_________________________________________________________________________ If you are lying next to me in bed, You turn away, you are next to his head, Your hands are between your legs, mine are there Reaching towards you, you finger his hair In the empty air in the cold air If you are lying, I lying deep within you, Reaching into gristle, marrow, bone and sinew, My mouth talking hysterically to keep you there Reaching towards you, thrusting in despair In the empty air in the cold air If you are speaking words before unspoken, He murmurs in his sleep, your words are broken And I disappear, his skin is always there The bed is always bare, you are still so fair In the empty air in the cold air You are still so fair, in the cold air ________________________________________________________________________ Dribble So I dripped text on your carpet, standing there naked like a fool while you turned away and read the bed. You read in the crack between the pillow and the sheets and the crack between the sheets and the sheets. I kept trying to catch your eye, white letters all over the black carpet, pools of them. I sucked paragraphs out of my tit, my nipple "wrapped around the shaft of my leaking cock, sending these letters onto the black carpet, pools of them." I decided to test the system, I decided to text the system. "the word is still going to be displayed in another format at least in this situation i understand that what i type here will be in the final format of the work itself and not a differance in the french organization of the word. thus it's the case that when i insist that nothing could be farther from the truth there may in fact be truth, that truth, in and of itself... who knows if this is really the case" "and to scroll the text is a real possibility... i'd add everything i know in the format, proceed from there... i would move and move inwards and away from you, an odd and diffident motion. the text gathers itself in the text, illocution of the desire to speak. i understand this and ultimately i think to myself, it is precisely understanding that is the excess or horizon of language, the _moment_ of language, the site, it is not ever the text or language's testimony, whatsoever..." I looked up at you, straddled you, you splayed me, I read your cunt scrolling down from the top of the screen, you excised me, cut into my chest, only to paste my tits onto your own. They said "onto your own," unerased; there was everything present except for your eyes. Your eyes were not present and, it is a trick of logic, from that fact, and from the fact that I couldn't see my own forehead, I surmised I didn't have eyes either. I was site-reading, not sight-reading; fingering myself in my ass, I pulled out your text which made me. For I was your maid-man, torn stockings and crotchless panties, a ribbon around my balls saying "host not logged in" and "no error on fuck-daemon." I pulled my fingers out and sucked them for you. I sucked them all the way down my throat. _________________________________________________________________________ RESIST! HOW DO YOU TELL YOUR FRIENDS, TELL YOUR FRIENDS THAT SOMEONE'S DYING THAT SOMEONE'S DYING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN HOW DO YOU TELL YOUR FRIENDS, TELL YOUR FRIENDS YOU'VE FALLEN IN LOVE YOU'VE FALLEN IN LOVE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN YOU'VE LOST YOUR LOVE, WANDERING IN THE WILDERNESS ON THE OTHER SIDE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN RESIST! RESIST! YOUR LOVE MUST BE AN ARMED LOVE! YOU'LL BREAK DOWN WINDOWS BREAK DOWN CHICAGO BREAK DOWN WINDOWS 95 YOU'LL BREAK DOWN MAC YOU'LL BREAK DOWN NEWTON ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN! THROW THE IMAGES OUT THE WINDOW! DON'T LET THEM TELL YOU WHAT TO WATCH TO THINK TO FUCK YOU GOTTA HAVE GOTTA HAVE HACKER RESISTANCE YOU GOTTA HAVE GOTTA HAVE ARMED LOVE! HOW DO YOU TELL YOUR FRIENDS THAT YOUR LOVE IS ARMED LOVE HOW DO YOU TELL YOUR FRIENDS ANYTHING ON THE OTHER SIDE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN! THAT THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY ISN'T GOING ANYWHERE BECAUSE IT RUNS OVER THE BODIES OF THE DRIVERS OF THE CARS RUNNING OUT OF GAS BECAUSE THERE'S NOWHERE TO GO BUT INSIDE BECAUSE YOU'RE IN LOVE WITH THE SCREEN AND IT'S NOT AN EMPTY LOVE BECAUSE THE SCREEN PRESSES AGAINST YOU AND SAYS IT SAYS COME TO ME IT SAYS COME TO ME AND YOU GO RESIST! AND YOU RESIST WITH ARMED LOVE ON THIS SIDE OF THE SCREEN AND THAT SIDE OF THE SCREEN! BECAUSE THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY RUNS THE TRUCKS RIGHT THROUGH THE GHETTOS STOPPING NOWHERE RIGHT THROUGH THE GHETTOS OF THE POOR RIGHT THROUGH THE GHETTOS OF THE TRIBES STOPPING NOWHERE! RIGHT THROUGH THE GHETTOS OF THE BODY! AND YOU WON'T BE SHUT UP ANY LONGER! AND YOUR LOVE IS AN ARMED LOVE AND YOU RESIST! RESIST! AND YOU SAY TO YOUR FRIENDS, SAY TO YOUR FRIENDS! I WAS BORN IN CYBERSPACE AND I'LL DIE IN CYBERSPACE! THIS IS MY LIFE AND MY LAND! I LOVE IN CYBERSPACE AND I HATE IN CYBERSPACE! MY OTHER LIFE FEEDS MY LIFE MY LAND! MY OTHER LIFE IS FULL OF THE MISERY OF THE WORLD AND MY LIFE IS FULL OF THE PROMISE OF THE WORLD! BUT HOW DO YOU TELL YOUR FRIENDS, TELL YOUR FRIENDS THAT SOMEONE'S DYING THAT SOMEONE'S DYING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN? HOW DO YOU TELL YOUR FRIENDS, TELL YOUR FRIENDS ANYTHING AT ALL! __________________________________________________________________________ fuck-slang always a difficulty using words that articulate the body's interior, but i return to this again and again, it's my inescapable pain why "cunt" and "cock" rather almost always than "vagina" and "penis" because these are cited/sited anywhere writing the antithesis to cyborg, _this_ site is the incorporation of the organic into a machinic always already positioned and foreclosing - simultaneously empty and full i imagine this machinic existing at all times and everywhere there is no vocabulary for this, constructing the difficulty of _writing_ here, cited, in the first place, the primordial place just as there are no solutions for those institutions of real-life we bring to this site: the post-office, the conference, the bedroom, the marriage and divorce, the birth and death, the classroom, the factory we are immersed in lag, in rewrite, in hysterical embodiment, in a grammatology abstracted from mater matrix, inserted into mater machinic sight the new words that come will invade the bedroom, the classroom, the factory and we shall not insert new words to prop up older rooms, we shall not insert rooms at all fuck-slang is the vocabulary of the streets, the informal or colloquial body, the body pushed to the limits, the nomadic body taken-taking any- where, parasitic fuck-slang burrows into the flesh, inhabits it for all time, make no mistake we're cited, sighted in fuck-slang, site in fuck-slang, we drop the old institutions, move out of the rooms with their cyclical walls disengage engage, disengage-engage: _______________________________ _____________________________ Questions, Malaise Why are we reading these lists? Do we hope to accomplish anything here? Do we really feel this is a form of community? Why are the demographics currently so skewed to males? Why is there such a rapid turnover on the lists? Are we too sensitive or not enough to one another? Why have all the cyber-romances disappeared? Are we discovering a viral anguish in our midst? I'm reading the list to learn and belong. I'm tired of anti-intellectual- ism. I hope to learn from reasoned debate. I want to feel I belong. I am ashamed there are so few women participating. I wish that the community would develop and not lose membership so often. I feel we need more sens- itivity at times. I hope for the perfect cyber-lover and her appearance forever in my life. I feel we are all anguished more than we admit. This is a list that needs more knowledge. This is a place where people who think would find a home. This is a place where flame-wars should give way to careful replies. This is a place of belonging and taking responsibility for one's language. This is a place which should be everyone's. This is a place where we should know our rites of passage. This is a place of repri- mands and comforting. This is a place of bodies and ghosts. Academics and nonacademics, intellectuals, and cypherpunks, women and men, mothers and fathers, students and teachers, unemployed and workers, be- lievers and non-believers, empowerment and release, patients and doctors. Take these spaces with you, spread the word, scroll the real, or not... __________________________________________________________________________ Mayakovsky's Trolley Churrrrrr ! Churrrrrr ! The trolley roars down the street ! Clang ! Clang ! It's filled with soldier's tip- pling the bell-cord shearing from the bell ! They're firing left and right, explosions of white mist - scattered stone hail pouring like lavender down the street ! scattered movements bags of cloth and bones ! Knock ! out the street-lamp glass funneled acorn delight- ing later on that night during "round-up" time ! It's so gay ! It's almost so gay ! I'd watch but for the nickels crashing on the rails or the dispersed nickels or the rounded-up right nickels and dimes for the gay soldiers ! Such empty UNIFORMS, tiny empty medals, these are Working Cannons cocked for one and all and everyone ! Ways down hall-ways, UNIFORMS blank, while the gay little trolley the gay little trolley goes lurching over the hill bye-bye ! goes lurching down the ravine bye-bye! goes Babi Yar bye-bye ! O lurching in the midst of agave, yucca ! O lurching in the midst of a reservation ! O somewhere beneath the streets of Lodz ! O somewhere teeter-totter hideout ! O somewhere way beyond the Pale ! Churrrrrr ! Churrrrr ! The trolley roars down the street ! ___________________________________________________________________________ 1868: Wire Dust Think of it as Wire going West on covered wagons, prairie schooners across the plains, think of it earlier, trains where rails were, incisions into the hard dirt, sod houses in the middle of nowhere. Or think of it later: The train stopped at the junction in the middle of the prairie, high noon. There was a crew from nowhere stringing wires. They strung them on a pole, dangling like ripe fruit from glass insulators, ribbed bright in the hot sun. Think of the blue-white sky, the lone bird in it, scuttlings of lizards in the underbrush. Testing, testing, one of them said. One two three four one of them said. Testing, testing. There was a key, brass oval with screwed wooden top, fluttering above the contact points. It clattered when nothing else did, and when nothing else did you could hear the clattering. It would continue through the whole century, it would clatter stapled to the skin of frontier men and women. At night near the coast, Wire glowed bright in bound fog with St-Elmo's Fire. Inland, you'd hear the hum, you'd say you heard it. Everything was built out of wood and dust. Feed went in and out of the way-station, now a town tiny enough to hold one-hundred-eighty people. Feed went out in burlap covered with dirty dark-blue labels. Feed went further West, some of it up to the Chicago pens. The clattering continued. A lean man with a moustache trembled his fingers in a rhythm of dreams. The sun bore down on them all and they died of influenza, it hit sudden-like. It was always time for God in the church that had just done the steeple, and it was done right, thanks to the Wires and the nails that arrived, some made local, some from back down East. There was a wood railing and the horses tied to it could hear the clatter- ing like hooves, also dreaming somewhere where the horses went to dream somewhere beneath the wires. The man with the moustache rose slowly from a chair. The sun rose and the sun set. The sun rose and the sun set. A baby was born down the line. ___________________________________________________________________________ Farming and Community This is the wave of the future; we need a general import for the sine wave to function, operating with the Origin in the upper left, lower right, operating with the Origin in the center of the page, third or pineal Eye. We need something. We need a new vocabulary to bring body and intellect forward. We need to establish homes. What about irrigation. We need law- courts with a formation of justice that takes into account the suppleness of new modalities of communication. We need no control. We need adminis- tration to keep the substructure operational, the drainage ditches beneath the fields. We need the elimination of blockage, compliance with county and regional laws. The tiles must be evenly proportioned and caulked; the effluvia must drain into the sediment ponds for further processing, just like the Model Farm in Far Hills, New Jersey. The croplands support a variety of life, wild and domestic, on the sur- face. Thin wires connect everyone through star-clusters, each home and person-home a site of perfect illumination. The soil is rich with dark loam, a smell of musk, the secret stirrings of routes and tendrils, translucent foams twist slowly in the dark monarchy of brown slitherings; nothing stirs above. Tunnels evince sentience, fumble with obscure openings, close cloacae behind them, tumble on. We need the moaning soil and its transparencies of heat, the dark encrus- tations, silvered filaments of cyberspace, webs haunted by swollen drop- lets of swift mucous. We need paths of escape, swift and poisonous ef- fluvia, black streams rupturing the last coherent glimmerings of the mind. _________________________________________________________________________ The Boxing of Ears Sometimes I could just talk to the shadows. I live around the corner and a block from the Silver Spoon, where I eat my meagre meals, listening all the while to cohorts discussing computer failures, blowups, a sports game, and love affairs gone right. The Spoon has two entrances. Leaving the first, I hunger around the corner for the second, instilling shadows on the silhouetted patrons whose company I had just enjoyed. Although to be honest, I never participate; lurking in the background, I absorb their lives, have my little crushes. Peering in, I am reminded of the distance that always already is present. Blank shapes against the farther windows, and if you don't believe me, go down Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, right after the corner where Dean Street appears - you see me there. Now I'm sitting at a table among others, happy as can be. I write these words which anyone can read over my shoulder, and now you have with the pleasure of my body not being an intermediary, huddled across the key- board. What was I thinking, that I didn't remain for that extra cup of coffee today, lingering over the palmtop or The Art of the Romantic Era, $3.50 used at the Strand, pictures galore. A once insulted B. B told me that A would apologize, that was his style. That as an artist he used apology to repress his inability to apologize. That it was his mechanism, his play. Hiding behind these words, please pass the toast, it's possible to hide, indeed to cower, behind openness. In some of my videowork, beginning with a tape made with Kathy Acker years ago, I'm totally naked; the body is explicit. The emergence after- wards indicated nothing had been lost. But the _real_ loss, the reason I couldn't watch the tape for years, was the presence of speech, what we were saying to the camera, to one another. (Was there a difference?) I could never face that. Even now, I'm unable to _listen,_ not bothered by the sight at all. Site, not sight, is disturbing. (To watch a tape is to _listen._ Words break bones.) I hide behind openness, am open beyond hiding. Sometimes I could just hide beyond the shadows. _________________________________________________________________________ The Use of Dance of the Twentieth Century Using the text as a crutch, I can talk the floor, go up on pointe, armor myself in tutu or leotard, my perfect legs performing a pas de deux with the mirror shouldering my height upon its vertical back: "The classical dancer turns out the entire body, opening from the heart as an expression of grace and strength. It is not so much a turn as a constant spiral, a circular dynamic that invovles the torso, arms, and legs. There is a modern tendency in ballet training to shift the focus to the lower body, to dance only with the legs. Turning out solely form the hips and thighs places emphasis on the genital area. In _Dance-Movement Therapy,_ psychoanalyst Elaine V. Siegel pinpoints turning out as an aspect of body image with a number of possible sexual connotations: The open crotch in all ballet positions not only allows for the 'line' most pleasing to the balletomane but also reassures the audience that the dancer's physical prowess is not a sexual attack . . . Actually, turnout could also be seen as an expression of supreme sexual self- confidence. It depends on who is turning out how. It is really a matter of how the impulse for turning out is translated into the body, whether that impulse originates above or below the hips. If the impulse is generated with a pelvic thrust, the ballerine may take her place beside the striptease artist." (Gelsey Kirkland with Greg Lawrence, Dancing on My Grave) The sexualized body is armored in the carapace of ballet, just as text enhances and distances striptease. Net sexuality is similar, a play of organs splayed open and foreclosed by costume and the theatrical. The pas de deux is always done alone, the dancer reaching deep inside hirself to reproduce the perfect emotional form; later, the reach is second-nature, and the ghost-partner becomes more and more real and emphasized within hir arms. The terminal screen provides a perfect theater with all encounters bounded by an angle of view not dissimilar to sitting mid-way back in a theater, watching the troupe on-stage. I feel a rush when one dancer lifts another, hand-on-crotch, the two of them desperately reaching for the skies in the midst of compressed genitals, athletic breathing. The screen and keyboard are flooded with fluids; as protocols become more adaptable, the mesmeric body will meet the ectoplasmic body, hypnosis against the regurgitation of spirit itself. The nineteenth-century phenomena return in full force, thanks to the table-rapping Fox Sisters, in the twenty-first. "'You remember I told you that at home in my village at Sils Maria as a child I used to do errands for Mr. Nietzsche? I carried his rucksack when he went to the Alps to work. Madame, he acted and looked, before he was taken away, just like Mr. Nijinsky does now.'" (Romola Nijinsky, Nijinsky) ___________________________________________________________________________ My So-Called Life i was already the empty tomb, the ransacked body ribs cling to flesh, memories of skin held taut filled with words: that made me a bone-bag bone- bridge listen there is a circle of teeth around me, brown plaster into scarred black earth, black-white chipped tongued dried skinned-palm-flat, outline: a horn barks in the distance. now you are empty, only see me age. text falls out, collapses, a dog wounded struggles to rise against the dawn very of the world. it can't. what won't be read, that last word, angela born with computers, circuits, wolves and pens: they leave trails forever. i have left. these words flash flesh through the charnal-house there on cemetery left. they are swollen with misspellings, forgotten links to language, dark forests, wet boughs of errors, musk smell of death and dissolution. now i am broken now past door. in the wet twig foundered on the earth. in the twig-rot, slime mold gathered together where the words spill, spoil, sprawl. where the words spun webs. where the webs were spun. _________________________________________________________________________ Slide-Base Tonight I assembled thirty-six slides for use with a talk I am giving, a talk on cybermind, on the Internet, on the psychology of the space. And I only have a text-based editor, work from the command-line, so it was difficult to organize the scrolling text, making sense of things for an audience. I didn't want, as well, to violate anyone's posts, to present things that weren't in the public domain. At the same time, I've been fascinated by the rush of words, the rush of menus and ascriptions, and so I began, revealing my own .profile file, full of aliases and tiny macros, lines churning my account into fast entrances and exits. The rush felt good, and I included as well my lynx_bookmarks.html file, my file of World Wide Web sites and fur- ther scrolling, and then I included my tin-newsreader list of current newsgroups of interest. I was on a roll with scroll, with film-roll, the clicking continuing, running down the screen; I took snapshots of menus and hypertexts, stopping at a home-page text or two, then run- ning on, even a moment of ascii-art, triple divided to terminally fit. Images were necessary, so I went to the downloading, snapping sections of maps, Miranda, the moon of Uranus, comets striking Jupiter, a chart of the exponential increase in domains. Returned to the account, and found a home page with letter reply; blocking out the address, I sent an impassioned short letter purely for the camera, cancelling the post before the final mailing into oblivion. I was on a fast-track now, backed the camera up to show the keyboard and monitor nuzzled up against one another, added two pictures - one of a male, centered, looking out- ward, downloaded of course, and another, of a female face, centered, in dark shadow, the premonition of uneasy sexuality, pornography, from the Net. (I am speaking of the _source_ of the image here, not a gendered response to images of women.) Lost on the monitor, the two faces presen- ted the problematic of desire, cyberspace psychoanalytics, but only insofar as it too was scroll. Returning, I did traceroute on jefferson.village.virginia.edu where the lists are kept, traceroute and ping -s, indicating the echoed response times on the Net, clawed images of Net-spread, the stuttered liquidity of the Net roaming everywhere across the planet. Returning in a theme intertwined, I went to a personals page, captured the front-end menu for the camera, immediately turning it back into the original html document, capturing that as well, back and forth across the Web. Texts and pictures shakily began the wall/room shimmer of this space I inhabit in real life; nothing was solid any more. I returned to two photographs of the palmtop computers I use, images of the world or notes to myself. But I was seeing stars on the desktop, stars buried deep in Net itself, and wondered, could all this _text_ convey stars? Then it seemed to me that the text _was_ stars, not the relatively unin- teresting graphics of Mosaic or Netscape - functional, yes, but hiding the skeletal Net, turning it into a magazine, fine for users, but not nearly as radicalized. It might be the difference between pornography and eroticism: Which teaches us the presence of the body, which at least makes pretense of stripping codes (only to (re)produce others/the other, yes, but at least the potential of stripping is there)? Or it might be the difference between a sedan and a top-fuel dragster, the power-train close to _power_ unraveling. (But the truth is, as I read this, that gen- der operates in uncomfortable ways here, in terms of traditional readings of male and female: male as power, hardness, female as ornament, effusion. These too have to be deconstructed before any use can be made of the terms, command-line analyses that escape naively neutral phenomenology, and so forth. What I can do is offer a beginning of this at the talk, nothing more. And I _do_ like the reversion, presenting everything promptly, at the prompt.) _________________________________________________________________________ Misrecognition: Disturbances of Third Sex Lyotard, the fictional discovery of a manuscript, as reported in Pacific Wall, in which this occurs: "It's precisely - to use the American phrase - off limits. Look: this center is the true nomad. The center is actually migratory because all cultures come here and exchange their movement quantities - lose them- selves. So come. Come and pillage that migratory movement. Come and carry off its real power." To _whom_ this is addressed, and the lateral subject of the text, remains for another day. The passage I present is reconstituted from the French, a minor-key, flattened affect, and judging by the date of the Wall, per- haps even a reference to Anti-Oedipus. But I say: It is the subject that is the center, and it is the subject that is off- limits. And for the center, Jerusalem, to wander, well then the boundar- ies themselves are thrown off, although one might imagine for example an ellipse or further distorted figure with a region of wandering centers. Apart from the wandering centers, there is language, lost and simultane- ously describing movement. And it is language which as the key to the un- conscious, recuperated this text for me in an/other/'s, or why _this_ is being written, uneasy thetic lost in the midst of chaotic trajectories: I speak of the speaking of cybersex, from experiences where language is lost through its presence; what appears metaphorically is _chora_ at best, region of clashing drives. Cybersex can overwhelm, overcome, the body left to the other's devices. And it is this that, I argue, creates a _third sex,_ beyond masturbation or visible partners, a third sex based on the language of the unconscious returning, creating within you a realm of _uncanny desire,_ the distension of the other in the same, the collapse of the Irigarayan self/other/self into other/self/other. For if the un- conscious speaks, it questions the _possession_ of this unconscious: Who is it that speaks me through the screen, if not my other/self? Ravish- ment here is always already unravelling of Borromean _nots_ held together by the last vestiges of the erased subject. I am sure about this. In cybersex your desire is spoken _by the other_ becoming your desire; what returns is desire-being-spoken-for, a position of masochism, splay and display, no matter what the guise. Obdurate matter returns in mean- ing's annihilation, rows of letters hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhx signalling orgasm as the hand operates gesturally (Tran Duc Thao begins the beginning of language precisely in gestures - but _this_ gesture is blocked, returning the body at its limits as well.) If in first or second sex, the _you_ disappears, in cybersex, the _your_ disappears as the body is parcelled out through torn sexuality. The text, languaging: We are so used to it! It cuts like a microtome, removing tissue structures holding everything together, the big ball with holes. We hardly know what's happening to us! And what about this loss of _your_? This isn't the ordinary little-ego boundary bye-bye teased out by liquid physiology; this is tied, bound, to the text, the _your_ taken from you, ingested in the mouth of the _other,_ spat out - there's nothing to hope for! Lyotard's text continues through politics, backwards and forwards, but a woman might well desecrate: "Come and carry off its real power. Act like white women. Pretend to be white skin." Third sex is skinned sex, text skinned as well. No longer reading/being read, the terminal _mouths the body,_ inscribes the neural musculature directly. The ideology of domina- tion, the uneasy politics of "normative" sexualities, races, ages, and genders, do not disappear; they are a _secondary your_ that in fact also is taken from you. (If the first _your_ is related to a primary narciss- ism, the second is related to secondary narcissism, cultural trajectories close on by disappearance.) Once you find out you don't know who you are you can't return to the sec- urity of knowledge whatever. __________________________________________________________________________ Routing Cycle For those who haven't seen this before, here's a black-hole circulation, I believe, on the Net; it continued through traceroute to surfnet.com until the maximum hops (30) exhausted themselves... This is the downside of the blindside, interconnectivity lending itself to neural networking, intelligent agents, and wall-crashing simultaneously. "_Black holes_ may result from any of several phenomena. During recovery from link failure temporary circular routes can arise. Once a packet enters such a route, it circulates until either the loop is corrected or a maximum time to live is exceeded." ... (Spragins, Telecommunications Protocols and Design) Welcome to the Maelstrom 1 xenyn-eid-E0.nyc.access.net (198.7.0.126) 2 ms 3 ms 2 ms 2 sl-dc-1-S12-T1.sprintlink.net (144.228.21.21) 15 ms 10 ms 11 ms 3 sl-dc-6-F0/0.sprintlink.net (144.228.20.6) 14 ms 11 ms 10 ms 4 sl-stk-5-H1/0-T3.sprintlink.net (144.228.10.2) 81 ms 74 ms 76 ms 5 sl-stk-2-F0.sprintlink.net (144.228.40.2) 151 ms 120 ms 140 ms 6 sl-rgnet-1-S1-T1.sprintlink.net (144.228.42.22) 81 ms 81 ms 80 ms 7 * ln1-ms-sf.tlg.net (140.174.178.2) 88 ms 82 ms 8 ts1-ms.tlg.net (140.174.77.13) 87 ms 84 ms 85 ms 9 gw-ms-sf.tlg.net (140.174.77.5) 84 ms 82 ms 85 ms 10 ts1-ms.tlg.net (140.174.77.13) 86 ms 85 ms 87 ms 11 gw-ms-sf.tlg.net (140.174.77.5) 83 ms 86 ms 84 ms 12 ts1-ms.tlg.net (140.174.77.13) 88 ms 89 ms 86 ms 13 gw-ms-sf.tlg.net (140.174.77.5) 100 ms 91 ms 87 ms 14 ts1-ms.tlg.net (140.174.77.13) 92 ms 91 ms 89 ms 15 gw-ms-sf.tlg.net (140.174.77.5) 89 ms 88 ms 86 ms 16 ts1-ms.tlg.net (140.174.77.13) 90 ms 90 ms 99 ms 17 gw-ms-sf.tlg.net (140.174.77.5) 89 ms 94 ms 96 ms 18 ts1-ms.tlg.net (140.174.77.13) 91 ms 90 ms 95 ms 19 gw-ms-sf.tlg.net (140.174.77.5) 102 ms 103 ms 104 ms 20 ts1-ms.tlg.net (140.174.77.13) 93 ms 95 ms 92 ms 21 gw-ms-sf.tlg.net (140.174.77.5) 104 ms 99 ms 104 ms 22 ts1-ms.tlg.net (140.174.77.13) 95 ms 98 ms 99 ms 23 gw-ms-sf.tlg.net (140.174.77.5) 96 ms 95 ms 97 ms 24 ts1-ms.tlg.net (140.174.77.13) 96 ms 110 ms 97 ms 25 gw-ms-sf.tlg.net (140.174.77.5) 101 ms 106 ms 96 ms 26 ts1-ms.tlg.net (140.174.77.13) 98 ms 102 ms 99 ms 27 gw-ms-sf.tlg.net (140.174.77.5) 104 ms 103 ms 122 ms 28 ts1-ms.tlg.net (140.174.77.13) 131 ms 101 ms 105 ms 29 gw-ms-sf.tlg.net (140.174.77.5) 100 ms 99 ms 101 ms 30 ts1-ms.tlg.net (140.174.77.13) 106 ms 102 ms 102 ms ______________________________________________________________________ Ascii Unconscious speak to me speak me speak _your_ the unconscious is _written_ like a language... the other embedded in it... i suppose the object which forces the realization...objet petit a / object petite a / what's the gender or cut, what's the inscription of the gender / i'd write it's a schizzed listen hearing the he/she/they - listen I'd write it any way I can, I'd write it on me, you'd write it on me - listen, you wrote _let me post on you_ - that did it, the outlines of my body already transparent gaining a kind of...weight... ) on both sides of the inscription - where suture comes in - because you've got to heal the inscription, seamless, the skin's seamless (fear of holes where _the body breaks into the real_ - Lyotard's flat puncturing) - what inscribes negates, a furrow - because when i listen to myself i am listening to you - because i rise to the occasion of your language - long ascii swells - slight rise in sea- level, change in temperature - surface reflectance - invisible site - see you see me - mirrored site ) to the extent that the furrow is a proper name, to that extent it disasso- ciates from difference, examines itself _there_ - but the body's schizzed in any case - that's _it_ - the occasion or occurrence - why the _your_ is devoured, dissolute - because it's simultaneously what you would have said what you wouldn't have said - because you would have _me_ when the imaginary's more real than the real - because the unconscious seduces - you're always more real than i am ) the texts create me as a laminar manifold, strata and tendrils - plateaus piled on plateaus - the conventional allowing of breathing and daemon - you _book_ me - continuous rewrite - open up the space inside the body where the language goes - frisson and a thrill to be here thank you very much - ascii body always already shaved, luminous - you slide the _your_ into me - because you _said_ you would and it's not a matter of belief - it happens when you say it because it _has_ to happen - ) say it say it say it say it say it - _________________________________________________________________________ Thinking Others Thinking Others Heidegger's in the forest. He's writing: Heidegger, What is Called Thinking: "A fragment of Parmenides, which has been given the number 6, begins with these words:" "The usual translation of the saying is: "One should both say and think that Being is."" Later, let's say that it's evening, that the storm has settled down a bit, the trees are dripping with cold water, the streams are rushing: "The saying becomes clearer if we take the liberty of inserting three colons, to give a sharper articulation to its word structure. We shall also write the saying in four separate lines:" "Following the usual translation, fitted more closely not to the Greek text, the saying then runs: "Needful: the saying also thinking too: being: to be."" Later, let's say there's a warning: "The warning runs:" ""And let not much-current habit force you into this way, | to let roam sightless eyes and noise-cluttered ear | and tongue, rather discriminate in reflection." Here logos __ is sharply contrasted with unreflecting gawking and ear-cocking and chatter. In the text _glossa_ , the tongue, mere chatter, is placed in immediate and almost brutal contrast to _logos_ , reflection." Jonathan Barnes' Early Greek Philosophy adds to the warning, which is in the seventh fragment, what holds the crag together: "Only one story, one road, now is spoken." Wheelwright's The Presocratics translates the sixth fragment - in its entirety - as follows: "It is necessary both to say and to think that being is. For to be is possible and not-to-be is impossible. I bid you consider this, and I warn you against another path, along which mortals wander ignorantly, with divided minds and scattered thoughts, so befuddled and helpless as to resemble the deaf and blind. There are crowds of them, without discernment, maintaining that to be and not to be are the same and not the same, and that everything is in a statement of movement and counter- movement." Barnes' has this, from Simplicius' Commentary on the Physics, and we're remaining on the sixth fragment of course: "for it can be, and nothing can not. This I bid you say. For from this first road of inquiry you, and then from the road along which mortals who know nothing wander, two-headed; for impotence in their breasts guides their erring mind. And they are borne along alike deaf and blind, amazed, undiscerning crowds, for whom to be and not to be are deemed the same and not the same; and the path of all turns back on itself." How does this begin? With "For having said:" - with reference to Parmeni- des - is followed by "for it can be..." and after " you," there is a "" separating the two sections, isolating the thought of Heidegger from the thought of Adorno, or leaking the crowd scene at best into the Heideggerian "they." Some of this clarifies in the German of the Diels' text; here are some excerpts: "Notig ist zu sagen und zu denken, dass nur das Seiende ist; denn Sein ist, ein Nichts dagegen ist nicht; das heisse ich dich wohl beherzigen." Heidegger, in Was Heisst Denken?, by the way, translates his second version as "Notig: das Sagen so Denken auch: Seiendes: sein." Heidegger also leaves out Diels' "nur," for better or worse. And the warning, in Diels: "Aber nur noch Eine Weg-Kunde bleibt dann, dass IST _ist_." What a mess! One can imagine the Parmenidean trance and declamation, but one can also imagine the deaf and blind (in the lineage of Pieter Bruegel), the double-headed (Diels' nice "Doppelkopfe") crowds reverberating with a flux similar and transparent to cybermind, to the insipidity of the discussion of being. More and more the Heideggerian appears as idiolec- tical, a meditation clearing its own grounds as technology and world-war sweep bodies out from under obdurate visibility. It's the easiest thing in such a world to talk to the ghosts in the forest, while radio in fact penetrated the boughs that Holderlin or Trakl meditated upon. Soon dusk begins to fall and a bifurcation occurs, the separation of uneasy wombs: either there's something wrong with language, or something amiss with our own expectations, or both, giving birth to translucency, when transparency _against_ the obdurate seemed the hardened will of the day. What to make of this is literally and permanently _beyond one,_ but there is a looming in the forest, neither ghost nor wraith nor speech, the aftershock of the nuclear, the realization of Heideggerian _waiting,_ full of wrath and promise. _________________________________________________________________________ Zoned I erased the hard-drive then changed DOS in the autoexec.bat files, well I didn't erase DOS, go with me here, so that it would loop continually, right back on and looping, auto-on, keyboard didn't do a thing, erased the floppies, go with me here, even the macros. I didn't want to waste the computer; information's expensive, organiza- tion, give it away to someone who can use it good. Found myself getting nauseous over and over again. My body shuddered its way through the rituals and this post is the last remnant of all of this. I kept taking pills, calm me down, build me up. Pills are wonderful, circular like the mediaeval world, everything equidistant from the center. Kept rummaging, they were getting harder to find. I wrote out the will of all my worldly possessions because they're made out of materials and organized in a way somebody might want. It's all a matter of a neat will, and I cleaned my sheets too by the way. I knew there would be a cutoff. I knew that would come when I couldn't do anything else, when there would be a blankness to the world of the wall, or when I could hardly function, could hardly see what I was doing. I kept correcting this post because I didn't want it to be sloppy and it's the gate to all the others. It's the gate and the reason I'm writing to put an end through a kind of building that's a building of a gate, I used to call it a portal. Now my worldly writing all of it circulates forever, it's out there in the wires, coded like some insane dna molecule wrapped up in the last concert of PJ Harvey before the stroke sets in the voice stops drums crash to the floor guitar winds down. It's out there and it's yours, I haven't the slightest idea where it is, where anything is anymore. They're round, without serrated edges; they can fall through your fingers just like that to a floor with a huge mouth in it that reaches up as if they were sex and they're not I know that, to the floor and I know they're not that. Someday there will be a last post that won't announce itself so this is an early announce. Someday there will be an end to it all, emotions that short-circuited themselves, so this is an early ending, not the real one, don't worry, not the silent one - this is the noisy one, the crafted one, and keep the texts rolling out, rolling through cyberspace, packets sputtering everywhere, someplace I must have said something good - __________________________________________________________________________ From sondheim@panix.comSun Mar 12 03:26:31 1995 Date: Sun, 12 Mar 1995 03:25:13 -0500 From: Alan Sondheim To: sondheim@panix3.panix.com Net Storm More: *s are failures, storming everywhere across the Net from New York to the list headquarters in Virginia... the dusk of the Net is approaching, red glow on the horizon, not a sunset _I_ can assure you... 1 xenyn-eid-E0.nyc.access.net (198.7.0.126) 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 sl-dc-1-S12-T1.sprintlink.net (144.228.21.21) 10 ms * * 3 icm-dc-1-F0/0.icp.net (144.228.20.101) 11 ms 10 ms * 4 icm-fix-e-H2/0-T3.icp.net (192.157.65.122) 10 ms 11 ms 10 ms 5 192.203.229.9 (192.203.229.9) 11 ms 11 ms * 6 128.167.252.9 (128.167.252.9) 11 ms 11 ms 12 ms 7 128.167.212.2 (128.167.212.2) 12 ms * 12 ms 8 * ctv-wtn8-c3mb.sura.net (128.167.3.2) 20 ms 20 ms 9 uva-ctv-c3mb.sura.net (192.221.3.18) 24 ms 32 ms 26 ms 10 * acc-router.ver.NET (137.54.200.12) 29 ms 22 ms 11 garrett1-router.acc.Virginia.EDU (128.143.226.4) 26 ms 31 ms * 12 jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU (128.143.200.11) 38 ms 28 ms 26 ms _________________________________________________________________________ The Sonnet of Insulting God If I insult God running down the wires Will I burn hard interminably in fires - Will I burn terminals dissolute, enmired If I curse God pouring through the wires - If I trample Holy Names, scream my desires Will infants die, angels sing in choirs Cursing a male, email, female joined in wires If I burn Names, illuminated fires - Let me burn a God whose Name is now enmired In centuries of pain, perverse desires Sung by third-sexed angels, fucking choirs Of she male, see male, female in the wires - If I burn Names, illuminated fires Let me burn both mine and thine, borne in the wires ______________________________________________________________________ Third Sex 2 [ Continuation of the account of on-line sexuality, as psychoanalytically potent in its relation to the unconscious, masochism, and transference. ] "In analysis, transference has a twofold aspect. Fundamentally, it must be considered as a form of resistance. The patient defends himself against remembering and discussing his infantile conflicts by reliving them. Transference actions (since the object is not the right one and the situation is not fitting) serve the purpose of distorting the original connections, and the discharge thus attained is necessarily insufficient. The analysand, seeking immediate satisfaciton of derivatives instead of facing his original impulses, attempts to use a short-circuit substitute for his repressed drives." (Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis) We are _looking_ at transference, which is _listening to_ transference; I am lying back on a couch, the analyst is elsewhere and indeterminate in the room (the result of the logical function of _neither here nor there_), and my labial vocal-cords expel a form of incoherent speech from the throat, breath rising through the upper regions of the chest, expanding and tightening the skin. I do not _look_ at the analyst, who speaks _to_ my ascii unconscious, wording himself, constructing an addiction centered around the thing of hir (dis)embodiment; I am languaged into hir presence, this languaging which is the _totality_ of my presence, out of which I must construct my body. "The analysis must aim at the passage of true speech, joining the subject to an other subject, on the other side of the wall of language. That is the final relation of the subject to a genuine Other, to the Other who gives the answer one doesn't expect, which defines the terminal point of the analysis." (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar Book II) There is always the potential of termination, the effacement/delete of the subject in third sex, without the abject turning-away that conditions negation in real life. Speaking to the screen, I beg to be "let in." Speaking to the screen, she promises to reach through it, through what is only glass, never mind electrons - I'll be grabbed at the level of the chest, torn open, inserted into perfect delay. "In the course of an analysis, something like an object may be formed. But this object, far from being what is at issue, is only a fundamentally alienated form of it. It is the imaginary ego which gives it its centre and its broup, and it is clearly identifiable with a form of alienation, akin to paranoia. That the subject ends up believing in the ego is in itself madness. Thank God, analysis very rarely succeeds in that, but we have a thousand proofs that it is being pushed in that direction. "That will be our programme for next year - what does paranoia mean? What does schizophrenia mean? Paranoia, as compared with schizophrenia, always has a relation to the imaginary alienation of the ego." (Lacan, ibid.) I am rewritten in third sex, splayed open; there are no secrets; you are my confessor. I will tell you everything, and this is _not_ telling you nothing; this is, in fact, the truth, the _only_ truth I have ever had to offer. In the position of Abraham's sacrifice, I am rewritten into a convenant with you; you enter me everywhere, penetrate me: your words are perfect. The content is the caress and the caress is the content. I yearn to make myself worthy of you, say the proper things, in order to continue the session. You never look in my direction; we are both voices, and even in cyberspace we continue _vocally,_ because this is the part of the body that leaves us and remains us, nonetheless. "The appearance of disturbing fantasies or of a stream of archaic images leads the patient to the edge of subjective destructuration. He then takes refuge in love for the analyst in order to avoid crossing the borders of psychosis. But this hostile love is not only a protection; it can become the index of the regressive situation into which the patient has now entered, a state of primitive fusion and confusion. The analyst who then clings to his role as the analyzer of neurosis is then playing the game of the patient, who speaks of love in order not to confront the limits of existence, which are life and death. The patient gives the appearance of enjoying the realm of sexualized existence, but that is only to avoid approaching his own loss. At this stage, two possibilities are open to him: to make the analyst abandon his reserve, so that he becomes one individual among others, or to force him to become even more impenetrable, to harden his role as the receiver and transmitter of discourse." (Francois Roustang, psychoanalysis never lets go) In third sex, we are all patients, doubling the regression until confu- sion is accompanied by dissolution, inescapable fantasms. This is the uncanny of the body under rewrite, interpenetrations through ascii un- conscious. The analyst, the other, you, abandon your reserve, naming organs, flooding me with names; still, you control my body and its distensions _for all practical purposes,_ the words hammering on the screen, from across the room. You will never let go; you rearrange my organs, reduce me to love from which even the hatred has leaked; I return inchoate matter, permanently disturbed, ruptured and tattooed. A final quote from Roustang's difficult and necessary book: "There cer- tainly appear to be two separate and distinct individals, but that is not true for the unconscious, for the utopia that is the limit and the force of psychical life. This could be expressed in the following way: _the principle of the life of the relation, its motive force and its source, is that there is no relation._ One finds oneself in the pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal state (without temporal signification), or well within language and Oedipus (wihtout spatial signification), in the sense that language has separated nothing and there were never two parents, only one, whose body is the only body or whose body has been abolished. "One must give extended attention to the most archaic if one is to have a chance to get out of it;" _________________________________________________________________________ Third Sex 3 (See Disturbances of Third Sex, Ascii Unconscious, Third Sex 2) It's here that I wonder about transference as a series of reflectances, a mode of imaging that always already distorts, that operates through noisy accumulations, resonances, and signalling - As of someone, the hunter, gesturing to the other, the prey or the blind, the decoy. When you speak to me through the lines, I hear the others through you, hear the speaking of the prey as well, a cacophony of voices, occlusions. It is as well, always already a question of whose voice, and never a question of whose voice, and _what happens to the question_ is that of third sex, the imminence of third sex - And this is as well what is the becoming of shape-riding, shape-riding as the dream of transference, in which the voice is lost on the convo- lutions of inchoate manifolds, peripheral to the vision of perspective, half-presences/absences - the stuttering of being itself. I am the shape that is ridden, the voice that is heard saying the voice that is heard; it's this flux that removes third sex from the necessity of the sado-masochistic scene/scenario/contract, into the arena of the flood, flotsam and jetsam, debris from the sea of selves: who's speaking, whose voice? " " Let us _hear_ this text above, reflectances surely a reference to the Soviet theory of reflection, matter illuminated as information qua mat- ter - but _here_ transumed into distortions: A reflectance is an intro- jection through the reading or hearing of the other, and there are prodigies of translation involved. Noisy accumulations - and not chao- tic; the lines are deeply distorted, all the way down. And signalling, gesturing - are these not the operations Tran Duc Thao believes signals the formation of language itself? For the hunter, there are these others: the prey, the blind, the decoy. Each hides behind and portends the rest; the hunter is the curlicue, the excess, promising death at the end of the long march. In third sex, it is not death, but that dissolution into part-objects, where boundaries are im-present, dismissed. ("Before dawn, as we all slept, I lost all distinctions, lying between the two of them. There seemed to be no dif- ference in our sexes. I was not a man, nor was I a woman, but something which included both. And like any good gestalt, I was greater than the sum of my parts." (Marco Vassi, The Metasex Manifesto)) But it is not a scene, either, of hunter and prey, but only of blinds and decoys, of tracings or protean trajectories across spaces _opened up and created by the trajectories themselves._ The spaces form mani- folds, form surfaces of desire inescapably intersecting the body, bro- ken and at a certain remove. (At times the trembling grows so intense, it becomes impossible to type, to respond; the body bridges chaos into chaos, noise beneath, beyond.) The transference is on the order of an _emission,_ sendings, neither from here nor there, neither to here nor there. Words babble, intercon- nect, intersect; they carry a certain grief, the remnants of what the participants once called human. (Once they had a calling. Once they had names.) ("And then the sounds began, the bubbling noises from my chest. At first they seemed like cries of sexual excitement, but I soon recognized them as moans of despair, sobs of sadness. They were the groanings of a per- son who was at his last. It occurred to me that I was at the brink of a breakthrough into a feeling I had long been hiding from myself, and as I examined my inner space, tears sprang to my eyes and I began to weep." (Marco Vassi, op. cit. The bookseller told me Vassi had died from AIDS.)) _________________________________________________________________________ Third Sex 4 (Nursery Rhyme for Clara Hielo on Unix/talk) If you give me your name, I can't write the same; No one is to blame, If you give me your name. I write from the air, I place my words there Above the fine line; I can't help but stare. I would make you mine, Your body is bare Below the fine line I know what you wear. I know what you say, What you tell me is true; This isn't a play - I know about you. My name is your own, Your flesh is mine; My flesh to the bone Is cast as your own. My legs are splayed wide, I moan and I whine; Upon me you ride, Come in me inside. Your legs are splayed wide, You moan and you whine; Upon you I ride, Come in you inside. If I give you my name, You'll have me forever. But marrow from bones Almost never will sever. If you give me your name, I'll always be true Through flood and through flame, The flesh runs to you. Our blood is the same, Your flesh runs to me. If you give me your name, I'm burned with the same. _If you give me your name, I'm burned with your name._ _________________________________________________________________________ I am that I am! I love you and therefore I tell you, your name is precisely that which you won't lose, that which other hands will, millennia from now, report from the middens and ash-warrens, recuperate from the tunnels and decayed pressed lamina of books and broken domains of pure pure protocols. From Nijinsky's diary: "LETTER TO SERGEI PAVLOVICH DIAGHILEV To the Man, I cannot name you because I have no name for you. I am not writing to you hastily. I don't want you to think that I am nervous, I am not. I am able to write quite calmly. And I like to do it, although I am not expressing myself in beautiful sentences. I have never studied how to do this. And what I want is to express a thought." /ending/ "You are a bad man, you are not a Tsar, a ruler. You are not my Emperor. You are an evil person. You wish me harm, but I do not want this for you. I am a tender being and want to write you a cradle song ... a lullaby ... Sleep peacefully, sleep, sleep, peacefully. Man to Man, Vaslav Nijinsky" (A footnote says that the cradle song is in verse and cannot be translated.) Irigaray doesn't mention Lacan anywhere in Speculum. Oh, there are all those stories about the names of God - either they're too innumerable to count, or they're unpronouncable. Sometimes I think language works over- time just to keep itself at a distance. But of course, it's not language, it's Vaslav's tenderness that is at stake, his Godhead, his weeping. "I am not afraid of you, I know well that in your innermost being you do not hate me. I love you as one loves a human being, but I do not want to work with you. But there is one thing I want you to know, that I am work- ing a great deal. I am not dead. I am still alive. God lives in me and I live in Him. My whole time is taken up with my dancing, and my work is progressing. Whenever I can I write, too, but not beautiful sentences, which you like so much." The cover illustration is a marble sculpture, of which it is said "It is probably the only sculpture of Nijinsky done from life." The book is filled with beautiful sentences. Of course the point isn't that no one alive today saw Nijinsky dance, and the point isn't the behavior of Diaghilev. _________________________________________________________________________ X-Ray to My Heart Scientific American has two x-ray pictures of the sun. They are so brilliant! So malevolent! I can't look at them because I think the sun will come and get me! Mayakovsky was so happy because he found his true love. He wrote: A furious sun ! How you beat down on my love ! She's not here cause she's living in the mountains ! It's the same sun she sees I guess so we'll tongue you together ! Nyaaaah! Nyaaaah! A furious sun ! No smith has beaten iron with a rock like you and me ! Everything falls into place ! My heart bends to your commands that I seek her falling over myself on this bewildered planet ! A furious sun ! My sun ! With x-ray vision you have grown so large, illuminating the interior of each and every thought! The wires burn with your murky embrace ! So what happened to the revolution, eh ! Tell me that, O furious sun ! ( But I won't be around to listen ! I've got better things to do. Thanks to you, I've got better things to do ! ) __________________________________________________________________________ "I want to write this book in order to explain what feeling is." (Nijinsky, Diary) Nudity, which conjures up the most beautiful vistas, appears upon the slightest motion of the lids, curtailing the din of the everyday, a crimson curtain shutting down the world, ah. Pubescent moisture at the edge of the mouth just beneath the bright sparkling eyes, lips garnished with vermillion slashed into lovely smear blending into the subtle plateau shadowed by fluttered cheekbones, ah. Dark ridge into the forest of black hair harbored near the glossied lineaments of ear and crevice, damp with oils seduced from animals aligned with edits, teeth, and glistened tongue, ah. Running down the hand the deer, fawned elbow, hooved palm, lines read through enormous chasm, ah. The chasm: I see written on the body, you have a short life conjuring appearance, curtailed and shut down by disasters oh so not so far away. And I see written in the air, a pubescent relationship with a lovely and subtle woman shadowed by life's bleak end. And further, I see into the darkness harbored by the lineaments of desire, damp with true love blending the life glistening with happiness, oh to be so seduced with the pleasure of being, thy poor life cut short, oh. And at last, I see life running out, fawning to the very end, where the lines meet, become enormous, ah, I have erred, they become enormous, never ending, life eternal, ah. Winterson, Written on the Body Sarduy, Written on a Body Sondheim, Written on some Body _________________________________________________________________________ March 1995 Mayakovsky's trying to sleep. He's been on the telegraph the entire day with Lili. Lili's caught in a new revolt that hasn't made the papers yet and Mayakovsky can't sleep because he's in love with Lili and doesn't know where she is. He only knows she's on the other end of the wires. He knows that because he types I love you more than anyone has ever loved I dream of you at night and I can't dream and I can't sleep and she types back she types back I toss and turn there's no tomorrow no day and no night no yesterday and no today and there are sounds of keyboards thousands of kilometers apart in the white night of Russian March almost into the flowering of the birch and everywhere you go there are guns firing in the distance and Mayakovsky thinks they're for us he thinks they're for us and Lili thousands of kilometers apart millions of kilometers apart she thinks Mayakovsky's sending me a message sending a message and neither of them can sleep __________________________________________________________________________ What Time is It? So he writes to Lili, he writes he's tired of Alan using his name, he writes what if it is the same, we gotta do what we gotta do and hey do you know what time it is - This time there's no silence, this time Lili looks up and says he's in love his posts are a mess he's in love and whatever he's said there's no stopping it, it's the same old story ! So he writes back and says what's this got to do with Cybermind, cause we need a bit of the anguish, the guns gunning, flags waving ! Aw Lili looks up and says Stop this silly writing, will you? We're lying in bed together just like we always wanted ! Can't you ever say anything? Just like that ! Face to face ! Can't you ever say anything at all? ! _________________________________________________________________________ Stories It was a bad story, it was the worst story he had ever read. The Countess, sable fir, dark and gloomy eyes, alabaster skin, had returned with her mother's lover to the birthplace of her illegitimate child. It was there that the dashing man in black, somewhat severe but devoted, appeared as an apparition for the very first time. Franz, she was heard to murmur, as the audience went silent, waiting for Clara's plaintive reply. Long ago and far away, he had read this and other stories and they had carried him to other lands, had carried him in their soft arms and beau- tiful breasts, a bright shining red and gleaming mouth, leaning against the sun intense with every intention of completing its daily round. These were the forfeitures of the biogeneticists, the occasions, surely, of age-old and weary patterns installed long before they had arrived on these poor shores. Hungry, my mind travelled the length of my body in an involuted sphere, companion to Volvox, yearning for the denouement of the noise of the world, anything but the noise, abjured, ignored, by the Countess. _________________________________________________________________________ The _Topography_ of the Email List Think of the email list as a porous tube, a flux in space-time, an uncanny relationship to the visible, the meat of the flesh itself. It's grounded in the history of archives, part-files that remain parasitic among sites, those of the list software itself, and those of the users, past and pre- sent. Think of the _uncanny_ in this regard as group memories constantly undergoing fragmentation, collapse, disappearance, Lethe. Think of sleep as harboring uneasy dreams, land-locked water-locked dreams with no way out. And think of the porosity as the identification of matter itself, matter which, in every way, interconnects elsewhere, the construal of a skein about the tube, tendrils moving elsewhere across the membrane. Everyone and no one is always already present; think of this presence. Think of the aura of private messages, email skittered back and forth across the Net, relationships coagulating, intensifying, disappearing and moving into the realm of flesh. Cyberspace loops across the real, regards it from within, and fleshmeet would only have been taken as a matter of course in European affairs, particularly in regard to the Enlightenment. For elsewhere, one knows that the flesh is not what it seems, that it is _always_ other, even the flesh and especially the flesh harboring one's own body, surrounding one forever and ever. There are fleshmeets of love and fleshmeets of acquaintances, meats of the flesh as well; there are snailmail exchanges of photographs, texts, tears and locks of hair, disks and envelopes filled with the presence of others. Think of these others jumping ontologies, always already in flux, and the accompanying flux of real life, of which the email list is an image and an imaginary, a _chora_ of rhythms, drives, disruptions, receptacle and transmitter of emissions and packets. Think of the opening and closure of postings (described by Laurie Cubbi- son as utterances), with their characteristics of inscription, rewrite, and creation of cyberspaced. And think of the creation of spawned groups, other lists, aliases, spatialities, with their own topographies and seed. And think of the protocol suites and the IP addresses, numerical, tending towards a uniform manifold of differences, all of this the gristle be- neath the surface, the bones. In the slipstream of the temporal the list continues, demographics pool- ing and transforming, lending themselves to a memory just out of reach. That is why the list is of the dream, and not of the wizard or the witch. But that is why the list is of flight as well, as I will fly to the one I love in a few short days, and am writing this, in fact, five miles or eight kilometers above the surface of the earth. - Alan Sondheim (somewhere over Kentucky) _________________________________________________________________________ Why you are saved from my texts, because I'm here (humid) in Dallas, because I'm working on a presentation full of interrupts (breaking-down, collapsing), because (showing slides of .profile, lynx_bookmarks files), explaining (aliases) or an attempt to hold an audience (flesh) against the terminal (itself simply screened, screening the screen) (inordinate) so that I can continue theory Mr. Anxiety on the lecture circuit (open, no current), storing texts, writing texts, decaying texts; why you are saved from my texts, because I'm there (humid) in Kentucky, because I'm interrupting my presentations (completing, rising up), because (turning the machinery off), dissipating (true names), turning aside from every- one but (flesh) adjacent to the terminal (unscreened) (wayward, contrary), so that theory's abjured Msr. Sutured on the circuit of flesh. _________________________________________________________________________ The Direction which is Living which is Never without Direction I am writing non-gender non-Kentucky from Dallas a site where no one would ever live, and thinking, heterogeneity from some work I am reading and others to be thought about. So that there is a sight, which is that of an intensity grounded in relationships I have had here, friends I have been through with altogether, their concentration. Even the smells have familiar smells. These moments cloud the nodal points which open up to yardages of materials skewed in numerous directions. I wander in and out of lives. I have always wandered so, non-Dallas Kentucky, non-Antarctica, which is why Antarctica. Antarctica slopes towards itself, uneasy horizon, obdurate with presence againt absented and lost except for trace-lines generated by particular routings towards the servers near the Pole of Inaccessibility. I'm concerned about this pole; I sleep against its uncertain inscription in a terrain which permits none Other. The bones freeze in death's monstrance against itself. Mind forecloses, curtails. What turns, twists in the wind. Sometimes there's wind.* It slopes around Dallas towards Kentucky but slopes. Highways go in and out of my holes. I am a landscape of tunnels and forests. There is bamboo in the Arboretum, the nearest to a forest blown askew wrought by the north-eastern wind.* Or is it north-western. Direction is an IP address, 198.7.0.2, searchlight or beacon without absolute direction. What I'm writing about is direction. I'm writing about direction because the lines go from left to right and then continue to go down, scroll down, there are lines beneath lines, always someone telling a story. But the lines can be anywhere, IP, urinate in a stream leading from the valley to the valley always lower. As if the desert reached the sea. The desert is salt because of the urine because of the salt because of the sailor on the Salton sea. The occurrence is an ingestion. There is no direction without another direction, do you understand what I am trying to say? And there is always that setting forth which is instanced non-Kentucky. Do you understand what I am trying to say? Where are you? Being is incapable of reply. _______________________________________ 2. Didn't I tell you beforehand that this would be too difficult, in the guise of a journey? That there would be no explication, nothing beyond the lines which demanded reading from the literal terrain, the slope of the heated road, the forests running down to it, the streams almost dried up, the rumor coyote? West of here there's the desert, there's an utterance which is inconceivable, unpronouncable, like the name of God who can only be a figuration in violation fabric, dune and wadi. The slope of the road is always a corrective. It is the slope of the road. ___________________________________________________________________________ Beautiful Stranger of Simmel When I meet you you are the beautiful stranger of Simmel. Your eyes conceal a hunger that made Julia Kristeva worship you! Idolize you! But Julia never suspected the truth, my darling, that your flesh is always already dispersed and I say that in lieu of the fleshmeet that thrusts bodies into relations with one another. It's the project of the flesh which has never begun; the flesh has never begun. We're (un)hinged temporally dispersed. We thrust ourselves into the digital, replicate exactly one hundred hundred hundred times. As if that were enough. Breathless, we replicate exactly one hundred hundred hundred hundred times. Our breath expels our souls. Our eyes engage with hooks and rods. Demons enter through our pores. Our cum are simulacra of being-human. Our hair unnerves us, our nail cuttings ennervate. We are thrust into the analog, replicate exactly one hundredth hundredth hundredth times. As if that were too much. Exact, counting to ourselves, we breath one hundredth hundredth hundredth hundredth times. Dying within the analog, living within the digital, I remember seeing you, the beautiful stranger of Simmel whom Kristeva loves. She always has this love in her heart because she's Catholic and filled with love. Jesus is a stranger, born unto a manger. Jesus' flesh rose up to heaven because he had it self-contained and took in the shame that he gave to everyone else. So he could be an object. So he had the proper name, the really proper name. Jesus was always polite and always got his way. Everyone else's flesh dispersed, blew all over the place, windstorms, nomadic wanderings, diasporas, refugee camps forming a bridge over which the strangers crossed, leaving the flesh behind. ___________________________________________________________________________ Swallowing Wires I don't want to run away. I want to swallow wires. I want them wrapped around the throat, they'll wrap in a helical hyperbola, pushing out the breasts pushing out the mind. I want the rim of them. I want the rim of them, wrapped around me, swollen name stitched into the back of the neck where I can't read. There's got to be the truth of this social security number, birthdate, and all the bad things I ever did. There's got to be the wires. They've _got_ to be where I can't read them because I feel too guilty to read the truth. They burn into the back of my neck. They brand me with my crimes like a geek code that's invisible with a translation I can't find. I carry around the puckered neck. I carry around the puckered neck which is where I am that I can't be. I want to swallow wires. _________________________________________________________________________ William 314 here's a post dealing with sex, what' s to be one about it, where shall we go with it, what big new jail' s big enough to hold all of us our arms up our cocks sex makes a good sport for an audience someday i'd like to see sex someday i'd like to see murder' s effect on the murderer and the victim always things to do, victim' s sound quiet someday like to see them tell about death' s noisy sex you know you dunno you know you scare s me talking like this, someday god' ss gonna get you cause we gotta purpose we gotta propose it down here' s a post dealing sex _________________________________________________________________________