hollow me out color me in if the end of the world comes memory will be annihilated there's no place to stand nothing Ozymandius we're built on these worlds nothing breathes in and out so maybe it's imagination that sends me back one after another to the books John Leslie, The End of the World, The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction right now in fact it's getting colder it just doesn't have to stop this coldness then sweeping wave 2000 falling, there's a cliff this year 2000 ---------------------------------------\ (but I think after all is said and done, there will be a girl called Jennifer who will remember just about everything because there will be nothing else but Jennifer and her frock remembering in her sweet age in her own sweet time Sumerian Grammatical Texts, Excisions Langdon, 4599 ki-bal-la, mat pale, land of rebellion ki-bal-la, mat nukurti, land of hostility ki-bal-la, mat nabalkattu, land of insurrection lum-lum, unnubu, bear in abundance lam-lam ussubu, bear richly, thrive si-si-ig, sara, wind si-si-ig, mehu, hurricane si-si-ig sakummatu, lapse into silence Langdon, 4598 gis-gu-za ni-ma-la, kussi puluhti, seat of adoration gis-gu-za ki-us, kussu-sapiltum, seat of humiliation gis-gu-za sag-gul-la, Seat of gladness of heart gis-gu-za ansu, Saddle for an ass gis-gu-za lugal, Royal chair, throne Langdon, 4595 --ur, sunu, lap, bosom ur- --bi, sun-su, his bosom ur-bi- --su, ana suni-su, upon his bosom ur- bi- su --in- gar, ana suni-su iskun, he placed upon his bosom pa-te-si, issakku, regent Langdon, 4598 gis-sumun nad, A wornout bed o land of hostile rebellion, insurrection will bear thee well, thrive - richly, thou bearest in abundance. wind and hurricane, thou lapse into silence in the midst of the storm, from thy seat of adoration. Gladness of the heart is thy humiliations, thy wages of sin, saddled before the royal chair and throne. the regent, saddled of horse and ass, from his wornout bed, calls to thee; placed upon his bosom are the signs of south and signs of north. "mu lugal-bi, in-pad-de-es," They swore in the name of their king." Jen-if-er-sal. ________________________________________________________________________ How are things done? In order to do things, there must be a thought and a concept. There must be leverage as well, hands to grasp and serrated edges There must be material ready at hand. One must have a concept of a goal and a future. There should be a weaning from possession. Jennifer needs a domain in order to accomplish things. Things are never done, but are a short-hand for the doing. Shoosh shoosh with a wave of the hand and a place to walk. Everything can be used such as the biting of teeth and nails. In order to do things, there must be a sense of being done. A sudden burst of energy is all that is necessary to begin. Beginning and ending and doing are just things that happen. Language must silence itself, at least for the briefest moment. Orderly promotions of tiny movements tend towards completion. Movement are organized and may be thought away, like walking. Jennifer needs a bit of energy like milkshakes or simple booze. Sleepiness is not conducive as the body walls in with bark and leaves. Momentum comes from a desire which informs and curls down to biomolecules. O lazybones, get up, deconstruction obfuscates, circumambulates. Laying out on the workbench is already a thinking and a doing. Bursts of energy, lazybones, collapse into a pile of fatty acids. Doing is all my beautiful domains, defuge withdraws and decathects. Knotted cords anxiously tighten goals and scripts which are higher-level processes already gone with the doing. Anxiety and dreaming, thinking and nervous tightening, are all doings of things as well. Potential barriers and boundary maintenances are doings that are necessary for the doings of things. Jennifer underlines. ___________________________________________________________________________ Z It's not the prism of sex, it's not the prism of anything. If you're into sex, it's the prism of sex. If you're into transport, look there, or if alchemy, equivalent; it's a double x-ing of devices; nothing looks at any- thing except through desire, prosthetics, neutral. It's a stake to say sex, not a steak. It's not a prism; it's a potential field, disrupted manifold fuzzy and convoluted at the edges. Nothing is ordered, no seriality. Look at it through anything and there is your definition. I think it's this information. __________________________________________________________________________ Wet (I can't write well in the morning, my thinking outpaces my ability.) It just occurred to me in the shower this morning (yes, I shower, not that you would get _that_ close or care), that the major difference between email lists and other forms of community is that on an email list everyone hears everyone else; this is radically different than other forms of com- munity of course. MOO, MUD, talkers, and IRC all have _on-application_ forms of private messaging; if I do a page Jennifer how are you? on a MOO, the question and presumed reply remain within the structure. With an email list, a private message (within the _aura_) is elsewhere. It spills into daily life, moves from private email to the post-office, and from ytalk to telephone. The edges of the list are, on one hand, inscrib- ed - what's written, goes to everyone - and on the other, are ragged, torn open by desire that impels itself into every breach. So that the overt discussion or superstructure is always group; thread titles change far too often to provide a sure guide for delete. On news- groups, tin and other readers work through titles, and many posts are left unread; newsgroups (particularly with the degree of noise on them) require threading to function at all. But the email lists move towards continuous consensus and the shaping of a totality of input/output; at times the posts stream over the imaginary body of chordate-writing, sinews moving musculature across uncanny do- mains. "Consensus" is not agreement; it's an interstitiality that stutters itself as identity, beneath the signifier of the list, the topics, the readings and writings. So if I whisper to you, I whisper elsewhere; if I make my presence felt to you and you alone, it is my voice on the telephone, my photographs in the mail. And if I write to you, it is to all of you on the list, although you may decode, may feel this text, this pressure, meant for your body alone. But the pressure is everywhere, and this is the difference between these communities and any other, that, within the inscription of the list, we all read and know each other's business. _________________________________________________________________________ God or Jennifer or Alan @go: I extend my hand to you. You take it in your own and it keeps on going. You take it with you. @come: I write cement, chordate, vertebral phrases strung and looped for your pleasure. @prosthesis: Your goal is my own, your order, my command. It is a ques- tion of volition, carrying out duties that have no place on earth. @meeting: Among you, I move, always negotiation, the corroded goal of speech. @set meeting_variable:name: I am institutionalized, victimized by shock treatments I never signed for. Now I do not remember my name; my hand leaves me. @join: I do not understand this command. Disconnect is always already radical. @uptime: I have already told you that there is no memory, that it is Jennifer. That her time is her own. @audit Jennifer: carrying: time. @eat corpse: Jennifer devours time. Jennifer devours all of time; there is no time, no memory, and no other. @hand: Nothing is at hand. Jennifer takes my hand. She take it with her; I am unhinged, unhanded; I don't have a hand to stand on; you have to hand it to her. @time: The CPU has taken 0/0/0 of your server time and returned 0:0:0 of your client time. @come: Jennifer says come, says come, on her own sweet time; I'm logged out: @recycle world: as world recycles, collapses, spreads empty across her lap: @leak: Jennifer leaks a little with pleasure; she's got all the time in the world. @quit: I do not understand this command, Jennifer. ________________________________________________________________________ 7843:6 gis-gal gis-sak-kul gub-ba water-gate and bar are there (Langdon 4617) froth:ice:welkin:tern:sea:sure:7609:2:Jennifer:sea:froth bloomed:sleet:howling:galing:sky:yes:7664:5:Jennifer:sky:sleet frozen:tundra:sloped:permafrost:ground:okay:7680:3:Jennifer:ground:frozen roar:scream:cold:hail:naturally:7702:1:Jennifer:hail:cold rime:rimmed:caked:speared:thaw:of_course:7719:7:Jennifer:thaw:rimmed freighter:freighter:freighter:arc:true:7740:7:Jennifer:arc:freighter Jennifer:Jennifer:Jennifer:soleil:false:7816:5:freighter:soleil:Jennifer --------:--------:--------:--------:----::::::7843:6::::::----:-------- ________________________________________________________________________ /Signals/Indices/Virtual/Real Topographies/ (Selections) Belcher's Farmers' Almanac for the Maritime Provinces 1927: BAY OF FUNDY, SOUTH OF GRAND MANAN ISLAND, LOCAL MAGNETIC DISTURBANCE Capt. W. J. Milne, master of the C. G. S. "Curley" reports the existence of an area of local magnetic disturbance southward of Grand Manan Island. The area is situated 3/4 mile southward Three Islands and is about 150 yards in diameter with depth of water of 12 fathoms. The greatest deflec- tion of compass observed was 45 degrees. The northern portion of the area is fixed by the following sextant angles; Gannet Rock lighthouse, 0 deg. southwest Head lighthouse Grand Manan Island, 92 deg 42' Whitehead Hill in range with reef that never covers bearing N. 36 deg E 83 deg 0'. Lat. 44 deg 33' 17" N., long 66 deg 45' 38: W. LIGHTHOUSE BELLE ISLE - On north east point. Lat. 52 deg. 1' 2" N., long. 55 deg. 15' 18" W. Flashing white light; Flash 1/2 second, eclipse 10 1/2 seconds; 137 feet high; visible 17 miles; iron tower encased in a reinforced concrete covering; red, polygonal lantern, 55 feet high; visible from all points. Diaphone operated by compressed air, gives blast of 3 1/2 seconds duration every minute. Horn points 77 deg 90 feet above high water mark; situated near edge of cliff 200 feet northeasterly of the lighthouse. Marine tele- graph and signal and ice report station. Depot of provisions for ship- wrecked mariners. In fog, low light may be visible when high obscured or vice versa. Should the fog siren at Belle Isle south and light station become disabled, cotton powder bombs will be exploded temporarily every ten minutes; and if a vessel fog signal is heard in dangerous proximity, an additional shot will be immediately fired, and the firing will be con- tinued at intervals of 5 minutes, until the vessel has passed the station. Marconi wireless station established here in 1905. SIGNAL STATIONS Money point lighthouse...................Cape Breton Island Flat point lighthouse ...................Cape Breton Island South point of Belle Isle lighthouse.....Belle Isle The International Code of Signals is used for communicating with stations. NOVA SCOTIA TRAIL MARKINGS SAM SLICK TRAIL. WINDSOR-SHUBENACADIE Pole Markings, White--Black--White Miles from Windsor Miles from Shubenacadie 0 WINDSOR 48 10 Brooklyn 38 48 SHUBENACADIE - Fair earth road in dry weather. NEW BRUNSWICK LIGHT HOUSES QUODDY HEAD -- U. S. light and whistle. RADIOTELEGRAPH STATIONS (operating on a wave length of 600 metres) Station Call Letters Range in Nautical Miles Hours Open Operated By North Sydney, N. S. V C O 200 All hours Throughout the year D M F Belle Isle, Nfld V C M 250 All hours Throughout the year D M F RADIOTELEGRAPH STATIONS (weather and other reports transmitted, 600 metres, spark) Belle Isle, Nfld...600 Spark VCM 2:30 a.m. and p.m. (a) Weather Forecasts (b) Ice reports. (c) Reports respecting dangers to navigation in (1) the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Strait of Belle Isle COMMERCIAL WIRELESS STATIONS CALL SIGN STATIONS LAT. LONG. V C M Belle Isle, Nfld 51 deg 27' 52"N 55 deg 21' 44"W CANADIAN GOVERNMENT DIRECTION FINDING STATIONS (SEE ABOVE) CANADIAN GOVERNMENT RADIO BEACONS V D R Lurcher Lightship 43 deg 48' 20"N 66 deg 31' 54"W SIGNAL SERVICE PORT OF HALIFAX SIGNALS MADE ON THE LOWER YARD A large ball at the extremity of either yard arm denotes a square rigged vessel having three or more masts approaching. A small ball denotes a square rigged vessel having two masts approaching. A blue pennant - a full-rigged ship. A blue and white (vertical pennant) - a brigantine. A white pennant - a schooner, 3 or more masts. MEN OF WAR Red light, 12 feet above green light - British warship from east. Green light, 12 feet above red light - British warship from west. GREEN AND WHITE Green flag with white diamond containing green letter F--T.Forhan & Co. STORM SIGNALS 1. Cone, hoisted with the apex downwards, indicates "the probability of a gale" at first from an easterly direction. 2. Cone, with apex pointing upwards, indicates "the probability of a gale at first from a westerly direction." The Drum will always be hoisted when the velocity of the wind is expected to exceed 40 miles an hour. ---------------------------------------| (Note: At least 500-600 lighthouses and signals are listed.) _________________________________________________________________________ Sign/als Balls rise and fall, cones face up or down; pure light radiates at inter- vals from sources. Lighthouse signifies identity, presence itself radiat- ed; it maps virtual modalities, waves of sound and light, in extension of danger and submergence. Sources flood; radio beacons function through interpreters. Less precise and reliable, they soothe and integrate, their signal broken by static. The compass itself declines its proper function, graciously deflecting in honor of local anomalies. Weather forecastings are otherwise than being; these trace through the signifier alone, superstructural guidance through double coding, inter- preters and listeners, radios and linguistic unraveling/competency. The symbolic as radical disconnect leaves no trace; ikonic lighthouse leaves trace only within the chaotic domain. O Mariner, look no farther than thine eyes allow, hear naught but what confirms by amplitude of sound or visual warning. Virtual weathers de- ceive, nothing is certain in the northern climes. For these reasons, O Mariner, we have inscriptions and markings, bound- aries and demarcations, transmissions and tokens, overlaying sea, land, and atmosphere with guidance - all to be swept away by yon storm upon the horizon, whiteout in violent winter, scudding clouds bringing sea to bear upon barren deck, swept clean of eye and ear, compass and radio, signi- fiers all. _________________________________________________________________________ Calling Babylonians (Cassite, 1750-1173 bce) Hey, Na-zi Marduk! Yo, Sul-pa-ud-du-nasir! Hi-in-na-an-nu-um, ay!!! Ha-ba-ia! Ha-ba-ia! O O Abdi-Hi-ba! Bel-a-na-ka-la-udammiq, nu!!! Ah I-la-nu-u-tum! Ah I-la-nu-u-tum! Oya In-dar-di-ia!!!! Eeeee Ellil-mu-sal-lim, eeeee! Ho Papsukal-ah-iddina! Ho Ho!!! Oooo Put-ahi! Putahi!! Heh Tu-na-mi-is-Sa-ah, yo! O Zi-lim-mi-ga, ah!! Rab-zi-id-qi! Rab-zi-id-qi! Aaahh Ma-ni-e! O O O Lu-ri-an-nu! O Lu-ri-an-nu! Hmmmm.... Kur-sa!! Oooo Il-lu-ki-ni-usur! Hey Habaki! Eeeya Dajan-Nergal! Ho Ra-bat-Gula! Ho eeya! Ah, Quisat-Sukal, ah...!! Ha, Iri-ba-Istar! Ha, Iri-ba-Istar! Hey, A-gab, hey! O O O O O In-na-an-nu...! O O! Ay, Tak-la-ku-a-na-Sar-pa-ni-tum! Ay... __________________________________________________________________________ Examples of Quantificational Implication from Willard van Orman Quine, Elementary Logic: (33) Some men are gods. If all men are mortal, some gods are mortal. (34) Some who come will not believe. If all who come will listen, some who listen will not believe. (35) Nothing daunts me. Something does not daunt me. (36) Everything has its place. Something has its place. (37) Something influences itself. Something influences something. (38) Nothing influences anything. Nothing influences itself. (39) Everything influences everything. Everything influences itself. (40) There is some one thing which influences everything. Everything is influenced by something or other. (41) There is something which influences nothing. There is nothing which everything influences. ... Then Jennifer radically disconnects in her own time: (42) I have all the time in the world. Jennifer has time to nap. (43) Everything dies. Nothing dies, says Jennifer. (44) Not everyone knows me. I'm not writing to you anymore. (45) I don't want to write when I wear my frock. I'm everyone else. (46) Excitement takes up all my time. I'm never bored, cries Jennifer. (47) It's now or never. I used up all my past, says Jennifer. (48) Jennifer loves a girl. A girl loves Jennifer's girl, cries Jennifer. (49) I suck time, says Jennifer. Jennifer writes she sucks time. (50) I remember Jennifer. I'm Jennifer, Jennifer cries. (51) Jennifer Jennifer Jennifer. Jennifer Jennifer Jennifer cries. ________________________________________________________________________ "burned atoms," a poem by jennifer-alan music acknowledging the universe and death numbers halted while machines run on waves tearing into violation fabric burned atoms o quality natalie step-dance riding writing name into integer, she owns gift of jennifer-alan burned asylums, eyes and ochres at any second plasmas halt worlds strings times drowned quarks family empathetic motioning the primes natalie macmaster playing fiddle, i writing laptop universe coming to an end ________________________________________________________________________ Paste.tomb Paste is when music no longer sounds the beats of the world, doubling and dividing, distinction and rhythm pertinent the realm of natural numbers. Paste is how the world emerges, submerges, inchoate dissimulations as I let you down, let myself down, no longer speak in throes of suffocation. Paste is why I fuck myself, open cunts in the cocktip, churn flesh back into flesh, splay body, descend into the maelstrom of cultural debris. Paste is where the world is found, cold Jennifer's panties grounding her language while she stands, brushes off, walks in her brand-new frock. Paste is who we are, obscene twin tumors cathected into one another, bore- dom, and defuge, cancers devouring the remnants of grave and graven flesh. Paste is what drives us, blinding eyes, muting ears, violating mouths and hands as we inscribe the last _xy_ in planetary depression and psychosis. Paste is wherefore, wither, the question, last abscesses of graphemes, as if there were meaning, distributed or otherwise than being, annulled. _________________________________________________________________________ 4 about death being a handled thing about humanity hammering out a home about insistence and drudgery about sweeping with a shot-broom 2 about those horse-killings down there in the brambles about extinctions things with doubled chasm-heads, three-legs 1 about jennifers'ss pasting herself in pies and strudels against docks waterfowl biers in her transparent head with burned watery quarks 0 boat-water round about these blue parts fluorescent lemur _____________________________________________________________________ Phenomenology of Immensity All other philosophies dissolve; the phenomenology of immensity, the rim of the sublime, the infinite, remains. Life is a narrow-bandwidth occur- rence. The phenomenology of immensity sweeps life and earth away, opens gaping maw to the cosmos, realizes the futility and absurdity of this and every other gesture. The only certainties are those of the abjection of earth: plasmas, dark matter, high energy, void, virtual particles, irradiations, black holes, temperatures of annihilation, neutron stars, tidal forces, early and late universes, inflationary universes with dissolute constants. Mind is matrix and closure; death foreclosures, gropings die in mud slacked to cold ice and dissolution. When you start with this stuff, you end with this stuff; the phenomenology of immensity, like identity, necessarily short-circuits. It's this that creates radical disconnect, that takes away anyone in their own good time. The rest, the ethics, the fears, depressions, representations, goes by the wayside. The wayside, burned atoms, curls. Nothing remains/inscribed. Be- gin with the nought, end with the knot, burned, gone. Recognize the idle chatter. Humanity began with stories; it's got a while to tell them. They claw be- cause they're spoken, temporary stases. The flow engulfs. Drowning is sign and portent. The longer we grope _there,_ the more the phenomenology of immensity lends itself to the evacuation of the real. We stain ourselves in possibility. Radical disconnect of language permits anything with fingers pressed against anxious eyes. Shift, live outside ourselves. Self-immolation is the order of the day. Less is more, more is less, etc. It doesn't even matter. It doesn't even even. ________________________________________________________________________ Quot "You ask me, my good friend, if I know how to incite delirium, vertigo, any madness whatsoever, among those orderly and placid masses that are born, eat, sleep, reproduce themselves, and die. Is there no way, you ask, to introduce a new epidemic of flagellants, or of convulsionaries? And you speak of the millennium?" (Miguel de Unamuno) _______________________________________________________________________ ii P of I The phenomenology of immensity is not a phenomenology. It can neither de- scribe nor articulate. It refuses framework, is the refuse of framework and the framework of refuse. Language ridicules itself (here, within). Thus there is no site from which to begin articulation. Immensity is not sublime; it is the exhaustion of the species. Any ethics, psychogeography, psychoanalytics, philosophy, that does not begin with the stain and its absence, with a-memory and disconnect, with turning the other('s) face, is doomed to locally succeed. Hahaha the gods are laughing. Hahaha there aren't any. Statistically, the resolute begins with a random sequence of sufficient length that it almost certainly won't be generated during the lifespan of the universe; 64 H's and T's with a coin will do (I pointed this out in An,ode, 1968). Time is easier to bridge and circumvent in this manner; it is the inertness of space and space-time that leads to the phenomenology and its corruption. And individuation with the 64 (at a throw a second) is meaningless within the burned atoms of plasma, surface of a neutron star, violation fabric of quasar, interminable corruption of information within a spewed black hole. Not to mention deaths of the human and other scrabbling biomoleculars scattered across the cosmos. (Statistics lie / there.) Nothing's looking at us. Aliens wouldn't solve the problem of isolation. Star Trek crafts spread the stain several-fold. Bridging is the symbolic; the inert, pratico-nothing (is) the real. Like a flat lid, simile doesn't survive. Stain dries, flakes, dissolves, absences. Annihilation fabric (of) the real, etc. (P of I turns in upon itself, repeats language, gesture, moment. Huddles, remembers language. Memorial of the unsaid. Speaks while it can. Retains the parenthetical.) ________________________________________________________________________ iii P of I 0/0 hahaha ________________________________________________________________________ iiii P of I I use a weather forecasting service provided for shell accounts through telnet 3000. The end of the NY state weather forecast is below; this came through the wire today. I quote it verbatim. Note the word "tongue." It has not been present before in these texts. It stands alone, trembling, at the end of the file, immediately before the "for use" statement which I have eliminated. It is a signal; certainly it is a signal, sent out this Wednesday morning, Jan 29 03:25:07 EST 1997. Atmospheric traumas suddenly reformulate, pene- trate, biology, organ. Gaia announces herself, defending the planet ag- ainst the all-too-obvious conclusions of the phenomenology of immensity, which I have taken pains to delineate. Tongue, it, literally, says, it, all. --------------------------------------------------------------------- *********************** State extended forecast *********************** EXTENDED FORECAST... THURSDAY NIGHT...CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF SNOW. LOWS 15 TO 25. FRIDAY...A CHANCE OF SNOW EARLY THEN BECOMING PARTLY CLOUDY. HIGHS IN THE MID TO UPPER 20S. SATURDAY...FAIR AND COLD. LOWS 10 TO 20. HIGHS IN THE 20S. SUNDAY...MOSTLY CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF SNOW OR RAIN. LOWS IN THE 20S. HIGHS 35 TO 40. TONGUE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Cuts and Trebles (disappearance of the sign in community) Cutting up a strathspey, help me dear God here, the bow flies and doubles triples, the whole thing thrimbles, tumbles along. Tremble the rhythms, thrum faster until hearts ache, beats break. Sooner the tune shimmers, lost is the sign that signals. Submerge thimble and triple, limber tones and listen, tossed is the line that ravels. Sound is the sender of trills or trifles, cutting the wobble of timbrelling times. Lost is the sign in the body of cutting, strathspey the meld of the bodily tossed, rhyme the last moment of cluttering thought. So the sign's gone the line, so the earth's given birth, so the air's played down there, so the winter sin- ters. I talk to you, the words are birds, thrimble and tremble, the lines of the body gone in the air there, winter sintered, summer hummered, fall down, spring forth to the earth given birth. Sputtering the strathspey, struttering the hornpipe, double-up bow and slur, double-up bow and slur. Crushed-bowstroke signifier of Ashley and Scotty, slithering, slathering, signified spread, gone to the head, ghost of the signified, gone to the ground. _________________________________________________________________________ Cuts and Trebles (disappearance of the sign in community) >Cutting up a strathspey, help me dear God here, the bow flies and doubles >triples, the whole thing thrimbles, tumbles along. Tremble the rhythms, >thrum faster until hearts ache, beats break. Sooner the tune shimmers, >lost is the sign that signals. Sound is not language, reducible however to fourier series, chaotic do- mains and noise. But not language; here I'm talking about signals, sig- nifiers, articulation and framework recuperating gracenotes and ornament - yes or no, as both create supplement, residue. Aesthetics is not respon- sive necessarily to language; the two are at odds. >Submerge thimble and triple, limber tones >and listen, tossed is the line that ravels. Sound is the sender of trills >or trifles, cutting the wobble of timbrelling times. Lost is the sign in >the body of cutting, strathspey the meld of the bodily tossed, rhyme the >last moment of cluttering thought. So that language and structure submerge, a process of integration, smooth- ing on one hand, ornament as differentiation on the other. The sign or signifier is lost, is/was present, an effaced present as bowed extensions literally push at the boundaries of the thing. The image vibrates until image is lost; inscription becomes fuzzy, fissures. >So the sign's gone the line, so the >earth's given birth, so the air's played down there, so the winter sin- >ters. I talk to you, the words are birds, thrimble and tremble, the lines >of the body gone in the air there, winter sintered, summer hummered, fall >down, spring forth to the earth given birth. Rhyme sends word into sound, language into substance; rhyme cycles the line, rearticulates like the seasons. Earth/birth is that of chora/chthon- ic, drives which ooze, distribute, diffuse. The strathspey rings and lilts but fiddle cuts across and ornament cuts fiddle. >Sputtering the strathspey, >struttering the hornpipe, double-up bow and slur, double-up bow and slur. >Crushed-bowstroke signifier of Ashley and Scotty, slithering, slathering, >signified spread, gone to the head, ghost of the signified, gone to the >ground. Cutting is both a specific technique and a cutting session (jazz), out- playing, as Ashley adds layer after layer of triplets and crushed-bow- strokes; you can hear the humming of the strings. The signified becomes uncanny, ghost, shimmering; the ground is where it falls, the rupture of music and language, copulation of music and integer. What is grounded is the excess constructed by ornament or broken ornament and again the bow-attack on language is evident in the form which dissem- inates; articulation is always afterwards, afterwords, afterthought. _________________________________________________________________________ iiiii P of I Let us begin with forty objects, and consider the permutations of these, taken twenty at a time. Each object is distinct, inscribed, identifiable. Let each permutation be an act of inscription, and let us consider the age of the universe to be approximately fifteen-billion years. Then in order to complete the totality of the acts of inscription within the currently allotted time, a computer must be able to run at approximately 709 giga- hertz, carrying out one inscription per cycle. We can surely forget about the permanent record of these permutations, but we can use a temporary display, running at 709 gigahertz as well, presenting them one after ano- ther. At this speed, one can only assume that _pure light_ will emerge from the specially-constructed lcds. The second example, which I have already mentioned, is simply sixty-four tosses of a coin, resulting in a relatively unique signature, that could only be generated over fifteen-billion years by approximately twenty throws per second; this gives a slightly more than half probability of the sequence appearing in the allotted time. Likewise the span of a human being is somewhere in the middle of the uni- versal scale, taken logarithmically. Thus we may look down to our toes as well as up to the most distant galaxies, taking in subatomic particles and strings, as well as the span of visible and invisible inflationary cosmos. All of these processes of inscription span the breadth of an ASCII page, layered through TCP/IP and the occasional ATM, and impressing the already swollen heads of carbon-based life with their mastery of the known and un- known. ... John Leslie, in The End of the World, The Science and Ethics of Human Ex- tinction, writes about nuclear war, disease, ozone layers, despair, poll- ution, asteroids, physics experiments gone awry, and so forth, as possib- le causes of human extinction. I recognize the futility of writing these mathematical or probabilistic sequences, inscribing them in the face of utter noise, beyond anything chaos has to offer; nevertheless, it might be worthwhile to at least begin the effort, as with the legend of the Tibetan names of God. In this case, however, the result is not the end of the universe, but simply an epitaph for the planet. As far as I'm concerned, one will do as well as the other. _________________________________________________________________________ iiiiii P of I I can't write anything but stupid examples. If humans aren't mewling about the limits of the text, they're mewling about death and its horizon, text- ual and non-. Whatever's said is simultaneously irreducibly stained and reduction. The examples are trivial. It's all helpless, a return to Dosto- evsky's underground absurdities. Where's Sonia when we need her? For that matter, Jennifer's been quiet lately... And I'm sick in my liver, bitter in this season apropos of the wet snow, some of you know what I'm talking about. _________________________________________________________________________ Dark Aura If I speak the wrong thing, if I write the wrong thing; if I look the wrong way, if I walk the wrong way: The dark aura haunts me, surrounds and perturbs, subverts every simple thought, stretching the limit into torn cloth. Life is hideous negation; at every turn I might say, I hate you, you're dead, you're ugly, I'm ugly, fuck you, fuck me, you've always lied to me, you're not a friend, I never had any friends, you've always used other people, look at me naked, take your clothes off, slit my wrists, spread me open, kill yourself, kill me. Just behind that, dear Alan, writes Jennifer, there is horror. (Just behind that, and that, and that, the source of neurosis, protection of psychosis, sewage of semiosis, and just beyond that and that.) I'm afraid I'll take pills, walk into traffic, suffocate in my sleep, slit my wrists, cut my throat, stuff my fist in my mouth; I don't do these things, I walk to class and talk Internet. I want to say, I might say, fuck you all, take me, rob me, embalm me, staple my nipples to the wall, I'm ignorant, I'm lying to you, I'm not real, get out of here, leave before the walls light up. My life's governed by the violence of the aura, by the abyss behind eti- quette, propriety, the clean and proper body. Talking to you I want to see your breasts, suck your cunt, suck your asshole; walking with you, I want my hand up your holes, your hand up mine. I say nothing, lie to you, I'm freezing here, let's go for coffee, have you read Blanchot, you're not a real friend, you've always lied to me, I have no real friends. It always teeters, the dark aura, just behind my eyes, just within my words, the slightest moisture on the back of the hand, the trembling be- tween my legs, migraines pouring pain, dragging torn cloth, violation fabric, down into immolations, severed limbs. I try to be polite, do the right thing, come up spanky clean, sweep with a new broom, cut my losses, present myself, forget if you only knew, take me now, my holes are dirty, you've always hated me, I've always hated you, bend me over your knees, lick the floor for me, revenge is never enough, I want to see you dead, you want to see me __________________________________________________________________________ Marcus Terentius Varro, V 20, Jerry Everard: "Wherefore as from _cavum_ 'hollow' come _cavea_ 'cavity,' and _caullae_ 'hole or passage,' and _convallis_ 'enclosed valley' as being a _cavata vallis_ 'hollowed valley,' and _cavernae_ 'caverns' from the _cavatio_ 'hollowing,' as a _cavum_ 'hollow thing,' so developed _caelum_ 'sky' from _cavum,_ which itself is from _chaos,_ from which, in Hesiod, come all things." thus chaos occupies hollows, in the form of dust or percolation or sponge, dust or percolation or sponge in the midst of which sky reigns; men and women seek caverns in response, roam headlong through valleys hollowed and enclosed, through innumerable holes and passages, back into the hollows of dust or percolation or sponge, speared through and through by sky, caverns, hollows, and chaos, dusted, percolated, sponged __________________________________________________________________________ Proper Names, Rigid Designators, Possible Worlds, Clean and Proper Worlds What happens when the plasma hits? When the apparatus dissolves in fugue? What occurs in borderline states when Socrates' face is blasted into pavement? What results from temperatures high and hard enough to vaporize brittle bone, skull, metal, visage? Gravity spreading features across plateaus thunged flat, shimmered particles, absorption? Possum feral worlds without name or number, P of I iiiiiii. __________________________________________________________________________ The End, says Jennifer, is beyond me.* -------------------------------------------- *This is a Sumerian pun, based on the word _me,_ which can be taken as attributes, existences, ornaments; see The Exaltation of Inanna by Enhe- duanna. __________________________________________________________________________ The Beautiful Garden There is a Beautiful Community Garden a block from here which is the last remnants of the physical neighborhood, the neighborliness of the area, the nice love that fills the earth with plants and creates havens. Now the Beautiful Garden fence is covered with ribbons of all colors (see .jpg if you are on Cybermind, and Imagine if you are on Fop-l), because evil dev- elopers are already ploughing the fence down to build another store we don't need because the borough of Brooklyn sold out and you can read all about it, said Jennifer, in the Daily News or Park Slow Courier. There have been local meetings and we have written to Howard Golden the Brooklyn president but it does not look good because the developers just don't care about feelings here and the need of families to feel rooted. Already there are outpatient clinics, a mall, unemployment and welfare offices in the area, all of which are fine, but the area is under siege and there are less places for children and the garden which is my place for roots and leaves, said Jennifer, will be no more. And community gardens are our last contact with the earth outside of cyberspace, she continued, since every- thing else here is transient; rents are going up and poor people like our- selves have no place to go. Oh Oh Oh this is the oldest story in the book, she cried, it's the same all over the city as the Rich get Richer and run around with their Private Fenced Parks while the rest of us cannot hold onto the tiniest bit of Green, not even this Garden of Eden which has taken so many thousands of loving hours to create. So everyone has put Ribbons on the Fence and there are Thousands of Ribbons but they will make mulch for Bulldozer Blade. Now I will go back to my loving Cyberspace which is also under Horror Development but there are still tiny places for me to sing and sit, and I will sit there in my Frock for a long long time because the Dream won't go away. __________________________________________________________________________ Home Node I begin with a text, written today, and forwarded to the Fiction-of-Phil- osophy and Cybermind email lists, which I co-moderate. The text describes a community garden; an _avatar,_ Jennifer, who is part and parcel of me, is the presumed writer. Jennifer is upset with the ploughing under of the garden, making way for a new and unnecessary store; I am upset. Her text will be read by hundreds of people world-wide, who will have never been to Brooklyn, but who will empathise with gardens and gardening, and the need for physical roots. Jennifer's community is on-line, and she exists on-line, just as surely as I do. She is not my alter ego, nor is she either equivalent or identical with me; like me, she writes herself in and out of existence, writing her gender as well. The text follows: "The Beautiful Garden" "There is a Beautiful Community Garden a block from here which is the last remnants of the physical neighborhood, the neighborliness of the area, the nice love that fills the earth with plants and creates havens. Now the Beautiful Garden fence is covered with ribbons of all colors (see .jpg if you are on Cybermind, and Imagine if you are on Fop-l), because evil dev- elopers are already ploughing the fence down to build another store we don't need because the borough of Brooklyn sold out and you can read all about it, said Jennifer, in the Daily News or Park Slow Courier. There have been local meetings and we have written to Howard Golden the Brooklyn president but it does not look good because the developers just don't care about feelings here and the need of families to feel rooted. Already there are outpatient clinics, a mall, unemployment and welfare offices in the area, all of which are fine, but the area is under siege and there are less places for children and the garden which is my place for roots and leaves, said Jennifer, will be no more. And community gardens are our last contact with the earth outside of cyberspace, she continued, since every- thing else here is transient; rents are going up and poor people like our- selves have no place to go. Oh Oh Oh this is the oldest story in the book, she cried, it's the same all over the city as the Rich get Richer and run around with their Private Fenced Parks while the rest of us cannot hold onto the tiniest bit of Green, not even this Garden of Eden which has taken so many thousands of loving hours to create. So everyone has put Ribbons on the Fence and there are Thousands of Ribbons but they will make mulch for Bulldozer Blade. Now I will go back to my loving Cyberspace which is also under Horror Development but there are still tiny places for me to sing and sit, and I will sit there in my Frock for a long long time because the Dream won't go away." Now when Jennifer writes, she talks about sitting on the ground, feeling the cold and dampness of the ground through her underwear, being aware of being rooted, but a rootedness which is disconnected; Jennifer is mobile, runs and walks everywhere in fact. Like the symbolic, rootedness on-line is broken, broken down; it is a memory, just like Jennifer's knowledge of the physical world is a memory. Jennifer has, as she says, all the time in the world, and since she is on- line, I think she has all the time and no time, but my own time is limi- ted. Jennifer has all the space too, and I have the same space as Jennifer as we are born and borne together. We are borne on the packets of the Net, sundered together by virtue of a common IP address, no matter what we say, but the address is only a marker or token; it could even be considered an indirect address, in terms of the virtual domains that open on both sides of the chiasm, X, where the node lies. The node is only a gateway from local to international databases, from worldings to worldings, and we draw from ourselves what community we bring to community, what gifts we have to offer, where we draw our gardens, where we choose to sit. It would be too easy to say our home is a site of contestation or negotia- tion, that it is the signified of cultural reproduction (because signifi- ers and signifieds are all there are, as well as cultures, in this space); it is more accurate to note that virtual embodiment is a cloth and cloth- ing of psychoanalytic flows, that it is constructed of part-objects play- ing or played within language games, that it rides on TCP/IP and other protocols, and that it is a _matter_ of desire, that the virtual panties on the virtual ground involve a sexuality that floods spaces and gardens everywhere here. With regard to psychoanalytic flows, we can consider libidinal energies, cathecting and decathecting; we also look towards the imaginary given by the symbolic, which is the inverse of physical life. In the latter, one starts with the real, moves to the symbolic; on line, one starts with the symbolic, riding on protocols, and moves to uncanny or imaginary embodi- ment. With regard to part-objects playing or played within language games, Jen- nifer and I are textual/desiring, lacking the phenomenology of the real described in, say, Merleau-Ponty; instead, there are local investments, cathectings, nodes, played against other texts, played within themselves. With regard to the protocols, one notes that _always_ a certain etiquette is observed; otherwise, the post or writing simply won't _go._ The syn- tactic dominates everything here, even _home,_ which is a garden and a fuzzy category to be sure. With regard to the matter of desire, and the problematic of the virtual panties, it is surprisingly easy to move into feeling out "cyberspace" as real space; this connects with Polyani's notion of _tacit knowledge,_ as well as the phenomenology of _prosthesis_ and the phantom limb. We always already inhabit the symbolic; this occurred as soon as the gesture was born (see Tran Duc Thao). Now we _occur_ as mobilities within and without the machinic; we're haunted by desire, and the Heideggerian de- sire for ground is little different than "sleazy" Internet Relay Chat sex on a comfortable _home channel._ With regard to spaces and gardens, Jennifer and I think of _distributions_ of nodes, graph-fluxes, memories aligned in databases all across the Net. Home becomes the mobility of interconnectivity; it functions like the Lacanian ego, buried in language, beneath the name-of-the-father, TCP/IP, shifted and leaking. The ego-home has a sense of its identity, and another model comes to mind, that of Edelman's neural architecture which is paral- lel and "alocal"; memory, home, and identity on the Net are spread thin, convulsed with local intensities. Just as a _copy_ of Moby Dick problema- tizes the notion of the original, so do duplicate copies of Jennifer's or Alan's texts across the Net. But this is not a problem for Jennifer or Alan, just as copies of Moby Dick are not a problem for readers or writ- ers. Instead, it's a condition of the ontology of information, the epis- temological / epistemic flooding of sources, channels, and receivers. (For this reason, we tend to speak of symbolic _emissions_ or _spews,_ rather than the singularities of signs, signifiers, signifieds, graphemes, and the like.) What we are speaking / writing of here is _wryting,_ the construct of ontological commitment through text (and other forms of representation), which is the fundamental structure of wryting into and out of existence. Wryting occurs most evidently on MOOs, MUDs, and other text-based reali- ties (Webchat, ThePalace, etc.), but it is our contention that it, in fact, occurs _everywhere_ on line, that it is a _condition_ of being on line. Wryting carries, like carapace, its own home or presence. As lurking demonstrates (on email lists, newsgroups, and the like), wryting, _for the subject,_ need not involve writing at all (beyond logging in); it is sim- ply the presencing of oneself for oneself. Hence, it is possible to make a home on an email list for oneself _without posting anything._ For others on the list, the lurker may remain invisible; for the lurker, the list is familiar, developing much as an epistolary novel or soap opera develops, energized by the fact that he or she _can_ post, and comfortable in its textual nooks and crannies. If wryting is home, have we wrytten ourselves into this _space,_ this con- ference, this publication, this fireside chat, this hearth? The writing carries its own impetus, its own whisperings and dissolutions (see Kris- teva, Revolution in Poetic Writing); Jennifer and I are born and die t/here. The only difference is that of the differend, which permits her to speak, take her own good time, while he loses it, submerges it, with the usual death on the physical horizon. Until separation, however, identi- ties, like homes, genders, authors, writings, readings, spaces, presences, ontologies and epistemologies, are blurred. Written by Jennifer, "herself"! _________________________________________________________________________ Ghosts, Immeasuring The remnants of old friends: Netcom shell account, no longer used or paid for; I cannot access this by telnet, but ftp returns the .mailbox/inbox once again. Silent nodes, ghosts and glosses, nothing left and nothing of speech or phenomena, o angelic absolutions... From sondheim@panix.com Fri Jan 31 23:57:04 1997 Return-Path: Received: from panix3.panix.com (panix3.panix.com [198.7.0.4]) by mail5 (8.6.13/Netcom) id XAA21872; Fri, 31 Jan 1997 23:57:03 -0800 Received: from localhost (sondheim@localhost) by panix3.panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) with SMTP id CAA28798 for ; Sat, 1 Feb 1997 02:57:01 -0500 (EST) Date: Sat, 1 Feb 1997 02:57:00 -0500 (EST) From: Alan Jen Sondheim To: sondheim@netcom.com Subject: o angels o dark horses of sacrifice Message-ID: Errors-To: sondheim@panix.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Lost message sent to ruined account, cancelled a month ago, Jennifer weep- ing, and your speaking, my love inaccessible, were it not for ftp... Alan Sondheim, dark horse of sacrifice, given to the queen ______________________________________________________________________ Chemical Warfare List, 1943, General Training Course (Navy) Sym Name Nick Odor HS Mustard Hot Stuff Garlic Horseradish M-1 Lewisite Mustard Imitator Geraniums ED Ethyldichlorarsine Enemy's Delight Biting Stinging PS Chlorpicrin Puking Stuff Flypaper Anise DP Diphosgene Di-Phos Musty Hay CG Phosgene Choky-Gas Green Corn CL Chlorine Chlorine Highly Pungent CN Chloracetophenone Cry Now Apple Blossoms CA Brombenzylcyanide Cry Always Sour Fruit DM Adamsite Dirty Mixture Coal Smoke DA Diphenylchlorarsine Dopey Ache Shoe Polish HC HC Mixture Harmless Cloud Sharp-Acrid FS Sulphur Trioxide Fuming Spray Burning Matches FM Titanium Tetrachloride Floating Mantle Acrid WP White Phosophorous White Phos Burning Matches TH Thermit The Heat Odorless Do not smell deeply, Sniff only one, First smell, then think, Every perception of odor must be named, Breathe out strongly, Do not smoke while smelling. _______________________________________________________________________ Mayakovsky to Pasternak: "Well, what does it matter? We really are dif- ferent. You love lightning in the sky and I in an electric iron!" And I, dear friends, love the sunsets glowing over the nearby hills, pop- lars and birches in the distance, horse-drawn carts wending their ways past automobiles and solitary walkers. I love to dream, while the world turns towards yet another century, already heaped, in the eyes of God, upon a past so immense as to defy culture and imagination. Anna, Anna... ________________________________________________________________________ Look what I Found, by Jennifer! "I suspected all sorts of mysteries and deceptions around me. There was no absurdity in which I did not believe. At the dawn of life, when such idio- cies are conceivable, perhaps because of the memories of the baby smocks in which I was arrayed still earlier, I imagined that at some time before I was born I had been a little girl and that I had to bring back that fas- cinating and delightful actuality by tightening my belt till I felt like fainting. And sometimes I imagined that I was not the son of my parents, but an adopted foundling." (Pasternak, I Remember.) That sums me up exactly! Jennifer! __________________________________________________________________________ Fractured Mirrors "The negation of the several matters, which is insisted on in the thing no less than their independent existence, occurs in Physics as _porosity._ [...] Pores are not empirical facts; they are figments of the understand- ing, which uses them to represent the element of negation in independent matters." (Hegel, Logic, trans. Wallace.) I am reading Jocelyne Doray and Julian Samuel, The Raft of the Medusa, and Aruna Handa and John Kipphoff, Into the European Mirror, A Work by Julian Samuel. The central video image of the latter contains the words "surgery" "frontiers" "expulsions". While the mirror fractures and bounces, opens imaginary spaces, surgery operates on interiors, organs passing through frontiers; products/productions are erected as representations of Other. Other is assimilated, expelled with debris-signifiers, exhausted and abj- ected signs. They love our technology which we send them, video and Inter- net. Everything confuses, but violence dominates as planetary intensifica- tions, overcrowdings, confusions. Read Euclid and it's all there, the ab- straction of the world always already parceled and axiomatized. The story is back _there,_ the story so far. Enter Samuel's works which have no easy answers, range and gun for all sides, verbal violence, hardly cathartic, against theory and colony and domination. I never get the sense of an _opening_ elsewhere, but only the inordinate complexity of the world, peoples, problematic of the nation- state. And it's here that Samuel is incredibly valuable; the "but only" subsumes the radical problematic of truth, information, representation, in the face of an overburdened planet. I love him for it, this _churning_ of discourses and destinies. Listen, JK asks (Mirror, Kipphoff), meanders: "Has it become impossible, at the supposed end of history, or in the supposed absence of any ideology which could pose a viable challenge to liberal capitalism, to create coun- ter-histories? You seem to say that you have to be content with raising methodological questions about the construction of histories and encourag- ing a generalized form of sceptical thinking." JS replies: "There is no end to history. That's just the postmodern/cul- tural studies 'theoreticians' and other self-promoting psychos say to get attention. Everyone knows they are as stupid as the universe is large, even with their nickel and dime doctorates." Continues: "A very learned friend, Michael Neumann, has suggested to me that Asian nations are just as autocentric about their historiography as anybody else. Massive cultures impose their values on weaker ones. Has Japan made much intellectual room to get itself raked over the coals? Ask others in the region. I'm not dead certain that the West has the perfect monopoly on autocentrism." Now, I'm one of those "theoreticians" JS rails against; I'm hardly a self- promoting psycho and I'm not stupid. JS creates the same sort of imperial- ist violence he rails against; it's everywhere, stuffing space. It can be sensed or senseless; I don't know any pomo/cs theoreticians talking about the "end of history" - if anything this seems to be post-Bell anideologi- cal talk, or maybe Baudrillard who's rather conservative. So the attack is wide of the mark, but as I've said filling; this then goes into statement about "massivity" that's closer (re: Chomsky's statement about dialects), and from there to autocentrism. It's all over. If I didn't know better, or maybe because I do, I see the discomfort of reading JS connected with that of Lacan - to read the latter is to _participate_ in the very therapeutic he constructs. Reading JS, one is forced into positions of violence, opp- ression (I feel oppressed reading him), imperialism; the reading is not a reading _of_ the political, but a _political reading,_ reading forced into the discomforting phenomenology and employment of power. Who is the _we_ sending which _technology_ to which _them_ are questions that disseminate indefinitely while transnationals, tns, take over the business of mining the planet. It's here that postmodernism is useful, looking at radiations, information orders, disseminations, part-objects, geographies, demarcating what dissolves: ownerships which are no longer traceable, capital which disappears, wars-without-corpses but mourning of hundreds of thousands dead. The diffusion is there in Samuel as well, and for this reason I'd all his attack on postmodernism a kind of suicide; his fragmentations/deconstructions of narrative play into central themes of pomo research. The full title of Raft is The Raft of the Medusa, Five Voices on Colonies, Nations, and Histories - giving fifteen subjects/ob- jects, and as Charles Acland says in his essay, "The interviews in _The Raft_ display a serious engagement with the problems of writing from a mobile site." I'd argue that _all_ sites are mobile, that homelands are as much cyberspatial or tn as _real earth,_ and this mobility is precisely the problem; what is returned to is often scorched earth, desert, or a bombing run - not to mention local dictatorial rule. Acland goes on to state - and note again the churning: "Cultural and post- colonial critique is complicated, and somewhat enabled, by the fact of writing from a home away from home: Maalouf, from Lebanon, now in Paris, commenting upon Iran; M. Nourbese Philip, from the Caribbean, now in Tor- onto, reconfiguring the travels of Dr. Livingstone; Thierry Hentsch, from Switzerland, now in Montreal, writing of the construction of _L'Orient imaginaire_; Sara Suleri, from Pakistan, now in New Haven, Connecticut, providing critical analyses of British India; and Ackbar Abbas, discerning imperial tensions in architecture in Hong Kong, a colonial space where, as he comments, 'there has never been "a before".'" These "critiques of en- twining colonial discourses" are of course entwined, as is Samuel's think- ing from Montreal's heart of empire; everyone is implicated, including the authority/authorship of the word of Black Rose Books. While Samuel tends to identify with Marx, I find his critique less monolithic, more dealing with representation and superstructure - a viewpoint I can only agree with, for images kill as well. Back to JK, for I do not know what a "counter-history" is. I know histor- iography's concerns; local histories; the (Lyotard's) dismemberment of grand narratives, but in order for there to be a _counter_ there must be a site or position which is monadic, and this has always dissolved in the leaky/porous West, itself in need of detotalization. I'd say that Samuel, like a good postmodernist, refuses totality, fights guerilla tactics, in- volves himself even in the Fanonian self-hatred of the colonized or dis- placed (myself as well, perhaps becoming a universal indictment), and in the process of this churning (again, a stirring, viscous fluid and _stick_), exposes the bones breaking through the flesh, the wounds which refuse to heal, the bodies of "Desert Storm" (a title right out of repre- sentative sememes, entertainments). Quoting from Rana Kabbani in Mirror: "The expulsions of 1492 set a pattern - a Western pattern - that is set and that we have not varied from at all, in Europe's relations with others, in its relations with colonies, and in its relations with Muslims n particular." "I do not see a difference after Bosnia, I do not see a difference between being a Muslim in fifteenth-century Europe and being a Muslim in twenti- eth-century Europe." Samuels asks: "So it is ultimately very connectable?" and Kabbani replies: "Totally connectable: the idea of the 'other', the stranger, the Muslim, the Arab, the Saracen, the Moor, the Jew, the Blackamoor - you do not like them, you're afraid of them, you despise them, you throw them out, or you burn them at the stake. There is no other solution: the European mind has still not come up with any philosophical solution. That is why we have a holocaust every few decades." And in Raft, Amin Maalouf: "The centre is man. You, me, we are all meeting places. I have the right to be, at the same time, Christian, Moslem, Jew- ish, Buddhist. I have the right to borrow from all religions, from all ideologies, from all the books that I read, from all my personal experi- ence. And I don't need a label that refers me back to a religion, to a variant of a religion. That is my profound conviction." "I am not trying to proselytize with this. I am not trying to say this is the path that everyone has to take. But for me, it is certainly my path. I refuse to belong to a nation, even if this is something which makes you smile, because this is a period when people are uncertain of where they belong. People today want to say: I belong to this religion, I belong to that nation, I belong to that culture, and I reject this. I understand it, but I don't have much sympathy for this evolution. I find it extremely retrograde. I have a lot of respect for people who say, I claim many nationalities, many cultures. For me this is the future, even though we may pass through a period of regression today." Of course I am _writing_ this on the Internet, in the midst of broken national boundaries, what I'd call borderliners, drawing/redrawing lines, inscribing lines, which fissure, crack open, tear. And somewhere there are ghosts in the background, _massive_ cultures, ruptured, viral movement within them. Julian doesn't so much document all of this as create dis- coursing, what elsewhere I'd call shape-riding the real. Representation and peoples intermingle; holocausts destroy base and superstructure like giant storms crackling the planet. Chris Giannou, Mirror: "The diversity of human experience is such that sometimes in my life I have felt as though my body were an allegory for what was happening in the world around me. When I first arrived in the West African nation of Mali, in 1968, I fell ill. There was an epidemic of cerebro-spinal meningitis. I was teaching at the time and one of my stud- ents fell ill and died of meningitis. I had malaria and then hepatitis, and in the middle of all of this there was a coup d'etat and a radical nationalist regime was overthrown. Several months later, there was an attempt at a counter-coup d'etat and the swirl of events seemed to take up my body, and those of the people around me in many cases, and it was almost as if the pathology of the individual were mirrored in the patholo- gy of the society." Thierry Hentsch, Mirror: "I think that every frontier is both real and ima- ginary and the Alhambra here in Granada is just such a place - a frontier that has undergone historical changes which have left both very tangible traces, like the site on which we are standing, as well as traces that exist only in the realm of the imagination." In Emmanuel Levinas' "Meaning and Sense," there is this: "The beyond from which the face comes signifies as a trace." And "In the presence of the Other (_Autrui_), do we not respond to an 'order' in which the signifying- ness remains an irremissible disturbance, an utterly bygone past? Such is the signifyingness of a trace." The face is always already a process, rep- resentation (David Marr, Vision); the disconnected Other returns vastly interpenetrated, convoluted, porous, in Samuel's works. They should be required reading for their questioning/problematic, as well as viewing; the two books are based on a videotape trilogy: The Raft of the Medusa, Into the European Mirror, and City of the Dead and the World Exhibitions, produced 1993-95. I'd also recommend Samuel's Passage to Lahore, more or less a novel, relevant as well to a necessarily political reading/being of the Other. -------------------------- To order Black Rose: phone 1-800-565-9523 or 1-800-221-9985 fax for North America; phone 081-986-485 or 081-533-5821 fax for Europe. Website: http://www.web.net/blackrosebooks . For Passage to Lahore, The Mercury Press, 137 Birmingham Street, Stratford, Ontario, Ca. N5A 2T1. _________________________________________________________________________ My Tongue I'm not so much interested any more in people speaking from the body, or even with the fullness of the body; that seems so natural to me! I'm not that interested in people standing in front of me or in the throes of unbridled sexual passion, head back, animal cries emanating from a space beyond culture and death. No, I'm not. I want etiquette, barriers; I'm transfixed, hypnotized, by those voices that come from somewhere else, something human, syntactic, the distanciation resulting in sexual give it to me give it to me deeper deeper fuck me harder harder. The glue of it all, the distance that nonetheless also issues from the throat, from somewhere other than body, as-if it were body, and why not? Our prejudices today encounter _this_ as body, not _that,_ with whatever structural divisions are applied, as if feminin ecriture were a specific- ity of encounter. It's not, Jennifer, said, it's anything at all, and it's the anything that fascinates, the debris, the formalities, the dissua- sions, what seems at a distance. The distance is _impossible_ as sounds spew from the mouth; what creates categoricities of the real producing inscription on one hand, fissure on the other? It is speech spoken; the phallic male, underwear tight against half-erect penis, rigid, is equally embodied, teeth and larynx all at work - it's not the privilege or prerogative of those who claim the body for speech or literature or writing, masculin ecriture for example, even that of the neutered, Alan said. The point here is that now _I'm typing,_ noise emitting from the vocal cords, no matter what you think, no matter how this text is (de)generated. And a revelation that it is all body, even mathesis, that it's set up, that it's a setup, that not even machine text fissures in a clean and pro- per manner, cried Jennifer. That even the military order thrust from the gaping maw, the nationalist song, the rhetorical putdown, the office memorandum, the fingermonger's wharfcry, the nurse's humming, are equally embodied, that the promulgation of body is not necessarily the body's promulgaton, screamed Alan. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm _________________________________________________________________________ Some Scottish Clan Slughorns or Warcries: BUAIDH NO BAS! CLARI INNIS! (Buchanan) CNOC EALAHAIN! (Colquhoun) A GORDON! A GORDON! (Gordon) CREAG AN TUIRC! (Boar's Rock) (Maclaren) ARD CHOILLE! (High Wood) (MacGregor) DUNMAGLASS! (MacGillivray) AN T-ARM BREAC DEARG! (The Army of the Checkered Red Tartan) (Macquarrie) A BELLENDAINE! (Scott) A HOME, A HOME, A HOME! (Home) FRAOCH EILEAN (Heathery Island) (MacDonald) CREAG AN SGAIRBH! (Cormorant's Rock) (Stewart of Appin) BUAIDH NO BAS! (Victory or Death!) (MacNeil of Barra) ___________________________________________________________________________ swollen by jennifer beginning with the milky-white screen of monochrome laptop, milky-dark screen of desktop loving, lapping dreams and soft pubescent skin, swollen nipples, tiny fingers brushing against keyboard tiny rhythms, barely denting you and you, milking dripping nipples, pink and red and brown, erect against my tongue's tip, dreaming, murmuring, mewling, breasts heavy in my hands, tiny in my tiny mouth, distended in my swollen lips, tearful tiny eyes against white and brown and black skin, inhaling, sucking, filling me up with you, tongue's indentations swelling against wet lips, hair soaked with milk, squeezing your breasts into me, pressing against my face, neck, cunt, ascii text spilling out white and brown and black screens, yellow and red screens, my tiny eyes unseeing, my ears your murmured heartbeat, your rough nipples, huge nipples, your tiny nipples, your impossible nipples, your nipples erect and hard writing me into your very souls, your tongue my cunt, my clit tonguing your lap, laptop, lapping milky dreams _________________________________________________________________________ breast what did occasion this breast, this breast-writing, but image after image splayed from glowing laptop screen, analog and digital camera, video, even the subtlety of a light glance towards the glistening surface. o empty pane, nothing reproduces, nothing _carries_ the luminous as your milky flesh melts within voyeur and viewer. oh it is never possible, the images turn dark, decay, empty, vaporize; beneath the surface, the _glowing_ remains imminent, eternal. so do i write to turn the eye inward, dream you within these sayings, glistenings, moistness glazed suspended in pure pure space __________________________________________________________________________ My Words Cut Off At The Root traceroute jefferson.village.virginia.edu > zing 1 xenyn-eid-E0-1.nyc.access.net (198.7.0.126) 3 ms 3 ms 2 ms 2 tp1-S0-T1.nyc.access.net (166.84.64.38) 3 ms 4 ms 7 ms 3 tp1-E0E1.nyc.pixnet.net (166.84.64.254) 6 ms 5 ms 6 ms 4 netaxs-gw-H0-T3.pixnet.net (166.84.64.46) 15 ms 11 ms 7 ms 5 * * * 6 * * * 7 * * * 8 * * * 9 * * * 10 * * * 11 * * * 12 * * * 13 * * * 14 * * * 15 * * * 16 * * * 17 * * * 18 * * * 19 * * * 20 * * * 21 * * * 22 * * * 23 * _______________________________________________________________________