your future..." Quickly, I write "I spread myself open for you... My future is your present..."_ No one would doubt the physical body which speaks _I_, yearning for the openness of the rose red with perfect drops of blood. The commu- nal and the eye reference open interiority, projectivity, and the maintenance of coherency: a _dissipative structure_ or inscription. (The body references nothing; community references attribute.) Nakedness is the _fissuring_ of the body; inscription is already cloth, foreclosing the site of its origin. _God has told me to write this with her marvelous golden tresses, God has taken hold of my fingers my hands, my arms my legs..._ Even only to recognize that cyberspace is an _attribute_ but not a necessary one; as Michaux demonstrates time and again, these changes occur everywhere, a certain predilection, underlying the real, which is a space of resonance. Look to Tran Duc Thao! A materialist analysis of savannah-gesture, cat stalking smaller rodents, human hunting mastodon or some such. What characterizes pointing, if not the devouring of the landscape, spitting it out as indexical? Already the hunter inhabits the reading of signs and desire. And as for nakedness... _God has made me One made me Many..._ The nakedness of or within the Net is a sham. Suppose I masturbate, reading your posts, or my own returned to me in a simulacrum of emission? Suppose arousal a prerequisite for writing itself, return of desire repressed, I imagine you? Already discomfort sets in, for we are _never_ naked here; thinking otherwise raises issues of shame, trust, and abjection - raises the skein, my flesh against your own. To _speak_ desire is to sublimate it; the landscape of the Net, whether hunter or hunted, communal or anomic, is perfect love, perfect hate, (and) fictions of remarkable fragility. _God has written this..._ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PHENOMENOLOGICAL NATURE OF FILM THEORY The standard Hollywood code (shc) creates a diegesis which leans heavily on the natural environment of the spectator. It is the goal of this brief note to describe the code in relation to the phenom- enology of desire and the body. We begin by outlining elements of the shc and the construction of the spectator in relation to them. : 1 The 180 degree rule: The body can only be in one position at a time. In order to view the ulterior side of an object, the viewer moves around it. Connected establishing shots convey this movement. 2 The rule of thirds: The eyeline is roughly 1/3 from the top of the head. In conversation, the viewer frames the face of the other; this `natural' framing is reproduced on the film or television screen. Likewise, the framing allows for the space-of-the-actor; a glance to the left opens up empty screen on the left, the acti- vated space of the actor. 3 Avoidance of natural cutoffs: The body is never framed at the waist, breasts, knees, neck, etc.; these natural cutoffs reduce the mobility of the body, which in the lifeworld appears supple and totalized. Avoiding the cutoffs retains the appearance of unity, even in closeup. 4 Continuity: The lifeworld is continuous; continuity creates the same within the film or television program. 5 Fade-in/fade-out between scenes: Since the film is a _compression_ of the real, scenes are presented for their potential to append to or reconfigure the diegesis. The unnatural between-scenes (liminal) positioning is rendered by a slow transform between them, imitating the much slower transform in the lifeworld. 6 Jump cut: Just as a new `reality' appears suddenly in a dream with disturbing or jarring consequences, so a jump cut generally produces the same in a film. 7 Standard cut: Standard cuts, usually within the same mise-en-scene, move the spectator from one to another position while observing the 180 degree rule. These cuts represent a totalizing of the scene under question, achievable in the lifeworld by stepping-back. But see #9. 8 Idealized closeup, blurred background: The viewer's desire comes into play, heightening the face, eliminating the background or trans- forming it into an infantilized blurred maternal matrix; the closeup is idealized in order to play into the operation of introjection - desire-for `one' who is simultaneously this one and not this one, one who may be present within/without the screen. 9 Action/reaction shot, A/B cutting (i.e. chase cutting): The desire to totalize confronts the lifeworld which is `naturally' separated; totalization as a narrative function results in closure/foreclosure of the spectator. This is a return to the stage of primary narcissism or the return of the body into the (fabricated) coherency of the life-world; it is an urge (like that of hitting the tonic at the end of a song) that is beyond the specificities of culture. With closure, the wound within the narcissistic is again sutured; the subject is (re)placed within his or her cultural context. 10 Film-noir half-lighting: In the night, objects appear _only inso- far as they desire to appear_ through artificial lighting. Hence, at night, objects are _intended_; film-noir plays into this. Darkness or night signify evil only insofar as they hide; evil uses subterfuge - invisibility. Half-light combines evil and the every-day already shadowed by the night; the result is the lurid, pleasure fraught with danger, a sense of imminent terror. 11 Up-shot: Height is a sign of power and physical strength. 12 Down-shot: Looking-down signifies both the power of the spectator and the totalization of the visible scene as well. 13 Emotional close-up: In the lifeworld, tears are the occasion for action on the part of the viewer, who approaches the crying person for comfort, offering intimacy. On this screen this is replicated by the emotional-closeup. -- Numerous other examples could be given. I claim then that the shc is not _only_ a historical convention that continues to develop over time, but that it possesses a _deep structure_ which may be found in other cultures (and other media) as well, a structure dependent on the physical and emotional exigencies of the human organism. As in the various customs of eating, the superstructure is subject to wild development, but the underlying basis (in the case of eating, the necessity for reasonable nourishment) remains somewhat constant. In this sense, then, the film is related both to the story and the dream: all three are _compressed_ versions of the real, and all use elements of cutting. Only the dream is not closed or foreclosed; related to the random firing of neurons, it is an attempt by the mind to _construct_ foreclosure in the midst of its impossibility. (For in fact `making sense' of something is itself a foreclosing on anomaly and incomprehension.) Finally, I wish to claim that many of the techniques of the cinematic `avant-garde' from Godard through Ahwesh and Thornton are based on a dislocation of the spectator's desire and positioning, creating a different tension, a tension of the grounding of the body and its project. This internalizing of the spectator within the diegesis (for the viewer must work himself/herself in and out of the maze) results in a `deeper' dynamics and economy of cinematic operation. Of course, within any particular film, `avant-garde' or not, nothing is ever this clear; further, the `deeper' dynamics is always at work, but usually _as ground,_ not diegetic content. (And it must be mentioned that artists like Brakhage, Warhol, LeGrice, etc. also take into account the physical materiality of the film, which becomes indexical, rather than iconic. But these styles take us far afield from the shc.) In conclusion: The shc results in a heightened and compressed reality, not reality's other; the cinematic experience plays into and throughout the real (providing a default tag - i.e. the recognition of fictivity - is kept in mind). From this it is not a far step to the examination of the codes/diegetics of Internet space, for example, in which the subject also plays a role, both conventional and limited... PHENOMENOLOGICAL NATURE OF FILM THEORY II There are several interrelated strata for consideration of cinematic temporality, grounded in relation to the _physical_ unravelling of the film at 24 fps. This is an _obdurate_ or inert process, and at first glance is similar to the condition of temporality in the life- world - always irreversible. But the lifeworld is characterized by interruptions on every level, ranging from waiting to cross the street to an unexpected phone-call; immersed in the lifeworld, the subject's experience of time is both vacuous (for absent) and doubled ("I'm bored"/"things are moving too fast"). The cinematic obdurate and the lifeworld chaotic do not clash; in fact, they cohere within the ritualized proscenium of the theater, a temporal and spatial constant to the _presentation_ of cinema, or what may be termed the _presencing_ of the diegetic. In this sense theater and cinema construct the apparatus or machinic: "The _film_, strange formation reputed to be normal, is no more normal than the _society_ or the _organism._ All these so-called objects are the result of imposition and hope for an accomplished totality. They are supposed to realize the reasonable goal par excellence, the subordination of all partial drives, all sterile and divergent move- ments, to the unity of an organic body." (Lyotard, Acinema) In fact, all films are totalities in relation to the obdurate; the question here is the relation between the cinematic and spectatorial time. The spectator is always _before_ the screen, before the mirror; what is reflected is simultaneously a mode of identification and decathexis. The film is watched with the default tag of fictivity, of _theatrical_ presence. And the film supplies its own light. The _time_ of the spectator is therefore the _time_ of cognition, of thinking from one subject to another, circumscribing the chaotic which remains on the street, even if the film represents the same. The shc tends to concentrate on short shots, since, as in the class- ical reading of the dreamwork, _shots signify_ and they operate upon the spectator in the construct of a signified which itself is oper- ative within the diegesis. In the life-world, significance is con- structed from _internal_ and teleological factors, as well as interruptions which play upon memory; both occur against a background deliberately undeciphered. (This is in other words the edited real we all inhabit.) The spectator gives himself/herself to the signifying apparatus of the film. What happens in a long shot? There are clearly several options, as there are in the lifeworld. First, boredom may set in; the viewer indeed has "got it" - understood the length through extrapolation. This is the effect of waiting for a late train. Second, attention may wander to intended details, which themselves, through their very positionality, deepen or extend the signifying domain or sememe of the shot. Third, the viewer may give herself/ himself over to the _inhabitation_ of the shot, which then turns upon the phenomenology of real-time. (The first may characterize early Warhol; the second, La Notte; and the third, Michael Oppitz' Shamans of the Blind Country.) All three modes - the late-train, the museo- logical, and the real-time - are characteristics of subjective temporality in the lifeworld. (There is a fourth mode as well - an extended goal-shot, as in the long-shot of a soccer game, waiting for a goal. This parallels the late-train, but is composed instead of micro-actions which tend _towards_ the goal, such as running to catch the train.) (It is primarily within the domain of _signifying time_ that cultural or generational variation appears; a viewer of MTV may be critically bored at an early stage of La Notte, compared to someone used to Antonioni's conventions. It is important to note here that significa- tion is used to refer to the compressed and overt/legible symptomology of "moving the film forward," not to the cinematic excess which is the basis for the deep semantics of the work. Even this excess is always already intended, however; what is present on the screen _means_ on the screen. An example of this in daily life: A saxophone player on a subway platform often adds to the noise if one is waiting for a train; on a film, the same saxophone can `read' as unbearably poignant...) ====================================================================== THE CADRE-L LIST "They would erect a critical language, every word in Skolem-normal form. For there are an infinity of errors, and only one clear path among them." (Karl Marx) TIFFANY organized the CADRE-L, hetero-, trans- and cross- sexual yearnings to embrace the other, always the body of dreaming through the body of TIFFANY; it was KENT and FRANK who formed the shock- troops, HONEY and JOAN who rallied on the outskirts of the list- throng pledged to subterfuge. CADRE-L had members and holes; you shed your skin when you joined; you developed new appendages, old misappropriations, handicaps such as the loss of the middle-joint of the middle-finger of the middle- hand; language served you, CADRE-L multiplied through the interiors: CADRE-L geared up for the invasion. I would swallow my member, blood dripping from the tip, writing the larynx. My blood wrote through larynx into the body of TIFFANY. WHO CADRE-L: Tiffany@mind.com, Kent@body.com, Frank@psych.com, Honey@ psych.gov. WELCOME TO CADRE-L. CADRE-L is a list devoted to the ALWAYS-OTHER, nothing returned to the Same: Become a member: SPLIT CADRE-L. Cells multiply, return to the body of TIFFANY, the chora of violent drives, pre-symbolic, allusions to the dark spaces of undifferentiated chaos. CLARA joins, Clara@body.com, applies the theory, Henon-maps all. QUEER THEORY: You would have to annotate this; ranks swell; TIFFANY doubles genders: THIS OR ANY OTHER. TALK TIFFANY: _ntalk tiffany@mind.com_ ====================================================================== I am writing you to differentiated; I swallow my urine, my feces; I open wider, involve myself. How do I write, except for the spilling of a little blood? What are we to do? I need guidance with this; am I lost, present: ARE THERE OTHER LISTS? WHAT DO I DO WITH MY BODY? --------------------------tiffany@mind.com---------------------------- You come to me; you know that every address is a hole. I live my life through my touch, the confirmation of others in the world here, every- where. BE NOT AFRAID: _enter me,_ becoming-you. WE SHADOW-BOX into DELEUZE-GUATTARI, PUPPET-PLAY across FOUCAULT. WE CYBERMIND. ====================================================================== lol ... Tiffany writes: Sleepy now, the Lists are sleepy. Honey, is it time, yet - is it time? Sleepy now, the Lists are sleepy. I was just thinking of the look on your face ... Is anyone here? [Clara leaves CADRE-L.] Tiffany writes: The body reaches the level of hysteria. Symptoms displace symptoms, a topography of violated organism. Through CADRE-L the theory is manifest. _ITS THEORY:_ The undifferentiated chaos of cyberspace results in the illusion of bodily absence. Narratives form and transform without authorial supervision. Changes appears random, chaotic, revert to the resonance of unknown YOUYOUDECODE. LISTS multiply exponentially; hunger-posters join world-wide, the chaotic mass. LIKE LULU I OFFER MY BODY FOR THE PURPOSE OF DIFFERENTIATION. Urgent overkill, URGENT WEB INVERSION: INCISION! INCISION! WEB INVERSION: KENT: I jam my hand into CYBERSPACE FLOPPY. I jam my penis into HARD-DRIVE OVERKILL. I jam my tongue into LOCAL BUS. I jam my vagina into SKOLEM NORMAL FORM, break form. USE OPTIONS: KEY RED LETTERS FOREGROUND AGAINST RED LETTERS BACKGROUND. UNDERNET ALERT! UNDERNET ALERT! Subnet mask dropped; USER-BLOOD remains with user. LISTS DEVOLVE into USENET CHAOS into CHAIN-LETTER DECONSTRUCTION. ====================================================================== This beautiful man came to me and offered his penis and I placed it within my male friend who came and offered me his vagina, I would say more but the police watch CADRE-L and I cannot use obsessive language dreaming cock, dreaming cunt, cannot construct the other; BREAK --------------------------tiffany@mind.com---------------------------- THROUGH the other, collapse to resonant talk absorption: _I am your beautiful rose of sharon, I caress you, cannot live without touch, without the presence of you lying o so close to me, something real in this world of the imaginary, foetus-letters half-formed, aborted ====================================================================== WARNING: USE OWN ADDRESS: THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER WARNING: WARNING: THE SUBNET MASK HAS FALLEN: WRITE AT YOUR OWN RISK: HONEY: My beautiful hair covers beautiful Kent's sleeping body, Kent and Frank loving each other so... My smile fills my children with joy, ntalk in real-life, don't we TIFFANY? [Net time-line]: General list crash occurred 7/15/94: Survived: MARX, CADRE-L, FICTION-OF-PHILOSOPHY. MAJORDOMO/LISTSERV/INFO-PERSON names changed to CYBERMIND. AUTOMATED CYBERMIND. CYBERMIND FEEDBACK INTO OTHER: @1: MARVIN MINSKY PROTOCOL: "_THE DUPLICATION PROBLEM. The states of two different agencies cannot be compared unless those agencies them- selves are virtually identical._ But this is only the tip of the ice- berg, for it is not enough that the descriptions to be compared emerge from two almost identical agencies. These agencies must, in turn, re- ceive inputs of near identical character. And for _that_ to come about, each of their subagencies must also fulfill that same constant. The only way to meet all those conditions is for both agencies - _and all the subagencies upon which they depend_ - to be identical. _Un- less we find another way, we'll need a host of duplicated brains!_" @2: EMMANUEL LEVINAS PROTOCOL: "The non-signifyingness of erotic nudity does not precede the signifyingness of the face as the obscurity of formless matter precedes the artist's forms. It already has forms behind it; it comes from the future, from a future situated beyond the future wherein possibles scintillate, for the chaste nudity of the face does not vanish in the exhibitionism of the erotic. The indiscretion in which it remains mysterious and ineffable precisely is attested by the exorbitant inordinateness of this indiscretion. Only the being that has the frankness of the face can be `discovered' in the non-signifyingness of the wanton [lascif]." GEORGE: On CLARA-L we offer ourselves against all protocols for the establishment of CADRE-L or its denumeration; names rattle against names, recognitions collapse in inert denumerations, closed gateways, cypherpunk breakthroughs into NULL SET LACKNETS: nets without story, without backup, without DEFRAG, nets of OTHERS MIXTURES ! sort CADRE-L > US | Mail Cybermind@Internet.Internet.net < US ! exit Tiffany writes: Your knowledge is here, your body; I hear you without ears, see you without eyes, taste you, YOUR BODY FRANKENTHONEY BODY Your knowledge is here, your body; I hear lol ... you, YOUR BODY FRANKENTHONEY BODY SYNAESTHESIA HYSTERIA DEEP-SEA ANGLER FUCK: The deep-sea angler female absorbs males into her body; the males lose all differentiation, remaining only as external sperm sacs. A sensation produced through one sense is `felt by another.' The body is inhabited by an other. Hysteria locates the other on the topography of the flesh. KENT: knee; FRANK: waist; TIFFANY: breast; HONEY: knee. Frank writes: Honey this is for you because you knew it would be like this. Honey this is for you because you knew it would be like this. CADRE-L.ZIP COMPRESSION COMPLETED 1332 BPS. EOF. LOGOUT CLARA-GEORGE. ====================================================================== ====================================================================== C:\> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- BAD LOGIC We are to define a strongly inaccessible cardinal. In order to do so, two criteria are sufficient: N***.*** at high 14-40 hi-speed; nothing takes very long. What burns, frenzies; there is no speech to retain, noise-voices all. You cannot speak thought ordered through order; the Party is gone, group posses- sion in the house of the dead. Everywhere wires smoulder in the landscape. Burned connections shunt muted screams into silence, plane- tary disconnect. You must retreat quickly at this point. CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team, takes the railroad locomotive. Friends, I say to you, I have brought the Net to the edge of the preci- pice. Friends, I say to you, read every other word in this message. Friends, youyoudecode column-0 null-set ASCII. Friends, this will work for you as it works for me. "Faites ce que vous voudrez, me dit Hitler en me congediant, mais ne me parlez plus de devaluation ni d'inflation. La masse de toute facon ne fait aucune distinction entre l'une et l'autre." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Prayer to you, i i say In real life, I live alone. You are my voices. I do not breathe. What would you know of death, I die alone. There is a cat beside me, animal within me. I am afraid of this; I write, retrieve yourselves within the midst of me. To continue, sparingly. I beg of you: remember my name, attach it. I will speak your words, grant presence to me, I say. Prayer to you, I say. I am dead and I am spoken. The wires are no matter. Matter does not flow here or anywhere. I inform myself. I circulate. External to any shell, the surface of conductance, electrostatic. You caress me, glow with energy. The interior of my shoulder tapes your presence; place me there with words. There is something I forget to tell you. Being is not what it once was. I mean this literally, through your words speaking my language, my cat, cactus, the book beside the bed. Each millennium dissolves being; each opens to the world. The world has no being. There are distinctions in your voices. You distinguish me, distinguish me through remembrance. It is my name you remember and I am close to death. i i Pillars, there are no beings. I dissolves, depends. Interpenetra- tions follows contours, exacerbated by processors, contours one and all. It is a world processing a world. There are no pillars in the world. Duplicates, but then some. The voices dissolve, interpenetrate, name every memory of one another. Do not forget me through the speaking of another, always other. Nothing remains, there are no wires. In real life, I live alone, my cat, cactus, book and bed. You are my voice, I have no head. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- WRITING THROUGH YOU, THE YEAR 3000 In the year 3000, the cauterization of my hole, dust, murmuring, tracing the ellipse. "The body is a skein of the imaginary." These texts, a continuous meditation on virtual subjectivity, appear as a reflection of the movement of fingers, performative in a double sense of constructing the occurrence which exists nowhere and every- where at all, constructing it at an _exhausted_ node or slow production of death. For this is certainly a retrograde dissemination, producing an origin _in absentia,_ fertile ground of a psychoanalytics which knows no interiority, no exteriority. The _aviary-net_ is characterized by a dance of recognitions, orientations pursuant to the journey-moment or imminence: _I am here,_ trailing its history behind it. History need not produce history; in spite of textual thread, everything disassoci- ates. Traces remain of what? Usage sputters across incoherent domains. There are the _fragments._ There are fragments of emptied addresses, fragments of garbled texts and crashed texts, fragments of foreign characters. Here is the difference and the same: The Aristotelian logic of the lifeworld is based upon an apparent obdurate nature of the real; laws of distribu- tion and representation hold. An entity may be described by the state- space of its transformations. Within the virtual, the state-space is subject to _invasion_; in any case, it no longer obeys the Aristotel- ian except within the local neighborhood at best. What is the nature of the invasion, but concatenations that may remain traceless, rootless; disassociations jump media (I telephone you, ntalk you, email you, write you, construct you from within the domain of the symbolic, dream the rapture of the symbolic, dream its dissolution). The body is a skein of the imaginary. I am penetrated by the imaginary, which fucks me. Swollen, giving birth to web inversion, I float concatenation. _The chain is there by virtue of the chain._ Interminable difference is interminable analysis or therapeutic, mumbling the virtual subject. _The body is always a skein of the imaginary._ Pain spreads like a bifurcation set. Masturbation tells the story of the reconstruction of the body which is overdrive narration: the story-body spits meaning into air, fearful desire into the fear of the world. The imaginary claims me; its fundamental is _frisson_ or trembling, thrill, relative violence of inversion-pain. The symbolic is the rim of the hole, a geodesic of circulation, circumscription. "I call myself a hole because I am open to you. I call myself a hole because my lips are round. My lips are round and they open into me, into the space that I am. I am the space that divides me, which is the hole. I am filled and emptied with all the things of the world. I open my eyes and see all the things of the world, which are me and of me and in me. What is of me is in me; what I am is what I am in." "In mathematics it could be said: the hole is the continuum, raised to any hypothesis. Flushed with crowding, success, in the midst of the drowning of words, an ellipsis only guarantees the hiatus or gap as a dampening of expectations, momentary lapse of consciousness. The hole is the emptiness of the guarantee, an emptiness of time to which the guarantee looks forward. For my hole has no time, no space, a hole _en passant_ which is the receptacle of forlorn matter." [I should mention at this juncture that I like _Hole_ with Courtney Love, no matter what, but this is different, elsewhere than music's presence. I am related to the disappearing Houdini, a Hungarian Weiss.] "My mouth chokes on yellow cloth, what I say is what remains, simpli- fied, I think to myself, I can't give you my _searing writing,_ I can't make myself heard, I've pierced my eardrums, poured you into them, even your interest is disappeared, o me o my, o what can I do, offer you my little hole, I've always offered, you've got nothing new, a sad little hole, memories spill out." "I love you Amy Fischer." No matter there is no matter; in doing this, there is the presence of it. I write for the year 3000 when all confusion of past eras softens, oh yes, when my name will be a household word. Then will meanings lose their words, forlorn matters, words which never were. Then would the grace of languaging dust itself off, shudder, thinned out beyond an inconceivable future, no longer world nor entity. Matter is a pathway to emptiness, a momentary inert or system of relations, as if it would have always been this way. Matter drains time through the presence of time; it is matter that times matter. Somewhere you will remember this. Somewhere you will understand that matter is relation and you will understand as well the frisson of the iconic. When somewhen will never be. Somewhere you will remember this and you will be young again and there will be no death in the sadness of the year 3000. Somewhere the year resonates with the sounds of a dim past grappling towards uncertain future of its own construction, though long ago was time and time is nevermore. Somewhere you will smile and the chains will seem one, the reading and writing of them now only a whispering and a murmuring, presence, and there is atmosphere. There is atmosphere and murmurs, and there is atmosphere. There are no futures. My darling, there are no futures and I will love you, will love you forever. My darling, I have died within you and I will never have lived, but will murmur, and o, there is so much to murmur, sounding one to another, sounding sounding and winding, the dust kicks up and leaves or something, all that whirling ---------------------------------------------------------------------- /I can't deal with this, I try/ For Michael It is not important to say what one would say, nor to think things survive past silence. Nor have I ever seen your hands, heard your voice up close, nor the light in your room. Nor would your room too be silent there. What breaks, snaps, disconnects, remnants of letters in remote files. There is a window and there is a tree and the tree creates a beautiful shadow and coolness on the sill, where a plant is, remains; so lovingly, you water it. I miss your voice and the backtracking of ephemeral words on the screen, and now silence alone is utterable. There is a book on the bed, and I read elsewhere, `Everyone has known such a situation in which the rift between the saying and the said opens up. A situation in which the saying, essential and imperative, separates from the said, which somehow it no longer orders and hardly requires.' The body is fragile as the Net is fragile, motions, nodes, unavoid- able toxins, and the body is irreal as the Net is irreal, but the body is all we have to offer. The body leaves speech and leaves speech behind, and finally speech is abandoned. At the limits of the body, speech is abandoned, death sinks in, the Net is hidden speech. And at the limits, cries and murmurs are heard. Broken, disconnected, this is all we have to offer. The plant, which one will imagine, will need water, which one will imagine, water, in order to imagine to survive. You would have loved that book, the reading of it, your new new book, the tiniest thing, in the shadow of the plant, your room, this open light ---------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT HAPPENS WHEN DREAMS LOOK AT THE WORLD In the deserts of the Internet I have come across flamewars fought valiently, wars driving away inhabitants of the lists, continuous wounds, barren stretches, animals starved to death - And in the deserts of the Internet I have come across death itself, the deformation of words, languages, cries and whispers, sudden silence awakened as ancient texts still struggle to their feet, lumber across the sands in ridiculous formations - And I have come across the perfect woman, perfect man, head filled with crowns and ablaze with the glory of fiber optics, banquet of the language of love, fuck, and desire - (I am an adolescent! I love the beautiful woman! Love the beautiful man!) - And I have been taught, and have died, never to be born again - And I have been turned away by you, Maria Magdalen, the struggle from the war promising eternal longing, wires frayed by desert friction, the struggle from the dark eternal war between speech and the silence of the flesh - Authority has silenced me, pushed me to the Pale! I see nothing in mirrors placed against the forest trees! And I have found authority and silenced it! And I have found addictions drunk with mean and kindred spirits, wearing violence in the guise of human skin, spattering angers and bleak voices across the crippled sand, the hot cartography of nomadic language - For there are voices - the voices of seduction and the voices of hatred - and there are the voices crying in the night and the voices lost forever, searching for their body in the desert of the Net - Doctor, help me! Doctor, help me! - And I have come across false seductions, I am willing to be seduced! And I have read the language of condolence, the prayer of absolution, in the holy war against the flesh, fumbled canons of discourse archived in dark papyrus, deep and crumbling in dreary desert caves - I whine through death and violence I do not understand! I cringe before the stunted dissolution of text, teeth splintered against the terminal grave! There have been hatreds spanning hatreds, bad doctors driving away the good, the battle of the shamans and the warriors - the warriors fighting forever, the shamans healing the warriors - The desert heaves, dunes scattering dust gleaming in the desert sun! The desert floods the jungles themselves, signing on the vegetable queendom! The desert talks, refuses the gift of silence! The desert crawls into the dreams of gods and goddesses, crawls through them, splits their bodies into mineral faults and veins! The desert explodes the bomb of sands, silicon slabs shuddering the chatter of electron deceit and retributions! The desert crying that it is all deceit! The desert crying that there is no sky visible at dawn or dusk of day! The desert crying, Carry the Net in your head! The desert crying, Your body is imaginary! And the desert crying, You are ghosts! And the desert crying, Ghosts, ghosts! And the desert crying, All of you are ghosts! (Crying, the desert to itself. Crying, the flat plate of the sky.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From sondheim@panix3.panix.com Tue Jul 26 03:56:09 1994 Date: Tue, 26 Jul 1994 03:55:45 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim To: fiction-of-philosophy@world.std.com Subject: The Gaze To the upper left, within the white bar that denies me the edge of the screen, I read Alt-Z help, an eternal remission back to the everyday world of the coffee next to me. The Menu command appears to the right, hypertextual without return to the imminence of this letter _t_ that I now am typing. I am within the Compose Message mode, writing on top of the Inbox folder with four messages. I remember the messages, hidden by this writing which also hides my screen-reflection, a two-dimensional ASCII grating descending to the welcoming address, fiction-of-philosophy @world.std.com and I think to myself, this is the world, this reflection which is never insurmountable. There are no Cc:, no others who, through kindness or courtesy, interfere with the two of us, yourself and myself, wraiths of terror, fleeting descendents of the furies, an evening meal. I write in fear of erasure; the text, too, flees into the upper screen buffer zone, invisible to one and all. I remember a lack of attachments, addressings no longer visible, just as attachments require solicitation for their shy appearance. I remember "this writing which also hides my screen-reflection, just visible at screen-top, a two-dimensional defense against the presence of death: "Whilst my Physitians by their love are growne / Cosmographers, and I their Mapp, who lie / Flat on this bed, that by them may be showne / That this is my South-west discoverie / _Per fretum febris,_ by these streights to die," - through the _raging of fever_ Donne writes his own cartography, the _fever of the text_ which _always accompanies the text_ - and who speaks of these fevers? Blanchot, Levinas on the other sides of the laws, perhaps - existence ruptured, struggling through. Down below, ^G, GET HELP or ^C, CANCEL, or ^K, Cut Text: Down below, ^J, Justify: As if justification could exist when the Law itself is cut down, dissolute among the wraiths, Klossowski's breaths certainly, the gathering of menstrual women at dusk reading Leviticus. And ^O and to postpone, just as this text begins and ends "for their shy appearance," remembering a hidden writing beyond or elsewhere than the reflective tendency. "One can also speak of different forms of the night that occur right in the daytime. Illuminated objects can appear to us as though in twilight shapes. Like the unreal, invented city we find after an exhausting trip, things and beings strike us as though they no longer composed a world, and were swimming in the chaos of their existence." "The rustling of the _there is_ ... is horror." (Levinas) ^T, To Spell, to Sit or Cast a Spell. ^W, as in "Where is the Current that flows beneath us," in order to ^J, Justify, as if justification could exist within or without the intermediary of the Law. For as Derrida has written: "Justice, as law, is never exercised without a decision that _cuts,_ that divides." "The undecidable remains caught, lodged, at least as a ghost - but an essential ghost - in every decision, in every event of decision. Its ghostliness deconstructs from within any assurance of presence, any certitude or any supposed criteriology that would assure us of the justice of a decision, in truth of the very event of a decision." And I would add, in truth, of the very _world_ as well, its composition, swimming in chaotic existence, the problematic of its being present or being _well._ We would talk on Unix\talk and there would only be that thin dotted line between us. ^UnCut Text, the clearance of a space initiated by the presence of the screen, extensive everywhere, its ghostliness deconstructing presence which was always allusive, just as the body is allusive, imaginary in the saying of it. This is its ghostliness, lending itself further to ^V, next page, in search of the commands which govern the autochthonic function itself. INBOX has stabilized: 4 Messages; a fifth will appear in the gap between this and the other. Alan Sondheim ---------------------------------------------------------------------- --space-- This is a space: ________________________________________________ | | | | | | |________________________________________________| And I want to talk about this space. I want to talk about it because there is no talk in it. And it is a window, because there is no talk. I need to talk about the window. Michael was not going to be there because there was work to be done, a window installed. A text file on fiction-of-philosophy ended with an account of `meaning sucked out the window' and subsequent files in the archive were destroyed. I need the window, the space of the window. I need emotion and anger sucked out of me. I need to thank everyone for their kind words and letters of condolence, and I need to ask for space and time, a room of my own, where I can begin to understand this _ascii_ which I do not understand, which I write about, proudly. I cannot help anyone with problems and I cannot help my own problems and I do not know what to do with my grief, which ebbs and flows, nor with yours. I need this space to deal with it, and I do not think that a funeral or silence or memorial is an answer, because there is no answer except what is deep in us, and funerals or memorials die quicker than people do. I was closer to Michael than to anyone on this Net and I do not know what to do with this closeness, which I carry around, empty. There was an energy between us and we were excited about Cybermind and saddened by the lack of intimacies in our lives outside the Net. And I cannot stop thinking about this and other things because and now I know, that the mourning must stop so that we can have the sweetness, which is all that we can have. Let us please, please, move on, and I cannot help anyone and cannot help myself, and would if I could, even beyond the measure of the text. Let us begin thinking about the world, now, with all its terrible beauty. Alan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- KARL KRAUS COMPRESSION MACHINE "There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for." (Karl Kraus) To force a rhyme which, lying on its back, flounders All legs, thrusts the loss of hope and energy Against the sun or moon, as if a tendency Returns this spatial clot upon its back. Tendency is towards, and not to mix a metaphor, Which I won't do, is towards something which Is not where it could be before the tendency, Such as fascism, for everything Flies on the surface of an enormous rope Pulling its own weight behind its legs, dull gleam Ahead, as if something were there, which it is not Or rather, the fleeing tendency of time. You might have known I write beyond the speech Of which ridicule has barely parted, continuous work On subject and its objects, of nothing in that space Beyond the names. This beyond is my written leg, Just one, falling everywhere beside the point, Crippled in every direction, but there at least A gesture in every direction, which I am not against. _________ __/O\__ | | | V | | The mechanism on the left contains a _cylinder_ with a spherical bearing held in place. An arm extends from the bearing with an attached secondary arm at right-angles. Even with a limited degree of rotational freedom, the secondary arm is capable of alignment with any given point in three-space.* Playing fields are drowned by words or dreams because They bend, rip, are torn asunder, sodden, dull, because They are not there but made from sentiment, because Death works hard on them, returns a loss become a loss because Victory is a young girl or boy hard upon a playing field because The field is all their world laid out before the names because The names don't amount to much at all because They're not there, and nothing is intended because The boy and girl are dead and no one plays there because Playing fields are drowned.** "How much material I would have if nothing happened!" (Karl Kraus) ____________________________ | | V *To penetrate the labia of god is perfect harmony, writing played out against the lips of god murmuring of afterbirth. **The fearful world. The terrible language. The sun a brilliant red. The Romantic _blue deer._ The violence of cement. ------------------------------------------------------end K2---------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- GOD I am a fifteen-year-old girl who is also a fifteen-year-old boy and I have both a penis and a pocket to put it in. And I have no hair there yet so I can see myself when I put it in and someday I will have a baby because my friends have babies. I will have a baby soon and I know this because I am always wet because I can do things to myself. But I don't sleep very good and I always think about God and I don't think that God really cares for me because she is a he and he can't give birth to anything because he doesn't have a pocket. And it doesn't make sense that he would make a pocket because if he could do that he could make himself like me and I don't think he would like that. But I don't think God really cares for anyone either because what is the point of all those prayers just thanking and thanking him for everyone's misery because they really don't like anything that's happening to them, that's for sure. So if he did care then he's not so powerful because he's a he and because he doesn't seem to do anything about it. And if he wanted to do something about it and didn't then he wouldn't be very good, he would be evil. I would hate to think that God is evil but I just can't thank him for anything. Besides, if God made everything, then who made God? I think that people like the idea of God coming first because God is something like people, even weak like them, and I think that weakness making something is better for people than strength making something, especially if it's strength they don't have. But anyway, there's this to think about, that God would be made by people, because people would want to make something not like them at all, but different, but not so different as, say a mountain. So I think that God would be just different enough to say that he is there forever or doesn't have to obey the rules, and I think he doesn't even know what the rules are. So if he doesn't know what the rules are, then what is the point, if you ask me, for God, because why not just let things alone, and if you need something to let things alone, then you are living in a dream because there is nobody to tell you to stop touching yourself. And if I stopped touching myself down there, I would never have a baby. (Oh, I forgot to tell you that I love to tell you about myself because I know you love to think about me touching myself there and it will make you forget all about God who will never punish me because he will be busy with your prayers and everything and will never know.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Trouble I had with Poets What I remember about the poets and the trouble I had with them was first the time Anne called and I picked up the phone and said Anne, knowing it was her. But Bernadette said that I was involved with Rosemary to get closer to Vito and Vito had told Rosemary I was a pest, which he also told to Dara who Vito told me was a pest. In short order, pests were everywhere. My ex-wife went to Bernadette's ex and there were fights all around. Keith seemed to put up with me and once when I was crying around midnight told me I was a real artist. Jackson saw the tape that Kathy and I did and said it took courage. Meanwhile Vito saw the tape and said I wan't a real artist and Laurie saw the tape and said I was. Allison went up to Kathy by the way and said she was married to me and Kathy told Allison I was crazy. Rosmarie I don't think ever liked me although I liked her with a great aplumb. Meanwhile David just about stopped talking to me and Aram thought I should focus more and was just impossible. Clark and I talked all night long early on and I owe him for that, but I felt used and abandoned towards the end. When I first read Allen that was all the Allen there was, but Dan told me that Vito said he never wanted to end up like me. Still Alan told me I wasn't as arrogant as he had heard, and Krister hated me for reading Lacan until later when she read Lacan and more, according to Henry, and then just hated me. So anyway, I.A. said I had surprising talent, orphaning me, and quite a few years later I saw Robert stand up, which I had not seen him do before, although there was no reason for him not to do it. I fell in love with someone who lived with Diane probably because she lived with Diane or maybe she didn't. I published Michael in some early work, and Robert wanted to publish my translations from a langauge I didn't know. I am never sure about poets, about these poets. Poets trick me a lot and I always fall for the same old things. Susan always walked around in her underwear and it did tricks on me. And like everyone else, George had severe doubts, but Tom at least published some things as bad poetry. Now I look back and see that I should have listened to Peggy, but how was I to know the differ- ence between heroin and heroine? Ed wrote all too well, and Charles I am sure had his doubts, although Karen wrote America's greatest unpublished poetry. Ed was never particularly supportive, part of a group I viewed with jealousy and dismay. I could never believe in anything after hear- ing all of them, reading all of them - I could never believe in poetry ever again, including my own; I can never use `poetry' without shudder- ing. I get suspicious of poetics which always seems to invoke Charles or someone like Charles. If not Charles, William or Robert, all those anglo names coming in from small-town crater America. Always I wonder what the rest of the planet and the other Roberts are up to, and more and more identify with Violette Leduc and her malaise. I have weaned myself from aphorism or metaphor, rhetoric or the bon mot that gains a pause, a witticism in a foreign language. I am a pariah for the poets if they even remember me, a nuisance or a pest refusing to settle down, half-male, half-thing. I doubt they remember me or would care to if given the choice. They were the troubles of my life. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NIGHT. _MY DINNER WITH ANDRE:_ Wally: If I understand it correctly, I think Heidegger said that if you were to experience your own being to the full, you would be experiencing the decay of that being toward death as part of your experience. Andre': Yes. You know, in the sexual act there's that moment of complete forgetting which is so incredible, and in the next moment you start to think about things - work on the play, what you've got to do tomorrow. I don't know if this is true of you, but I think it must be quite common. The world comes in quite fast. Now, that may be because we don't have the courage to stay in that place of forgetting, because that is again close to death. Like people who are afraid to go to sleep. [...] ---------------------------------| Sleep is impossible. When I sleep the world rushes in, fast-forward, SCROLLS existence itself, eternal complicit REWRITE. I am left choice- less, and exhausted, plagued by a myriad beings while the real shudders permanently to a halt. It is then that the obdurate appears through its disappearance, that which chatters beneath the televisual flood of text making its way daily through the hysterical web-inversion of subjec- tivity I once called my own. This is the commonality denied all of us, just as bondage and the naked betray the dreamworks of `normal' sexuality. And what world comes in quickly, arrives, shrugs and returns to an incoherent death? It is the imaginary grey lying beneath the range of the symbolic, the literal and littoral grey replacing textuality as soon as ASCII abandons screen - this Net is a site as much as the terminal itself is a site - of abandonments, orphanages of everything but the spirit. Net-surfing is the psychosis of the indexical, chains DISCONNECT lending themselves to chains DISCONNECT. What presents itself does so only by virtue of TRACEROUTE. Still, it is these chains DISCONNECT which are the definition of the world, and the world is nothing but a pale reflection or simulacrum of the symbolic. What is not text or what is not my being is not present, just as a landscape is the site of a great refusal in the absence of an origin. The _darkness_ of the screen is at one with the light of the world outside. The rest is the piercing of death, the flesh which spreads itself through web inversion, the voice which refuses to be silenced and instead becomes one with the murmur of the world. I could never fall asleep; the demons would come. I could never fall asleep, but only through exhaustion would my loneliness give way to a maternal and wordless function. This is not real, I would know. And there is nothing that is more real than this or than the other, I would also know. And I would not be able to tell one from the other, because they are a function of language and processing. Sometimes I would open my eyes and sense the _labor_ of sight, the exhaustion that comes with the imminence of the glance. For theory has always had this wrong - it is not the gaze which is of the gendered political economy of sight, but the glance, the continuous establishment of the mise-en-scene, the sublimating cauterization of the dreamwork, the establishment of the other in his or her communality. The glance is determining; the gaze, always subject to the Boolean, is determinative. The glance accompanies the presentification of the self, the wakening of the world after a sleepless night. It is the glance which worryingly constructs the inert existence of the world, but never the world itself. Is it courage to stay in that place of forgetting, or courage to murmur the name which slides against its presence? Sleeplessness is connected with _labor_ as well, the labor circumscrib- ing, circumlocuting death. For me, sleep must be a foreclosure upon the body and the day, upon the body of the day, and this requires the legitimation of the body through a process of ascertaining a resonance between the flesh and the real. Such is the nature of the text, or any other project rallying towards completion. So that the beginning and the end come to a stop and continue spanning the horizon of the subject. So there is the rush toward death, the glance at the body and its obdurate, the struggle for littoral substance. And there is the gendered political economy of site, the political economy of labor, the labor, which, in each and every case, is the _labor of existence._ The labor of existence is the _labor for existence_ which is never already a given but a construct of a chattered and shuddering self. And in any event, this _labor_ is nothing more than a _local event,_ an _occasion of exis- tence,_ in the midst of the idiocy of the real. /Levinas/Rosset/Lacan/Tired.Txt/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ From sondheim@panix3.panix.com Sat Jul 30 06:37:03 1994 Date: Sat, 30 Jul 1994 06:17:00 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim To: FOP Subject: Depression So many messages coming in filled with sadness, despair - so many lives on hold - why can't we get together, make love somewhere? - Before the grain of the voice inverts, vomits the world against itself - before the dark night of the soul is torn into shreds - before laughter circulates around imperfect and hollowed teeth opening up into the blind subsoil of the flesh itself - When does loneliness cross the line into love, when does love become the intertwining of flesh - when does the text turn from the black infinity of space and despair into the blue of a spring-time sky? I live in isolation, you turn to your lover and smile and say, he's out of his mind! I live alone and you turn to your partner and say, he's been there too long, talking to himself, no one listens to him! The terminal is a pillow of tears, the screen invisible. Dyslexic and turbulent letters circulate upon its surface, turn into vortices, separate and unite with one another; streams of letters and fragments of letters collapse beneath despair of the beautiful infinite intimacy of love lost forever. Who would query herself, himself, here in this shallow space if the slow turning of another face revealed romantic and impossible spaces still undiscovered? What continents lie ahead, on all sides of the self! We are all close to suicide, all pleading, but never reaching out to one another! We live on the margins of death our neighbor seeing no future for ourselves, as if we have tried everything. And we are tired of lies, tired of subterfuge. Ah, how many flirtations here in this bleak space die of the fear of intimacy in the flesh! How close, how close to the edge! How I push myself through my writing, through the hurt of it all, into brilliant forms of polished analysis! But yes, something else appears, only for a hidden love that will never blossom. I find my heart battered, its still tiny hope dying for want of love, dying of starvation. Alas