Christopher I am reading Christopher Isherwood's Kathleen and Frank, the reconstruc- tion of his parents' lives from their letters, diaries, etc., and I am struck by numerous things related to our existence within and without the Net - first, the emphasis a century ago on conditions of illness and the body - and the relationship, quite clearly drawn, between the body and emotional states; second, the continuous deferment of sexual plea- sure and its replacement primarily by states of etiquette, proclamation, and finance; third, the existence of various modes of communication which constantly interfered with each other (for example, telegraph as opposed to letter-writing as opposed to travel by land or by sea) - and fourth, as a result, the constant insistence on the _things_ of the world, among them the body itself. There is pleasure in this. The body is fully con- sumed by the trappings of the late Victorian era; this is not only a sub- terfuge, but also an inhabitation which placed desire at its service. One _knew_ the body by its coverings in a way we can scarcely imagine today; the difference is unbridgeable. The vocabulary as well; descriptions of Kathleen's wedding dress or the various ailments that perturbed and determined her family relationships are practically unreadable today; they partake of an other language or languaging. They remain tied to fabrics and the swellings of the skin, to the phenomenology of blushing, influenza, and ornament, all indicative of labor and sensitivity. They imply an intensity almost inconceivable in the "west" today, buried beneath platitudes of underdevelopment and the so-called "third" world, resurfacing in the work of Regina Frank for ex- ample. Labor has moved elsewhere; these machines I compose upon were (and not _of course_) produced by an obsessive and underpaid semi-skilled dem- ography, without which the Internet would not exist in its present form. The Net has become indefinitely reproducible, expanding, driven by the fury of corporate innovation and _constructed_ by factory laborers who would never otherwise touch a keyboard. What has become hidden now is in a sense far more insidious than what was beginning to emerge in late Vic- torianism: _now,_ we should know better - _now,_ we have the tools of communication readily at our disposal. _______________________________________________________________________ The Promising Bot Less and less there will be texts during the oncoming week; I need a break. Yesterday for the first time I heard Soho referred to as "Sili- con Alley." Art has transformed into communications; the radical cri- tique of audience processed during the heyday of conceptualism has fi- nally paid off. The intensive labor involved in painting is one thing, and defensible as anti-capital at capital's heart; on the other hand, audience has become increasingly rarefied. Silicon Alley changes all this. My texts exhaust me; I strive for originality and wide-ranging subject matter. Critique is no longer within the aegis of arts journals; now, it ranges across the Web, diffuse, distributed, nowhere at all. Soho becomes cyber-So, the submerged entrepreneurial spirit of the Losaida art days bearing fruit as well, big money to be made in the media-conscious 90s. Everyone is turning to McLuhan because of his un- canny ability to _generalize_ exhaustively - who needs hot and cold to comprehend the fact that the Net's interactive? _How_ it's interactive is another question altogether, certainly transforming the subject mat- ter of performance art from autobiography to self-reflexivity, self- assertion in the midst of all the _cool_ applications of the world. What constitutes _cool,_ in fact, if not my texts or textual project; here there might be reason to consider McLuhan, as the _stuff_ of the Inter- net Text suffocates writer, if not reader. So less and less texts dur- ing the oncoming week, or so this bot has promised itself... _________________________________________________________________________ Phaedra talker ( Partial text and atmospherics from reconfigured Nuts2 talker on a LAN at Parsons, eventually opening on the Net ) ----------------------------------| absorbed, you pay no attention WE will talk here and we will be in the mountains. The mountains are ex- cellent for talking; the mountains carry us forward, and we can think through the problems of gender raised by Phaedra and Medea here, as well as Tonya Harding and P.J. Harvey. Don't for a moment think these are mini- mal or uselss; they're part of our very existence, and demand our keen attention. We will be able to think gender in a genderless space; you will bring the gift of gender to it, the gift of words, and you will presence yourself. This is the factor which divides the premises of organism, what we are given, like gravity, coherent, thickened sweet and loving splendor. Live within and without it; it is our heritage, but speak, speak, speak, in the midst of the mountains and the streams, the ch'in playing slowly in the background, the raging of the Maruts overhead... /Atmospherics; these appear disordered at random intervals/ "I can't I can't!" "Save me!" "They're coming for me, where is my lover?" "Surely you would have done the same!" "Are there any choices in our lives?" "Fallen, we are always fallen!" "You are victims of my words!" "You can't see me! I'm never around!" "The she-wolf attacks! You've thought better of it!" "No wait, I'll tell you a story!" "How I once saved my children from the wolves!" "Who the men were, how they were armed!" "What happened to the chalice of jasper and garnet!" "Wait, I have more to tell you!" "You can't see me; invisible, you are everywhere of me!" "Don't be alarmed!" "Please don't leave the space; look into my eyes!" "I have beautiful dark hair, raven-black, I carry a sword!" "There is a hunger in the land and I shall avenge it!" "Wait!" "Wait! Wait!" "Wait" "Wait!" "And these armed men, came with eyes of jasper and garnet!" "A sheen over all the world, encompassing" "encompassing all the world" "and its dominions thereof" "and brilliant, brilliant!" "Now I-Phaedra shall rest!" "Now I-Phaedra shall rest!" "Now I-Phaedra shall rest!" "Rest among me and I will speak the world to you!" "Place your sword by my side and I will sing to you!" "I-Phaedra!" "I-Phaedra!" "I-Phaedra who shall sing to you:" __________________________________________________________________________ The Internet as the Instrument of Death With infectious diseases on the rise world-wide, with problematic male sperm counts, overpopulations, nuclear mafia druglords, it comes as no surprise that the Net is not only contributory to the anxiety felt by almost all of us within development or underdevelopment - but is also in fact the _instrument_ of the death of the species, the death of being- human. It is the Net which brings ultimate and perfect knowledge, infor- mation converted to principles of totality and transcends abandoned as soon as the next upgrade comes along. It is the Net which lends one al- ways _elsewhere,_ the lure of the Other stronger than one's own. As the real is increasingly micro-specialized, as detail rises to the surface everywhere, stress results; the human organism can not absorb even the managerial principles necessary for subsumption. The result is a continu- ous neural shockwave without end; the species which has sickened the pla- net itself is now sickened as well. Its perfect achievement will be the simultaneous denouement of perfect knowledge, and a lack of those with the ability to absorb the same. No species has the ability to encompass the real; most have the wisdom not to try. Those which have succeeded have died out; those which remain are ignorant. Although we thirst for ignor- ance, we have subverted it by the detour through cyberspace; here we locate ourselves in the dominion of death. It will never strike us down nor appear with a whimper; it will only result in the abandonment of URLs, sites hit less and less, a galaxy of home pages tumbling empty forever. There is no conclusion to this, or rather there is no conclusion that is not already foretold among the Web files; such is the nature of foreclo- sure. The Net is not sentient, has not killed us; we have extruded the Net as a shell of information, and naked, we're prey to microbial hordes, brain embolisms, psychoses, dreams of paranoid pasts. Our future has passed; there is no future and in the world to come angels are sysadmins. _________________________________________________________________________ -- lnix There's a chance that the hidden order of unix will emerge; as I continue working on unix/linux machines, the interior of the body is becoming in- creasingly visible. What connects are thin matrices of wires and commands beneath the surface; the surface itself is sponge-like, absorbing tags and extensions everywhere. The command-line interface is mythology at its best, as if everything were running in an orderly and linear fashion; what occurs in the depths is something else entirely. What processes are where, who is accessing the same /bin that you are, what has been placed in hearth-like fashion around the root, remains unknown at the level of the screen's cool skin. Certain indications, however, let one know that the fractal display of the home directory resides somewhere almost untoward, an excrescence mirror like shattered glass certain operations below. On the other hand, there's the behemoth in the relative difficulty of con- necting the keyboard to something as innocuous as a floppy drive; mount and fstab and other obscurities immediately declare themselves like Panta- gruel barely capable of direct action. It all makes sense; I find my way through it like the streets of Atlanta, knowing circuitous ways of getting almost anywhere but despairing as one _big picture_ is painted after ano- ther, none of them anywhere close to what goes on in the kernel, and, heavens forbid, even further down in the midst of binary languages. In some ways it was enough when I realized that I understood, say, what sed and awk and grep and the rest of them _did_ without having to know all the modifiers; at this point, even for the humble tr command I tend to go to the unix or linux compendium, ignoring the catcalls and derisions of a memory that fails to record every subtle modifier. I'm still at the point, by the way, where compiling is a miracle - the transformation of description into performance, the production of relatively unreadable files. I find in the manual that those core dumps are actually of use in all of this; I shudder at dealing with megabytes, even though there are commands producing less complex error messages. But core dump is core dump, and for me this is the heart of unix, a _mass_ carrying buried history with it, capable of producing miracles if only the key were in evidence. The theme that emerges with all of this is the same theme that emerges elsewhere, that of the body's interior. Core dump is glut, spew, coagu- lation; the ruptured cleansed surface of the shell is only that, a cara- pace hiding just about everything. The commands themselves function as skin-inscriptions; they're tattoos, carrying messages, and some like biff, even the names of pets. History swirls on the surface; telecommu- nications takes over in the depths, and farther down, electrons plummet according to quantum mechanics' rehearsals of the universe at large. It is this way everywhere on earth, and within/without every organism, but unix or linux makes it _evident,_ the beginnings of a kabbalistic jour- ney into the next millennium. I would say this, then, upon contemplation - that the original framework problem of classical artificial intelligence was somehow on the _mark._ That the core, core dump, of everything is simultaneously body and fore- closure (and Husserl with his eidetic reduction, bracketing, of course was on the _mark_ as well), that the latter lends itself to inscription, just as the former lends to fissuring. If the former is what _I write_ at the prompt, the latter is the core dump's prompting me, an engagement _en masse,_ the realization of a Flaubert in dialog with the quantum. _______________________________________________________________________ - The Internet, The MOO (from Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach) Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. -----------------------------------------| ( This uncanny space of irreality, this _text,_ where politics plays out its role as real as these machines we dream upon .) ______________________________________________________________________ - Virtuality and Spaces All of the spaces are different; talkers have lean commands, present a rigidity that tends to dissolve in the midst of conversation. On a MOO, the environment is always present, and on haven, it never is. One is aware of locale and movement on an lpmud, as well as striations/hier- archies of power, danger, hunger, friendship. On Unixtalk, the body is a presentification throughout the textual; in other applications, the body is mediated by the third person presented as second (on MOO) and as third (on talker). In some spaces, Hi! is given with other prompt information such as date or time - in others, Alan says, "Hi!", or Alan exclaims "Hi!", taking cues from name and punctuation. Because the body follows suit, the body is singular, doubled, tripled, in cyber- space, even in the writing of it. In Unixtalk, one; talker two, MOO or MUD, 3. On ThePalace one observes its compression, manifestation of Lacan's singular a, Barthes' punctum. The symbolic encompasses. In IRC, scroll dominates, the same scroll that lends itself to the real: i.e. "Wandering down Flatbush, I found myself scrolling." Entrances and exits give the appearance of the lateral. On Unixtalk, conversation inter- twines the (usually two) participants; on talkers, half-hearted group chats often lead to (predetermined?) couplings. The interactions on IRC are counterpunctual dances without recognizable harmony; one is within or without them. On MUDs and MOOs, deliberate interferences are often in evidence; the structure continually asserts itself in the form of bots for example. Actions on IRC on the other hand are translucent statements of momentary opinion. Texts such as this in the form of posts appear monolithic; they're of a unary time, occupy a bandwidth of the I/eye. What moves, moves solely to content intercut with itself. The standard buffer is around 256 characters on MOOs, about three-and-a-half lines often interrupted by others' speech in their typing unless a client is utilized. IRC tends towards the gasp of a breath, fast-forward; Unixtalk might present whole paragraphs at a time, or double-rushings each seek- ing to complete the text of the other. They remain apart, separated by the suture of a dotted line, the screen presenting unassimilated terri- tory. Land is born. In IRC, no one owns the channel, not even the chan- nel owner. You're invited to my space on the MOO, but the space floats; words cover the screen and the space isn't equivalent to the screen space although it can play with it, tease, seduce. The text/post moves _one screen at a time._ Message boards on talkers, MOOs, MUDs, every- where in fact, can be used for display of longer texts as well, as can descriptions (of spaces, rooms, newsfiles, welcomes) themselves. I en- vision a talker utilized for a course in which each space is actually a text waiting for comments; the latter come in the form of texts on the board. Think of MIRC and what might be added there, as well as Global Chat. ThePalace has objects which might be texts. One might enter a text in ThePalace as well, body skittering across one or another font. I've seen cut and paste in Unixtalk but it's only a screen; lengthy texts on talker have appropriate quit or continue commands. Beyond the opening welcome, haven is just haven, a relatively closed environment of flick- ering channels, good for the fast rush. From compilation, haven's tiny and compact; undernet seems to go on forever and probably does. Powwow has the ability to send files and like some of the other applications off the Web, it can go back on, traveling around with groups in mind. The Powwow interface is similar to ytalk, a variety of Unixtalk, vertic- ally divided as well as horizontal and useful for chat but the windows seem to small for lengthy discussion unless predetermined. In IRC the problem is the competition of users; even with the text entered at the bottom of the screen, there's little room for considerate discussion and the weaving leaves one behind, the longer one remains external pre- paring the keys. Place everything in .plan or .sig and let them know who you are. Open up a radio station. Go real. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Boxing. Match I need machines. I need to live beneath a huge machine. I need to be pene- trated by jacks, jacked in. I need to be rented to the machine. I need fluorescent lights. I need no shadows. I need dull screens with green let- ters against black background greyed by incoming light. I need to be fed by incoming. I need fast fast food. I need to slave myself use it. I need to use it. I need to forget using it, to be used by it. When my needs are met, I don't need anything. I'm not there to need anything. The screen's not there, my eyes aren't there. I'd do anything for that. I'd hunger for that, fuck for that. I need your unixbox. I need your super-c. I need generation five genera- tion ten generation x. I'll work for you any day. I'll work for you as hard as I can because you'll let me use your machine. I'll use it on the off-hours, repair hours, lunch-hours, you condition me. You give me the framework. You give me the framework and I can hack and hack all night long. I almost got the talker. I almost got the mud. I got the talker and the mud and the palace and the haven and the alpha and the worlds and the mirc and the chats and I almost got the lily. Give me the lily and I'll almost have the unter. Give me the unter and I'll go for the uber and I need 1, 2, 5, 10, a million megabytes. Core dump: let me at it. Let me run gdb and swallow it. Let me run gdb and swallow it whole. So I can sit at your machine. So I can walk around it. So I can be a mach- ine of loving grace. So I can feel the power. So I can plunge down deep. So I can plunge deeper farther. So I can swim the crawl. So I can upside- down. Let me answer the phone, sweep the floor, read the books, count the sec- onds. Let me teach the course, plug in and out, hide your girl, hide your boy. Let me compile the code, runtime around the clock. Let me wind your clock. Let me on your box. Let me run your box. Let me plug your box. The box sings to my fingers. The box shudders and shakes. The box runs basic, runs unix, runs linux, runs lisp. The box runs c++^2, runs quiet recursive. What it runs is the box, unwinds my fingers singing, unwinds my plugs, my running, my being on the box. The box unwinds the clock. I'll do anything, let me your machine, let me machine. __________________________________________________________________________ - Travis and the Big Machine Travis walked under the wall. He didn't go under the wall; he was beneath it, not emerging on the other side, but along the long thin line that made it go go go. His shoulder on the right was pressed by the wall on the right; they went together. They had gone together, this or that other sur- face which moved smoothly as he stepped forward against the humming that was always there. Unlike the smell of iodine, Travis heard the sound, con- stant tinnitus without release, always near the same bundle of frequences, but containing sufficient variation to signal uncompromising change. He heard this. He heard everything. He paid for it with the walking and its thought. What was its thought? That it had been paid for, that labor was involved. The wall did what he wanted, pressing back like gravitational energy. It did this in the sense of a contract, it uncompromising. What would he have learned had it not been; it hadn't. It was how he had worked himself _here_ or dwelled _here_ in a space of windows and sashes, gotten for granted. Unclean life was at his beck. He'd ignore it. He'd descend and sometimes forget himself. Then something would return. It was connected with the tinnitus. Lala-life wouldn't release him. It was an accent-grave; he was buried in it. Lala would sound as a continuous moan raised to the highest degree. Lala was unclean because lala made dim scenes foregrounded by sweat and bodies which approached one another. There were cries in the distance, ululation-lala, his listening. Travis thought he wasn't in, wasn't in far enough. Travis pressed harder, hugged and hugged the wall. The wall left itself on the surface. He'd do this or think this tonight. It was an impression. His last thought was: _it let him._ (What was at stake? Everything, infinity. Travis would do everything. He would do this and be this. It was only the sound that was its occasion and its filth . The sound was the same and Travis was left wondering, but then he thought, when he was in, he'd ask the machine. And he thought, that wasn't close enough.) ________________________________________________________________________ - Exhaustion As the lists stray from their topics, I wonder if everything that can be said, already has been - in much the same manner that trigonometry (as Stent has it) is already a completed and depleted mode of inquiry. The same might even be the case with topics such as English Literature (as long as it's not contemporary). In CMC, I've been concerned with first the interrelationship between text and philosophy, and second, with the philo- sophy and psychology of cyberspace in general, including issues of embodi- ment, sexuality, mind, performativity. I've written somewhat exhaustively on these subjects, reading as much as possible of the work of others. Be- yond statistical approaches, which constantly produce new information as say the Web and Usenet groups grow, the fundamental bases of virtuality and CMC appear somewhat stable (including bases of virtual reality). And not only stable, but delimited, circumscribed - and perhaps what is oc- curring at the moment on the lists is a feeling of decay in terms of this circumscription - that anything more on the subject will already be re- dundant? The anecdote or poem of daily life, descriptions of emotional and/or physical pain, are replacing other considerations. New applications are appearing at least weekly at this point, but they merit little place here, in part I think because the communities define themselves by the boundaries of email lists. Attempts to break through are often met by resistance; when, about eight months ago, I began discussing video cli- ents, a number of people withdrew vocally (which is not withdrawal) sta- ting that they were satisfied with text, and anything else would be almost an infringement. When Jon Marshall on Cybermind first presented his list of forty participants in order to study issues of r cognition, the first responses were also resistance - suddenly the list was bracketed, framed, not purely an interiority, but something that one might circumscribe. So it is one thing to circumscribe the _topic,_ and another to (de)construct, as an object of inquiry, the inhabitation, such as it may be, itself. All of this constructions a Borromean knot, which may quickly fracture, were it not for the escape into the every-day. The lists fulfill them- selves, the discussion becomes foreclosed. Could it be that there may be more and more to say, but that the saying would have to occur elsewhere, in a more formally academic environment? Does community identity displace self-reflexivity in CMC? Does this post itself contribute to foreclosure as well? Idly asked, these aren't idle questions. _________________________________________________________________________ - Frontier [Kayo and I set up a MOO and run into it on the Internet. We're the only ones here. We explore and make some home things.] "I'm going to log this... You say, "I'm going to log this..." You say, "So Alan and Kayo are here and I'm the Wizard Alan at the moment... Maybe I can create?" @create $thing Usage: @create named [name:]alias,...,alias or: @create named name-and-alias,alias,...,alias where is one of the standard classes ($note, $letter, $thing, or $container) or an object number (e.g., #999), or the name of some object in the current room. You can use "called" instead of "named", if you wish. @create $thing named Quaretz You now have Quartz with object number #100 and parent generic thing (#5). kayo says, "what are you going to create?" spicules, needles, smoky devices... Description set. drop quartz You drop Quartz. look Yurt hovel where Wizards hang, bones in front, skins behind You see Quartz here. Alan and kayo are here. "type look You say, "type look" look Quartz hard spicules, needles, smoky devices... kayo smiles "But I needed Wizard status to do that - we're utter novices otherwise.. You say, "Not really, hmmmm...." @examine Alan Alan (#99) is owned by Alan (#99). nervous and amazingly interesting! @examine Wizard Wizard (#2) is owned by Wizard (#2). Aliases: Wizard Interesting and Nervous! kayo (#98) is owned by kayo (#98). Aliases: kayo a transparent being Key: (None.) "I'm not sure how to raise status... You say, "I'm not sure how to raise status..." "or for that matter give programming bits... kayo says, "Do you want me to give it a try?" You say, "Sure, want me to log out and in as Alan?" Wizard says, "I'm going to look at the wizard help...hang on" @linelength 72 Line length is now 72. Word wrapping is off. To enable word wrapping, type `@wrap on'. You are now a programmer. You have new mail (1) from Wizard (#2). @read last Message 1: Date: Thu Jan 18 20:57:22 1996 EST From: Wizard (#2) To: *New-Prog-Log (#29) and Alan (#99) Subject: @programmer Alan (#99) kayo is now a programmer. You say, "As in @programmer Alan?" Wizard says, "let me see if I can make you a wiz" "& Kayo as well! You say, "& Kayo as well!" The housekeeper arrives to cart kayo off to bed. You say, "Did you make anyone a wizard?" You say, "Kayo just got carted off to bed? Did you do anything?" Wizard says, "no, I'm still trying to figure out going down the command list" Either Alan doesn't want to go, or Limbo didn't accept it. You say, "type @join Kayo - it's interesting." Wizard teleports in. Wizard says, "it was strange..." Wizard says, "I couldn't use any commands till I typed @join alan" You say, "so weird..." You say, "want to log out so I can take a look?" You say, "come in as kayo?" Wizard says, "sure" co Wizard @read last on *New-Prog-Log WHEN PROGRAMMER BY 2: Jan 18 20:57 kayo (#98) Wizard (#2) @who Player name Connected Idle time Location ----------- --------- --------- -------- Wizard (#2) 39 seconds 0 seconds Yurt kayo (#98) 28 seconds a second Kyoto Total: 2 players, both of whom have been active recently. Available Help Indices ---------------------- wiz-index -- Wizard Help (#23) prog-index -- Programmer Help (#22) builtin-index -- Builtin Function Help (#28) core-index -- Core Utility Help (#19) gen-index -- Help Database (#59) full-index -- EVERYTHING help wiz-index Wizard Help Topics ------ ---- ------ $site_db forked-tasks @net-who @shutdown @@who further-reading @new-password site-info @abort-shutdown @grant news-items spooflist adding-help-text graylist @newt @spooflist advertised @graylist @players @temp-newt blacklist @grep @programmer @toad @blacklist @grepcore @quota @unnewt @chown @guests @recycle @untoad @denewt @log recycling-players @who-calls @deprogrammer mail-lists redlist wiz-index @detoad make-core-database @redlist @dump-database @make-guest @register @egrep @make-player @shout *Player-Creation-Log *New-Prog-Log *Quota-Log *News *Site-Locks *Password-Change-Log Composing a letter to *News (#60) entitled "We're Starting in Japan!" "Welcome! We're starting in Japan! Join us in Kyoto! Line 1 added. send Mail actually sent to *News (#60) You say, "take a look at the news..." Alan has disconnected. The housekeeper arrives to cart Alan off to bed. kayo says, "We're starting in Japan?! :-D" You say, "We're in Kyoto!" kayo teleports Tokyo in. "What on earth is Tokyo? You say, "What on earth is Tokyo?" kayo teleports out. You see Quartz and Tokyo here. kayo says, "I'm trapped" You say, "Where are you?" kayo says, "in Tokyo!" You say, "go s actually..." look Tokyo You see nothing special. kayo is here. s Kyoto This is all there is right now. kayo has arrived. kayo leaves for the s. You say, "this topography is getting complicated! we should put in descriptions if we keep it otherwise it will get to be a mess.." You say, "there are two Kyotos, two Tokyos, one Quartz and one Yurt." You sense that kayo is looking for you in Yurt. Objects owned by Wizard (from #0 to #105): #0 The System Object [Nowhere] #1 Root Class [Nowhere] #2 Wizard [Yurt] #3 generic room #4 generic builder [Nowhere] #5 generic thing [Nowhere] #6 generic player [Nowhere] #7 generic exit -> #8 generic container [Nowhere] #9 generic note [Nowhere] #10 Login Commands [Nowhere] #11 Player Last_huh Verbs [Nowhere] #12 Guest Log [Nowhere] #15 Limbo [Nowhere] #17 Player-Creation-Log *[Mail Distribution Center] #20 string utilities [Nowhere] #21 building utilities [Nowhere] #22 Programmer Help [Nowhere] #24 Wizard Utilities [Nowhere] #29 New-Prog-Log *[Mail Distribution Center] #34 Quota-Log *[Mail Distribution Center] #42 permissions utilities [Nowhere] #51 object utilities [Nowhere] #52 lock utilities [Nowhere] #53 generic letter [Nowhere] #55 command utilities [Nowhere] #56 generic wizard [Nowhere] #57 generic programmer [Nowhere] #69 Site-Locks *[Mail Distribution Center] #71 Network Utilities [Nowhere] #74 Gopher utilities [Nowhere] #79 Generic Utilities Package [Nowhere] #83 Server Options [Nowhere] #87 FTP utilities [Nowhere] #88 password verifier [Nowhere] #89 Generic Gendered Object [Nowhere] #91 Generic Mail Receiving Player [Nowhere] #94 Yurt #95 n *Kyoto->*Kyoto #96 n Yurt->*Kyoto #97 s *Kyoto->Yurt #100 Quartz *[kayo] #102 s *Tokyo->*Kyoto #105 s *Kyoto->*Kyoto -- 44 objects.---------------------------------------------------------------- kayo says, "well, there's no help for building" kayo says, "that's the problem" You say, "we can import that later. no problem." kayo says, "well, I found it. I was looking for @show command" CUSTOMIZATIONS .welcome_message -- the message for "help" to print. .create_enabled == 0 => @create prints .registration_string if one tries to use it == 1 => anyone from a non-blacklisted site (see `help blacklist') may use @create to make a new player .registration_address -- an email address for character creation requests .registration_string -- string to print to players to give them information about how to get a character created for them, .registration_address is substituted for %e, % for %% .newt_registration_string -- string to print to @newted players (see `help @newt'). same substitutions as for .registration_string. .max_connections -- integer representing the maximum connected players permitted on this moo. .connection_limit_msg -- string printed out when this is reached. .lag_exemptions -- list of non-wizard players who may login anyway. --------------------and so it continued...-------------------------- By the Harbor (beginnings of MOO) There was the moment that the mail list was bogus, the moment we feared others would trade upon our secrets. There were times when the titles seemed all-encompassing, as if they held the world forever, and times when redundancies threatened to reduce the whole to resonant causeways intersecting with themselves. There was the moment when the controls seemed to swim before the eyes, when the rooms were swept and found wanting, when mail lay unused at the beginnings or portal of fallen columns. And there were times when the world began a theme park, when it partook of capital, when it had to withdraw and begin again, when there were just the two of us. No one else could shore up the world with rainbows; no one else could storm it. Locked tight, from the out- side, it had all the hallmarks of rejection; from within, there were forces at work going nowhere in the midst of uneasy circulations. It would be a monument to its own defenses. There were the moments of the first encounters, of recognitions driven by commands; moments when bodies rolled out upon indecipherable moor- ings. What tethered them rolled tight around them; what was visible was the intermingling of purity and the potential for shame. Nothing was shameful, visible, audible, odorous, flavorful, hot or cold; noth- ing was dry or wet, and nothing burned the skin. Pressure was that of the language upon the fingers. There were moments when the language was the moment of the hands' running the _th_ in rat-a-tat unison, instants where division appeared beyond the _al_ of all. But in the meetings and in the circumscriptions of very ordinary things like basins, exits and entrances - like existences and their descriptions, everything was lost, foolishly forgotten, packed away. The world was fresh as wet sand on the feet hardening into memory's internments. And there were finally moments when we knew that this was the way the world was and the world always would be, that the way of the world had in- alterably shifted like a sea-change, like a fall in barometric pressure. Somewhere the interstices between inval'id and invalid' came to mind. We were @dig with the shovels at that point. There were demarcations already asserting themselves. I was reminded of Frost, that good fences _literally_ make good neigh- bors here, that there are no neighbors, and nothing, in fact, without the fences themselves - a world of delineations in fact. There was a time when that was less than sufficient, but now delineation itself defines sufficiency and its domain. I wrote myself through it, not to the other side, but to the beginning of email, the communication of languor itself, in the moo's swirl. Where it would always be. Where the sea breathed, itself. _______________________________________________________________________ - Catastrophe and Writing Let's say our MOO got annihilated. Let's say the software returned to its standard state, that the checkpoint was disabled, that nothing was sal- vaged. Let's say that the rooms have disappeared, Kyoto, Tokyo, the Wizard's Yurt, that the welcome_message has evaporated, that downtime has also trapped the *Online list, nothing remaining. Then pure thought has gone away, has been orphaned, imminent in memory; the disk's physically pretty much the same as ever, give or take some revolutions. Let's say that we're in an empty shell, that time is always uptime, that there is no other, no otherwise. That we'd begin again, this time the pro- cess of reconstruction. And let's say that this was a secret MOO, on the Net but hidden from access, experimental open but guarded, never giving away its secrets, always in the process of seduction. We're confronted fast-forward with talkers, havens, with the MOO; let's say that there's sudden and catastrophic changes in the wind and things disappear in this year of your lord 1996. Ghosts left behind, the hard disk continues to sing; what's disappeared but in the realm of platonic thinking, each instance that of the whole, each existing as purified information, the _states_ of things being the things themselves, being other and otherwise things? What are the worlds accessing here; let's say that the MOO never returns to life, what are the traces here? Breathless, we come upon them, breathless we leave them. Our first cry the air in our lungs, getting the thing going; our last expiration never an occurrence; others take over, microbial. Let's say that we're dreaming memories of MOO, that these things never existed and that the voices are silent and have taken their buildings with them, Kyoto, Tokyo, the Wizard's Yurt. We work our way through the making of things and these are pure things. They are things which shimmer translucent. They appear where nothing has appeared. They realize a dream of pure appearance. And let's say they have gone, the machine's rebooted, inaccessible once again; let's say that they won't come back when we walk untoward into the vicinity of the screen. This is the _said_ of it, in fact, these forms of pure appearance. The disk is what the disk has been, on occasion of a revolution. __________________________________________________________________________ How Humans Came to Be @create $container called human Wizard now has human with object number #109 and parent generic container (#8). @describe human as precocious Description set. @create $thing called food Wizard now has food with object number #110 and parent generic thing (#5). drop human Wizard drops human. put food in human Wizard puts food in human. @lock human with Wizard Locked human to this key: #2[Wizard] "That's about it! Wizard says, "That's about it!" _____________________________________________________________________ Interim Report Here's some information on our (Kayo Matsushita's and my) explorations at the moment. It may be of interest. I'd also recommend people to look at the current issue of Byte, which has articles on avatars, Internet tele- phony and video, and linux. We installed lynx 2.4.2 (I believe) on a linux machine without difficulty; it can be configured for either a personal account (which anyone can do on their unix server) or system-wide on the machine. We did the former. There is a lynx.cfg file that sets the parameters, like the netscape.ini file; we've got the home-page set to a bookmarks file. This went in easily. We installed NUTS2.3 (I believe) which is the easiest talker to use, I believe; there's a datadir directory with a init_data file that is very simple and allows the wizard to create room exits and entrances, as well as permissions. There are also .atmos (atmosphere) files which contain statements that appear randomly in the rooms - one for each room. Finally, there are the room descriptions themselves and a map. NUTS is very configurable; the rooms for example could be long texts - one could enter essays for a seminar that way. There is a .read and .write system for messaging that could be used for discussion. In this manner, one would enter, as a student, a textual space which could then be used as a basis for discussion. You don't have to read the entire text each time you enter, by the way. Another advantage with NUTS is the .echo command, which works without diacritical marks, although you can't use it with the name of an on-line participant. It has emote, say, tell, etc. as well. Mail can be left. NUTS installed with error messages that we were able to ignore. We also installed Lorien, and this is more complicated; there were error messages galore and the system runs oddly, but it runs nonetheless. We didn't try this out with telnet. Finally, we installed a small Haven/zone, which was around 80k I believe unexpanded. This is the simplest talker, much like IRC, without many commands; there's no password and anyone can login. You set your own name with /n for example. It runs lean and fast; there were few error messages. For those wanting to play with this stuff, you can find it all over the Net. You can generally rewrite the databases completely; on the lpmud I worked on a while ago, the space was _vastly_ configured into an entirely different sort of landscape. If you have permissions and the programs allow it, you can run them as daemons such as haven -d 4000, which would direct haven as a daemon to port 4000. You can also use the interesting command nohup, no hang-up, as a background process; for example nohup haven -d 4000 & where the & backgrounds. With the lambda moo, you run it with a database, .db extension; you can also have a second data- base which can be used as a checkpoint dump. (You can also checkpoint as a wizard from within the MOO. Checkpointing simply means creating a .db.old so that the database is saved in case the MOO goes down. Otherwise your work is lost.) It's easy on the MOO and NUTS to keep outsiders out, or give specified passwords, etc., so there is some control over the environment which may or may not be useful. Linux itself works like a charm; the bash shell is like the korn shell and takes the same alias structure. The version 1.2.8 (I believe) we're usng has strange stuff like calendar on, which I didn't expect; it uses an X terminal that makes opening other shells extremely easy. Some of the things we're going to experiment with - ThePalace, which is a graphics MOO environment from Time Warner; Prism, a TinyMud descendent, and Lily, a conference data-base which fits over the MOO core. We're running the things that work both on a LAN and open privately to ourselves on the Net, so we can experiment by telnetting in. Eventually, various applications will be open to the New School, and some will hopefully be open in general. We're a bit worried about bandwidth and hacking of course, if the sites become even the slightest bit popular. (I should add my own interest stems from the phenomenology of the differ- ent applications and the ability to treat them as highly-activated texts to write within/without. The NUTS and lpmud, for example, both contain a lot of writing that constructs application-wide environments, almost like crystals. The MOO will be collaborative, of course, once it gets in more open operation. We're not that familiar with Lily to comment on it. The- Palace, as a server, allows one to use home-made gifs as rooms, and to specify entrances and exits within them. That's thrilling. The gifs have to conform to a particular spectrum (wide-range though) and size; other than that, they're fair game...) Alan ________________________________________________________________________ - Interim Report ii We crashed the MOO by not having its database saved; actually, it was saved to the default port number treated as a file - a _real_ syntax error! Once that was straightened out, we created a ./startup file to run four applications: the MOO, the talker, the haven, and now the lily, a conference applications database which runs on top of the lambdamoo core. It is _strange,_ having /commands like a talker, no building, but the ability to create or dissolve discussions, moderate discussions, play games, and so forth. A complex messaging system with a very large help file - we're just beginning to get this organized. We also tried to get prism running, but this fell through. Prism has cores for both DOS (with c) and Unix; in our rush around the other apps, this got left behind. So now we're hoping that the sysadmin will place the ./startup path some- where on the machine so when it needs rebooting our work will be saved. And I make sure to dump the database quickly, almost every time I'm on the MOO. Working like this, by the way, is bizarre; you're stepping in and out of the environment constantly, from the file system to its interior; in this fashion it's like an insect, soft parts within and carapace without that both connects and protects from the elements. We move from the depths of the file system, surrounded by images in .c .o .h down through pathways and up, deconstructing the barrier that separates us from our logins. Once within, the MOO settles around us; the email list for example becomes a mode of personal communication, asides, tests. One dances on the flat fields. (It's all so tentative; the MOO stays in active memory, which is why the database dumps are necessary. It's there, always in circulation. It's a flood plain. We inhabit it, haunt it, dwell there. We put up words for cabins and other words to lock them. The other day I made a human. It was nothing.) ________________________________________________________________________ - The Wonderful Rabbit Cool the Internet the great Wonderful Rabbit, every day I thank my Lucky Stars for the Internet that brings me to You, the fantastic Duckling You holding me Forever in your webbed Claws! Cool the Wonder of Wryting and Magick, do you know Aleister Crowley the Great Ocelot? A Pentagram would Mention in Godz Her Book FIve Tremendous Animals, Would you believe The Thundering Armadillo? Armadillo crawls down across the creosote. We'll leave him for a moment, look at the bushes. They're in the form of rings. They've been dated back ten thousand years, before our culture fixed itself as something no longer from the god/desses. The rings expand, root systems intertwined; you'd barely notice them, the bushes, unless you were tuned into things like junipers and that clay fragment beneath your feet. Who wasn't? The Euro- peans, none of them, the writers, have the slightest conception of Ameri- ca, at the least of the desert and its nodes, bridges, routers. You can hear the despair among the carbon cacti, boojum trees, even in the midst of creosote or cholla. (The Europeans got where they were by not under- standing. Did they know they stood under nothing? There were too many things around to look at. After 1600 they stopped looking. "Why, Sir, ideas must be given you by means of something which you know: and as to musick there are some philosophers and divines who have maintained that we shall not be spiritualized to such a degree, but that something of matter, very much refined, will remain. In that case, musick may make a part of our future felicity." (Johnson, in Boswell's Life.)) Cool the Plant that Plants the Planet! What holds our odor in the rain that sometimes comes, there's less rain in the high arctic, everyone knows that, arctic willows five inches high. I'd rather settle for slow-motion slime-molds, the yellow-white I saw like fried egg across rock and stump in North Carolina for example. "It seemed obvious that painting, sculpture or drama imitated nature. But what does music imitate? The measurements suggest that music is imitating the characteristic way our world changes in time. Both music and 1/f-noise are intermediate between randomness and predictability. Like fractal shapes there is something interesting on all (in this case, time) scales. Even the smallest phrase reflects the whole." (Peitgen and Saupe, The Science of Fractal Images.) How are we going to _listen_ to the Internet? To _look_? What new mea- sures of sound and sight turn to greet us? What appears behind the eyes and ears, subaltern, nuances burst forth in the paleolithic? The creosote rings clutch the ground with root claws, holdfasts. Anything does; what doesn't, falls and fails to stand. "All those who have legacies in my will, except for my freedmen, will receive them only on this condition that they cut up my corpse and eat it in front of the citizens." (Petro- nius, Satyricon.) "Death will be overcome by trembling, and will vomit up all it has eaten, so that no dead will be left who is not brought to that place of judgment. And the dust of the earth will be commanded to separate itself from the dust of the dead; not the tiniest particle of that dust will remain be- hind; it will come before the Judge. All whom the sea has drunk, whom the wild animals have eaten, whom the birds have ripped asunder, whom the fire has burnt, all these will awaken and arise, and come forth at the twink- ling of an eye." (Ephraim in Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Wes- tern Christianity, 200-1336.) How many of us _ooze_ in real life, spittle on our lips; our underwear stained slight with urine, semen, lubricant, feces; nasal emissions; sweat in the shadows of the flesh; tears held back at the slightest pain - the body holds itself in except for the bowl of undergarments catching our fluids? In the desert, everything has a use; nothing dries out, but there is reabsorption or at least the effort made. Slow effort, trees blooming with the thin rain comes, then nothing. In other words, liquid demarcation determines value here; fingers print themselves, reminisce upon the key- board. When death comes, it comes in full view; you can hear it. Today I walked through New York in old sneakers, silent, imagining myself invisible. I felt sexy, powerful, lewd, voyeur. Back at the loft I fell into a deep and soundless sleep. Looking now, at text, is looking at pure emptiness. Rabbit, my underpants are dry. __________________________________________________________________________ - Carapace I want to discuss the carapace briefly, as it applies to lpmuds and stan- dard lambda MOOs. In the latter, the database is of a whole, an enormous singularity that can be hand-edited but is almost always accessed from within the MOO. The database is a performative body, a body of wryting, the body operative on the body. In an lpmud, objects, rooms, persons, etc. each have their own file; my lpmud decompressed to 600 of them at startup. These can be edited either from without or within; inside the lpmud, as a wizard you have a series of Unix-like commands which penetrate the cara- pace and drag out the file system itself. So on the lp, you're aware of the skeleton, while the skeleton of the MOO, accessible from within, ap- pears of the same stuff as the MOO itself - when you hit @dig it actually seems as if you're digging into the _MOO-substance_ so to speak, an enti- rely different feeling. I wonder about these sorts of investigations into the phenomenology of their spaces, not wanting to get trapped in detail, but feeling without detail, one generalizes about "cyberspace" as if body is a simple projec- tion of equivalence - "I" here is equal to "I" there. This is (maybe not so obviously) false: there are not only varying projections, but varying persons (among first, second, third, spivak, neutral, etc.) as well - and there is the question of the dream screen, the matrix receiving the pro- jection (specifically, the matrix _produced_ by the projection in dialog with the software at hand). I use "carapace" for dream screen, because it's a _covering_ or hardening of a surface; the dream screen in Lacan is more of a bubble or analog of the surface of the breast - but in any case, a purity which is absent in text-based virtual communications. _________________________________________________________________________ [Hokusai finds the human and runs away.] Welcome to Kyoto-MOO! Type 'connect ' to log in. A moment of stillness just before the invention of radio. you are entering a world of speaking bodies; everyone is close at hand. If you reach out, you touch us with your bright thinking. Welcome to Kyoto! co Hokusai abcde *** Connected *** Yurt hovel where Wizards hang, bones in front, skins behind You see Basin and human here. Alan is here. look human precocious, squeezable Contents: food squeeze human liquids flow from human take human it's mewling now, awww... drop human it's soaking the yurt, alas! north Kyoto an intense clearing, city-basin, distant humans, everywhere visible... You see snow and Luminous Sign here. read sign suspended in mid air against the darkling sky, a vestigial tablet parting the ways reclining in languor, my life is valued in garnets suffused with the organs of truth You say, "ah...." @quit _______________________________________________________________________ The Whisper The whisper is critical in cyberspace. On some talkers, it is announced, "Clara whispers something to Alan" - others in the space are aware. This both serves to curtail the doubling or duplicity of conversation and yet leave room for critical commentary that overcomes the "hurdle" of the announcement. But in most applications, whispers aren't announced and permit total (i.e. with the exception of wizard @snoop commands) privacy, and this leads to situations rarely encountered _this_ side of the screen (by which I mean the doubling or duplicity of typing itself) - parallel, interpenetrated conversations in which only certain parties are aware of their presence or structure at all. I have had net.sex in the midst of a discussion of postmodernism; this may server as an example. For it did not interrupt the discussion, but it did create a sense of transgression at work, a transgression which undercuts the academy (which however remains ignorant and not undercut at all of course). What of this? I would type doubly or with duplicity, resonating on one hand (literally) with my partner, and on the other (equally liter- ally) with the contents of the argument. The _sense_ of being split and the power that ensued is in fact the result of _not being split_ at all, being coherent in double or duplicitous realms. Echoing is another example; on some applications, typing .echo will result in at the prompt; in others, the result is + - the plus sign indicating that it is an echoed statement. In many appli- cations, it's impossible to echo with the name of any current on-line par- ticipant. Echo has inordinate power; it creates statements which, without the + or other diacritical mark, may be ascribed to others, or to the machinery itself. If Clara is on, she may find "Clara takes off her clothes" at the prompt, without agency or intention; if the name "Clara" is banned from .echo, she might still find "Claara takes off her clothes" or other circumscription. It's also possible to mimic the entrance of someone else entirely into the room: ".echo " can result in "" as if the application itself were responding; "Franz" can then carry out what "Alan" or "Clara" would not - an avatar with no existence whatsoever except for the doubling or duplicity at the .echo command. Finally, Wizard #2 on our MOO, Kyoto-MOO, I noticed, has the power to change any object created or owned by any player, because #2 seems to own them all... While I haven't personally seen this abused (although I have seen @snoop in use on a talker where it shouldn't have been), the havoc this could create is tremendous. It's again a question of doubling or du- plicity, of agency, ascription, and intention - as for the Web, it's a tangled one we weave... ________________________________________________________________________ - Ruins He felt disconnected. He wandered around the station, his computer under his arm. It wasn't a question of dollars and cents; there was enough po- wer to last him an hour or two. He could turn it on and type and see his words appear on the screen. He could replace his words, save them in a secret place, start them over again. He could call a bot forward in one or another program, but he knew that the bot would echo him as well, that the outcome of the battle or conversation was preordained. He felt that everything he could inscribe in the world was already there, that it wasn't even a question of looking. That the world formed a nub to his left and his right, that it formed an inverted bowl above and a bowl be- neath. This was the world he had inherited, and it came complete with rules, instructions, random factors, decay, and bugs in the machinery. But in spite of all, he could wander at best, press enter, press save, and for a second his mind went into orbit and everything occurred. - What I said at the last "Cybermind Fleshmeet" Hi, I want to say that it's nice to meet all of you IRL because F2F has sometime got to augment what we've know of each other, no? In real life we can even get @drunk together; that's got to be what the fleshmeet is all about! I couldn't believe that PE could be so important, but without physical existence I doubt - but I'm not sure - that we could even be here? Could we? We can't forget face-to-face for a moment that on some level we're all flesh-meat, get it? I mean this isn't a virtual @drink I have in my hand, now, is it? I think we got to support the NPR as much as possible; without neutral physical reality, we'd be unable to commu- nicate on any level! But then, hey, that's what snail-talk is all about! It's one thing to be Netizens and another to be Citizens - you got to prefer the former! It's great to vote on-line; it's another thing to run down to the old bus-station or wherever they've got the booths set up. Hey, I got trouble on the line! LJFGLKFGLKFG, get it! You wanna fuck? I mean let's crawl under the table! Whisper Clara can't get enough of you! I mean my handle is GO GO GO! I mean @naked does the trick doesn't it? You got money in this place? Hold on, I got gold coins! Hey, flesh to flesh seems almost real! Heh! The graphics are pretty good here, don't you think! I got sound files like you wouldn't believe! This is almost stereo! What are we, HEHEH! .wav or .au extensions? I mean like real audio! Wish I could turn the volume down though, heh! Incredible! I mean every direction I look, there's something! Not as clean as VRML, but it's there - I'm sure of it! Heh! Wait, hey bartender, @order drink from! Works every time! Almost out of gold coins, though, heh! I mean we gotta do this again sometime! Like we go on tonight, see you on eighth street! There's a terminal there - wouldn't be caught @delete without! Get it? Heh! I mean let's @fuck, we've talked too much. What's wrong with you, too much fleshmeat? Get real! Ytalk me a little! I'm all @yours! ________________________________________________________________________ - Cold My frail body can't heat the coats. They've been placed on top of me, on top of the blankets and the comforters and the quilts and the sheet. The room is cold from the bottom up, from the floorboards and the wind whis- tling in the space below, perhaps an open porch. The room is cold from the creaks, loud bangs coming from the walls, not in the direction of the radiator; there's air moving through the slats, moving into the inter- stices of everything warm in the world, crackling flesh and plaster apart. I'm there frozen. I'm there thinking of Tasmania, where I ended up in the winter in a house on the hill across from the mountain, and the wind swept through it violently and it too creaked. There I had an electric pad which was placed beneath the body, not like the senseless blankets in the States on top, where the heat rises elsewhere. But beneath, I found that the heat rose only to caress the skin in its vicinity; the top was cold, the blan- kets never impossibly thick enough to converge on the heat's escape. In both situations I wake in the middle of the night, not shivering, but li- terally _shuddering,_ as if in early stages of hypothermia, which it may well be. Later I was told that during the sleep here, on Monday night last, around three in the morning, I started screaming Don't hit me! Don't hit me, and I explained to Sharon that I've always had nightmares on a constant basis, but never as far as I knew vocal, that maybe it had to do with the cold. The cold is relative; when I lived in Los Angeles, I went to exhibit art and talk to Montreal, stepped off the plane into -18 below Fahrenheit, and refused to wear a coat. What was biting through the body was inscribing me back into a culture I loved and which had abandoned me; frost welcomed my return. Before that, when I lived in the city, a strike had created ice zones in downtown on the sloping streets, up to eighteen inches thick; cars skidded across them and into one another just as they did trying the hill next to the Rhode Island School of Design, where I'd watch the back- sliders in the depths of winter. From New York to Providence I remember on 95 an ice condition to the depth of an inch; the salters had to plow backwards, and we were cautioned to stop, begin again at five miles an hour. We were passed at ten, and all the cars trucks vans except for us ended up ditched, some overturned, on both sides of the road; we couldn't stop. If the journey had continued to Halifax, it would have been a dif- ferent winter, one in which we drove through the blizzard from Halifax to Yarmouth with the car door open, foot on the road, to ensure we ended up alive in the total whiteout. This was nothing yet again compared to falling into the sea at Peggy's Cove; I couldn't feel anything in my body but the footage was great, later incorporated into a film about Vladisvos- tok, where I had never been. That agony didn't matter because I would have gone; Robin Collyer and I tried repeatedly to get to Lake Hazen, Ellesmere Island around 480 miles from the North Pole, but the trip would have been around $25k then, the result of hiring Otters to do the flying and the pickup, when, we weren't sure, weeks later. But the cold's biting through me now, and it's beneath me, and far from the keyboard, where the keys, warmed by the power supply, warm the fingers as well, and doesn't this translate into the lack of temperature in cyber- space? And then I think that when a woman sleeps with me, I sleep without dreams, I am a perfect sleeper. That the warmth which spreads from the occasional touch is sufficient. That what is sufficient in real life is this blush across the body, the horizon of the blush, as if I could close my eyes and it would be a presence. But a presence is more than an encoun- ter, what this space brings one, one and one to one, to one and one. And an encounter warms and cools simultaneously. That this space would be for- ever and that would be in its forgetting. That this space would _endure._ _________________________________________________________________________ - 3000- Years ago I taught a course called The Year 3000, figuring the year 2000 was too close in a sense, easy to call in some ways, impossible in other; now that 2000 is rising fast on the exponential vertical producing chasm at 2012 depending on who you read, time to look forward again - So curious about your predictions about the further end of the next mil- lennium - I took in the course say the year 970 in relation to 1970, that sort of thing - the _inconceivable_ changes coming only the last century or so - And then you think about how impossible things were - for example the simplicity of a _magnifying glass_ - they had jewels in Greece and Rome - didn't anyone _look through them_ - the telescope wouldn't have been far behind - But like the fabled Aztec wheeled toys and lack of wheels on other scales - there has to be a framework for all these sorts of things - So looking beyond the framework to the far future - I'm curious about the possible scenarios that might emerge - not in the form of stories or Omega-points (unless you truly believe the mystic's coming into hir own) - ultimately I think this sort of thing is _the only way to think through things_ - for example if you concentrate on say 20 years, you'll be in big nanotech debates, where/when sort of thing - who's got the best motors sort of thing - so carry it farther, past another nine (at least) centuries - what emerges - Because that's about the minimal wearing down of a stone or a fraction of the life of a juniper, creosote ring, whatever - if there's recognizable vegetation left - (sea anenomes go on indefinitely apparently) - So it's as if you're there, as if you're seeing/hearing things - what emerges - concentrate, head back, eyes half-closed - tell us... __________________________________________________________________________ - The Infinity of Providence This is from Clark Coolidge speaking in Talking Poetics from Naropa Ins- titute, edited by Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb in 1978, and this is from July 19, 1977: [...] " Aram said "Your works are like cliffs of rock," I thought yeah, that's right. They have that particular solid separate arrangement aspect and I _read_ them, and I want people to read them. And he was saying that you don't have to read them, just look at them. So we agreed, but we were totally wrong, which is an artistic problem too. I have a quotation from Heraclitus here: The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubbled tossed down in confusion. Has anyone seen Jean-Luc Godard's films? Have you seen _La Chinoise_? There's an exchange in there that hits me particularly. It's between a boy and a girl: "Guillaume," played by Jean-Pierre Leaud; and "Veronique," played by Anne Wiazemski. Guillaume says: People ought to be blind. and Veronique: Why? Well, it would be better when we speak with each other. We would listen to each other seriously. Oh, how is that? Language would be redistributed differently. Listen, don't forget that over the last two thousand years words have con- siderably changed their meanings. So? So, we would converse seriously, because if we were blind, it would be meanings that would change words. Ah yes, I understand. To talk to each other as if words were sound and matter. That is what they are, Veronique. Now don't hear that "sounds and matter" as any simplification or abstrac- tion: sounds and matter: emotions, feelings, desires, densities, subs- tance, arrangement. Everything is there. " Clark was on about arrangement, syzygy, Olson's field poetics, distribu- tions, at play in his work, somewhat influenced by Ashbery, going in an entirely different direction; his geological/spelunking background came constantly into play, working with stratigraphy and breaking away even from say Stein who restraied a lot of others, and even then. But the words above had resonance for thinking about cyberspace and the words here and my concept of wryting and I found myself walking all over Man- hattan today remember when Clark and Aram Saroyan and I all lived to- gether in Cambridge Mass. and what a time that was, Aram studying Clark constantly and Clark writing intently, and Aram and his one-word poems and I didn't fit in there either. But that brought back earlier memories when I met Clark at Brown Uni- versity, I on the way in, he on the way, editing a magazine called Jargon and the point here is twofold - that he was instrumental in getting me to the _edge_ of doing anything (and stepping over it and trying to look back from wherever space one found oneself) - and that - And that Providence where Brown is, was once the focal point of both the underground railroad and smuggling, that there were tunnels everywhere underground, and aboveground there were writings inscribing them - think- ing of Lovecraft who could have come from nowhere else (Poe was there), Nathanial West, all these _contusions_ of language, coagulations, a depth of inscription in which I found my home. The tunnels and subsidence burrowed everywhere. Some of the oldest houses in the city were raised to the second storey as newer structures were built _under_ them. Language as well was raised to the highest degree. I memorized the streets. My amateur paleontological background (Carbonifer- ous flora a specialty) came into play. You had to dissect the strata with dental tools, needles; you had to play heed to the forms. Nothing else would do. In that there was writing in and out of stone. In the comfort in language which one breathed in Providence. In Clark's resurrection in my mind; he moved to Western Mass. and I'd visit him for all-night discussions. Everyone came to mind in his cloud-house in the mountains from which you could see forever, from which you could see that mountains led only to others of their kind (false, that they needed the valleys). It was the _substance_ of language he was engaged in, this material that formed the basis for his writing, but the basis for wryting as well. In his dismantling of words, it was the words that _mattered._ And they _mattered_ in all sorts of ways, even in the way that poetry _mattered_ or needed to matter, beyond or through the dissection of logos. Throughout all of this, there was only language I wanted to break away from (leading to my association with Vito Acconci, another compatriot of that time as well as influence), but Providence held tight onto me; it wasn't until Beth insisted we move to New York that other possibilities announced themselves, the beginning of my nomadic existence. It was in Providence that I had recorded some records and done music that way, but music was never satisfying; it wasn't wryting, was too much of the world of pure body/performance and I kept looking for prosthesis. So now it is my reading this speaking of Clark's that brings back my dwelling here, making me question it for that _matter_ once again. But he's right/write/ wryte: " Anyway, I left for California at that point and got involved with rock- and-roll. But I was sitting there with Aram, and Robert Creeley, the poet, was visiting. Aram is a person who has to exactly know and exactly state "I know you," this sort of thing. He looked at me and said, "I know what your work is. I know exactly what you're doing." I said "Huh?," and he said "It's a big cliff of rock. That's what it is." And I thought and I said, "Yeah," and Creeley sort of looked at us. And later I thought about it and I thought that it was a tremendous misconception becuase what he thought of it as, is that you look at the rock as just one thing. It's a cliff, okay? You go do something else. The way I look at it, because I've had geological interests and some training, is that geologists _read_ the rocks. They can read the layers by the fossils in them and what ages and what came first and sometimes there are very complicated arrangements of strata and faults and things, and they can read what came first even though it's all messed up. Aram said, "Your works are like " [...] _______________________________________________________________________