Confession Confession for those who would violate in the name of the left, in the name of history, or confession for those who have already slaughtered themselves or confession for those guaranteed of truth and absolution confession for the innocent confession for those TRIED IN THE NAME OF HISTORY confession for those JUDGES OF THE TRIBUNAL, CLERKS AND LAWYERS ALL confession for an absolute justice in the name of torture and confession by _One in Absolute Power_ Male, I have slaughtered millions of children for my sexual pleasure the length of a blond hair, eyes of the clearest sky White, there is no other race I have not violated, enriching myself until my flesh creaks with money and satisfied desire Jew, I have bought and sold each and every child, praying for the Passover sacrifice the taste of Christian flesh Straight, I know cocks were meant for mouths and holes in women who spend their lives tempting and complaining Male, I crush Jew and Muslim, sissy-men all White, I kill the Jew in every one of us, the dirty dung-heap of history, filth contaminating the ends of the earth Jew, I want to fuck your wives and daughters, steal your money, throw you out in the street, garbage! garbage! Straight, I see how Jews pervert the idea of sex, Christ, and cleanliness, Jewish doctors spreading AIDS riding the world of love Male, my wealth is immeasurable, my pleasure undeniable, and I am privileged beyond anyone's belief White, I walk the breadth and length of the world without a problem, managing flawlessly one or another strangled woman, race, country Jew, you will see my power in your papers films and radio programs Straight, ah, but I fuck each and everyone one of you, public or private, animal, vegetable, mineral, the world splayed open Male, I have a secret to tell you: We all hate women, rape for the pleasure of it; our aggression knows no bounds! White, I have a secret to tell you: We are all wealthy, living off the fat of the land, cancelling our crimes and depts each and every day! Jew, I have a secret to tell you: There was no Holocaust! You can imagine what we made of it! Straight, I have no secrets to tell! My cock says it all! For Fassbinder, from Easy Street ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Rules of Writing in Cyberspace 1 When replying, quote only when necessary. Stick to the subject-line of the thread. 2 Reply only when what you have to say contributes to a discussion. Replies such as "I agree" simply take up space. 3 Remember that flaming does not contribute to a discussion and, in fact, can bring it to a halt. Flaming is never a substitute for a good argument. 4 Refrain from surrealisms of all sorts which annihilate an almost- dying world of communication. The love of words is not the Word of Love! 5 Remember that we are all part of an honest, genuine, and authentic community. 6 Remember: everyone will always use his or her real identity, and including yourself. A false identity is a dead post (see #8, 10). 7 Remember that words mean exactly what they say they mean. 8 Remember that a message can contain only honest feelings, and that anything otherwise would be technically prohibited from transmission. 9 The Net is the only place for the consummation of genuine encounter. 10 Write an accurate description of yourself and you will be rewarded; write an inaccurate description, and your message will never reach its destination. 11 Present yourself to the fullest, refusing to hide behind the invisi- bility of text; kindly give your compassion to everyone replying. 12 Spend time with your writing; caress it like an absent lover. 13 Remember that the Net is a mirror of your own mind. 14 Quote emoticons freely, doubling or tripling them to indicate the degree of merriment or ill-humor of the moment. 15 Assume that flowers grow between letters, meadows among words, whole forests in the midst of phrases. 16 Each of your posts is a young infant destined to remain stillborn unless soliciting the hungry breast of a correspondent. 17 Post no chain letters which are destined to cost the impoverished and anger those who have not read the anecdote of the king, the grain of corn, and the chessboard. A king offered his daughter to a knight. Or the knight could have some grain. The knight said to the queen. O I would have grain. Place it on a chessboard, each square twice the previous. Little did the kind king know so many grains are 2^64 that there are more than there could have ever been. But the post is such that the board is covered by the seven- teenth square so no one could count more and the post could not get through to the right address. So the daughter married the knight. 18 Assume a world of truth, not falsehood; a universe of clarity, not dissension; an honest emotion makes an honest person. 19 Refrain from sexual innuendo unless you are offering yourself to anyone who replies, in which case describe your body to the fullest. 21 "Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist." "Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge." (The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.) Wittgenstein. 22 Every post is a fact. Include in the body of the post only what you would include in your own body. 23 And remember that while falsehood might be said to exist, in fact it does not. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ You You .. Touch seals the lips, surrounds the skin. _The other_ is the presence of touch, infantile massage sleeping or dreaming the newly-born; you move your hands between me, punctuate the rhythm of everything heard within the world or lost, of touch. I could not laugh uncontrollably without your fingers across my back, knees, inside the pockets of the arms. A body is never its own, always an other which is the presence of touch. ... Lips bring the muscles to a close, rest the body spread open or field of desire. Ejaculate, wet, we would mark each other, skin spread in ripples across vision, hearing, long jaws gaping into the distance, nowhere without the other produced or construct, building materials pleading for an entity. .... No wonder the Net embodies hysteria, disembodiment effacing the other. Touch seals the lips, slips between the legs into the mouth, the doing of it. Massaged babies are "more active, alert, and responsive, more aware of their surroundings, better able to tolerate noise, and they orient themselves faster and are emotionally more in control." (Diane Ackerman.) You leave me _speechless,_ give me the gift of silence; arms and legs tied apart, you give me to the inert thinking of the world, your breasts my milk, your cunt the birth of that other emerging through a cycle I could never fully fathom. ..... In touch, the body is mediated, one with the release and control of the world; in touch, labia close against definition; you emerge you in full- ness against my body's cartography. Language dissolves in the pages of a book seen lying open, splayed, on a table next to the bed. I trace your body against your body, a closure of topology and circuitry, chemical release one could never do alone. This is the _laminar_ state. And in cyberspace, you never come behind me by surprise, caught off-balance and never afraid. ..... She dances with Ferdinand, she told me, perfection. They live together, she can lean back almost to the floor, oblivious of audience and dance alike. I don't know what happened she said but I moved in a trance this evening, remembering nothing. I am never afraid with him; we know each other that well. Living, bodies slide across one another; breathless, they caress the floor. .... Desiring the real, I write and write on the Internet. Gaps open up; I fill then with words, pleading, trying the presence of letters them- selves, x's holding sway, begging for touch. The chasm is filled with writings and poems, performatives, expletives, sexualities lean with emptiness. My arms surround my arms. Air crashes. What is air that it crashes so. There is no other. ... _On the Net, there is no silence but for the speaking of it._ Hysteria falls towards you, surrounds you; pretend my words, my tongue, fingers, your cunt touched with open eyes. Opening, there is text blank but for its speaking. Opening myself farther, there is only _web inversion,_ the catastrophe of hysteria, dissolution of the mirror stage. This train stops at only one station; this train never stops. .. Your entrance is my silent presence. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Irghaz Empire When the troops of the Irghaz empire go into battle, they are told they will leave with nothing but the shirt on their backs. They have come from battle that way and they are going into battle that way. They will take no spoils and will disappear from history forever, leaving no memory and no trace. When the troops of the Irghaz empire approach death, they bare their backs, so better as to divide the body instead of the body's spoils. Thus they have emerged from a slit or focus and thus they return. They parade with body tilted on horses tilted; they wander mountains strewn with boulders no smaller than a man. They are colorful with pale flesh and beards set against purple, red, and green silks, open to all weathers. These are not their battle-clothes, of which there is no mention. The troops of the Irghaz empire leave no one behind and look forward to no one. They are perfect horsemen, a blur of cloud or dust on the horizon that seems to take forever to settle. Long after they pass, it disappears among the stunted trees growing against the slopes of the mountains. Silent streams of water continue to cascade downward. When the troops of the Irghaz empire pass, no one remembers their name; no one remembers them, or their passage. This is the dream I have had, which I have been told to impart to you. This is the impartation. Blessed is the dawn before the darkest night. Sh'in. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Protocol Suites A protocol suite consists of a hierarchy of protocols, each of which is invisible to the rest. The communication that occurs at the fundamental level directly transforms physical reality; it is here and only here that issues of _classical_ space and time are directly relevant. The Open Data Network Architecture, as described in Realizing the Infor- mation Future, contains four layers. The lowest level is the _bearer service_ in which "bits are bits." If a bit is a bit, is it a material state? I associate bits with a _succession of material states_ at a specified site; this is the _diachronic reading_ of the bearer service. There is a _synchronic reading_ as well, which is a _spatial arrangement of material states. Together they constitute a relativized configuration presumably subject to Heisenberg's principle of complementarity. The second level of the ODN hierarchy is the _transport_ layer, which includes "flow control, end-point connection establishment," and so forth. This level is also concerned with data formatting. The transport mediates between the bearer service and the network or end node. The third level is called _middleware,_ which includes "higher-level functions that are used in common among a set of applications." Here, issues of security, encryption, file systems, addressing, etc. are dealt with. The upper level is that of _applications_ such as email, and ftp. At the top of the hierarchy cyberspace exists with a _problematic_ relationship to space and time, and human subjectivity "directly" interacts with "content." Further, protocol extends on this level to issues of Net etiquette, becoming fuzzy and indeterminate. In Bernard Aboba's The Online User's Encyclopedia, five Internet layers are described: physical, network, Internet, transport, and application. In Internet: Getting Started, these are described as hardware, network interface or data link, Internet, transport, and application. Else- where, up to seven layers have been described for various networks. In every case, the layering stops at the application level; here time is related to internal time consciousness, and space becomes particulate, intensifications of activity occurring in the vicinity of one or another node. (_Internally,_ the node is site-specific; _externally,_ the space is fuzzy, chaotic, the node functioning as a strange attractor.) There are two ruptures, two ontological breaks. The first is between hardware and bits/bytes, information streams. Consider this a movement from the physical substrate to a mathematical substrate. Existence pro- blems are transformed; the existence of the graviton is inequivalent ontologically to the existence of infinitesimals. Although convention- alism plays a major role in current mathematical philosophy, I think one or another form of Platonic idealism remains the background philosophy of working physicists. The second ontological break, of course, is between the application layer and the user. This is a movement from a semiotics (or at least a syntactics) to a phenomenological-interpretive mode - from high-level abstracted signifiers to their incorporation/introjection within human subjectivity. Again, existence problems are transformed; the existence of the word "tree" is different, inequivalent, to the existence of its signified (i.e. the internal representation of "tree"). The issue becomes even more difficult when emotional and other "psychological" considerations are taken into account. If I write "I love you," how, beyond bits and syntax, is this interpreted? What is its internal rep- resentation (i.e. beyond the signified/naming of the "loved")? Embodiment is abandoned, not only from hardware on and throughout the protocol suites thereafter, but also within the subjectivity of the user who cannot claim the _presencing_ of alterity. What occurs is a constant _downstreaming_ of subjectivity within and without the Internet, which I have called REWRITE - an assertion bridging ontological domains, as if it would emerge whole at the other end, the recipient. But this emergence, of course, is conditioned by the absence of material/psycho- logical substrates; in other words, wouldn't the ontological condition of an _outgoing_ message qualitatively differ from the condition of an _incoming_ one? (The _compression_ involved in the sending is inequiv- alent to the _decompression_ involved in the receiving; the former always already as (its) face-at-hand, but for the latter, the face is always in the form of a _surmise._) A final point is simply the _absenting_ of the deeper protocol layers in normative everyday use; only with the appearance of anomaly or break- down do they fissure the (seamed, sutured) application layer, making themselves visible as nothing more or less than _corruption of the text._ The skeleton appears only when the invisible body is cut. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- _gter-ma_ "The Discoverer of Concealed Books (_g-Ter-ston_) is a person embodying in himself the poles of temporality and extra-temporality." "The human existence which follows the rules of temporality is pervaded by the absolute reality of extra-temporality. The Discoverer of Concealed Books sees this reality in a vision. Nyang-ral Nyi-ma-'od-zer (1124-1192) saw Padmasambhava riding on a white horse whose four hooves were supported by Spiritual Beings; Padmasambhava gave him an empowerment and the heavens opened, the earth trembled, and the mountains shook." (The Rise of Esoteric Buddhism in Tibet, Eva M. Dargyay.) "The book leans on the void." (Edmond Jabes.) "I thus understand the obscene as that dimension of culture that allows us to cross boundaries, exceed limits, apprehend the irrational, and experience the dialectic between life and death." "Obscenity thus chal- lenges the accepted limits of culture, not always with a view toward redefining these limits but toward revisiting their reasons for being, and toward underscoring their ultimate tenuousness." (Voluptuous Yearn- ings, a Feminist Theory of the Obscene, Mary Caputi.) Obscenity is interwoven with the maternal matrix, with splay/display, with transgression. Beyond that it is the absolute absence of secrecy, the immobilized life or _hole_ spent and exhausted within the realm of presymbolic_appearance._ The obscene is that which is _unspeakable,_ unaccountable, the inchoate speaking of the other. The specificities of obscenity are culturally localized, but the obscene itself involves a limit of privatized secrecy. This is not the secrecy of the rite or shamanistic passage, but the secrecy of individual power and shame, the pleasure of the liquidated body. In industrial culture, obscenity is caught up in the machinic and the _role,_ which are simultaneously determinate and "wobbly." The obscene does away with culture, with thought; it caresses death, transforms the body into physical loss; all obscenities are (willing or unwilling) masochisms. What could be the obscene here, within computer-mediated communication, if not an hysteria of the self-silencing of language, impossible repro- duction of the material world? The result is flamewars, violated texts, psychoses, echos and bounced mail, quotations and requotations, reitera- tions. For what _passes_ through the protocol suite is _polite,_ a transference from an absented sender to an absenting receiver. And what is polite below forms [the contours] of the body above; the text pushes at the limits of politeness. To push is to _hack_ on one or another level; obscenity is the hacking of the cultural matrix, the collapse of etiquette and the creation of a numbing discomfort that has no resolution. Pornography's irresolute lack of resolution exhausts both the user and the image/text/imaginary themselves. Ultimately a pornographic image is discarded (and the consumer readied for a new cycle of consumption) because it permits no final reading, perhaps no reading at all - only redescription (as a form of re-entry) (as a form of recuperation) (as a form within and throughout the absence of form) and circumlocutions that neither describe nor analytically display its power. Circumlocution: Speaking around the text; speaking against or in the face of death or disembodiment. The location which is the cite is no site, no location or sight at all. Speech flames, burns; speech cuts through. Disemboweled. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sit This Set Out. somewhere want to say brittle beauty the one time I sat in on a session in Paris I was drunk at le Chat qui Peche on the left bank and had borrowed I think it was an alto but it might have been a tenor there were these guys from Morocco one named Alain who later died on a trainwreck France's leading alto I think again in the style of Ayler (Albert not Don) and I was onstage and birds bright and yellow flew out of the horn but I didn't know what I was doing nor at that point how to listen so I heard myself and the abyss opened up in every direction those birds flew in darkness but that's not the end of the moral nor my fear american whiteboy jewboy in the midst of Vietnam and I couldn't go wouldn't go anywhere because I took that stuff with me to Copenhagen where I heard Dexter Gordon and burning with a fierce desire now I had a drummer turned me on to Art Blakey I him to Guiseppe Logan so we played there at a student center got picked by reggae rock and roll Jamaicans holding back on the fours and I went to Indian flute which I carried listened hard to the drumming watching the audience for thr highnote release and it worked each and every time the last we had three-hundred odd attending attending and screaming pleasure screaming pleasure before is our first disaster concert come late in the telling with an obdurate Dane misinterpreting Cecil Taylor /who I just now heard on on Mercer? Street side-walk caving in/ and then along comes Ted Joans who turned me onto something from Mali and played a lick or two, that's trumpet, and I heard him, that's Mali later I recorded with the drummer and some others but thinking now and after hearing Taylor once again this enormous onslaught on Black Music, New Thing Music, Leroi Jones' applecore articles for the old Down Beat lost lost forever, and all those, all those notes gone and gone and gone, real birds like the Bird Lives tacked all over Copenhagan near the Dew Drop Inn with the junkie needles etched in the thick glass door - gone annihilation alley death as if they never were, and all that writing and latenight and now Ayler dead years ago and any fucking kid can get a squeal out of the horn and I keep think, that space, that space, literal as in: across the Seine, more altosound down beneath Notre Dame by the concrete banks mid- night war-night screams, or figural as in: this abyss now, here, finding ourselves, these notes now lost, or as in death or a future double- decade, who's playing what, who's listening, what dark new music fatal to emerge the last night met a woman Maya who told me her name meant illusion nothing could hold back time all the gone new music all the gone this was culture-murder now what's going to be ------------------------------------------------------------------------ GROTTO [This simple program generates shapes reminiscent of abstract back- grounds in the Tun-Huang Frescos; for me, it also represents an arche- typal cyberspace, the first pictures coming through the line, from the brain to the mind, from the terminal screen through terminal velocity, to the brain. The images never repeat and the random seed is tied to a seconds-after-midnight function. The program is of some limited mathematical interest as well, being a continuously nested recursion which is semi-fractal at best. (This is my favorite image- generation program, by the way, using a "lean" script.)] Grotto Program This is a qbasic program that will run on a 386 or better VHA or SVGA monitor; you should have at least 25Mhz speed. To run this, save every- thing below the dotted line as a file in DOS called "GROTTO.BAS" (The program uses Screen 12 in qbasic.) To run from qbasic: Type at the Dos prompt: qbasic /run grotto.bas The program runs until stopped. To stop, enter control-break, which brings the program up. Then exit the program as you would any DOS file, by typing Alt-File x (for exit). You can also create a small batch file with the editor by typing cd/dos qbasic /run grotto.bas into a file called "grotto.bat" Then at the DOS prompt, anywhere, just type "grotto" and the program begins. The program will generate new forms continually until cancelled. (For those who care, sin/cos was used in place of tan because the latter generates overflow.) This program may be distributed as freeware anywhere accompanied by the author's name. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ REM Grotto Program Alan Sondheim 1994 DEFDBL X-Y home: y = 0: n = 1 RANDOMIZE TIMER gg = 0 IF RND > .5 THEN gg = 1 zink: zz = INT(RND * 10) IF zz = 0 THEN GOTO zink IF RND < .3 THEN zz = 1 q = 0 a = RND * 30 k = 1 z = 1 - RND / 8 IF a < 5 THEN a = 10 * RND * a d = 5 * a IF RND < .4 THEN CLS SCREEN 12: WINDOW (-d, d)-(d, -d) x = -a two: y = SIN(COS(x) / SIN(x)) - y x = SIN(SIN(y) / COS(y)) - x n = POINT(x, y) n = n + zz IF n = 16 THEN n = 1 PSET (x, y), n IF gg = 1 THEN PSET (x, -y), n q = q + 1 x = x + z IF q > 4000 THEN GOTO home GOTO two ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Damaged Life, 1989 Inside the mother-father The baby turns. Screaming and dying, Its body burns. Flames leap from its fingers, Father-mother lies dead. Flames leap from its eyelids, Eyes burn in its head. Mother-father cries, rising. The babe turns around, In anger strikes out. Bones fall to the ground. Father-mother falls, crying. The babe once so rash, Kills its tormentor. The body's in ash. Dust falling and rising, And parents and child, Still burn within daily. Their cries are defiled. Dust rising and falling, None shall atone. The baby still turning, Dies daily, alone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ One Million Years in the Future Noise.[1] Huddled air.[2] Molecules.[3] Tan(tan(tan(tan(tan_x)))).[4] The sound of weaving.[5] Each atom has exploded.[6] Information billowing.[7] Carapace.[8] The shift of serrated edges.[9] ---------------the cliff [1].Ejaculations of sound. Vortices, edges turbulent, roll against the presence of obdurate material. Sub-vortices, borne upon the shear, resonate in shrill wavering tones. Nothing is sine. Broken and polished in ellipsoidal shapes or fractured. Most of the same. [2].Oxygenated, singed or burned dust. Leverage towards the ground. Laminar erasures of firestorms. Scuttling. [3].Wave-organelles, floatations. Compressive immobilities, tailored above and below. Stars not on your life. [4].Enfolding resonance. And what would be the intensity of all reason? Splayed upon the interior of the recursive tangent, everything. So that a fast-forward or backward feed. What would be the presence of space and time? _Not on your life._ [5].Occasionally a serrated shaft or wheel. Now that reason is a black hole, the thing threads a knot, knot threads a thing. The memory of material might have been. [6].From weight. Tangential imaginary. Burned through pharoah catalyst, tethered wave. If a whisper: _everything is a natural kind._ The ending: _everything is a natural kind._ Tangential imaginary recursion. [7].Noise. Supra-vortices across stream and front alike. Here would be every syllable. Foam-flecked scudding sloped debris gathering. Memory of the pebble. Memory of the indentation of the pebble. Grain. [8].Scuttling of identity, insect transgression. Sexual unraveling in the surplus niche. For the most part carriers of molecules, exploding atoms, tethered waves. [8].From the far corners they come, names beyond them, finding the desolate continents of shattered planets, moons' eerie face-offs with solar heats, scraggled metamorphoses. Infestations, tailed. Stars? Not on your life, folded against matter. [8]._gTer-ston_ "dByings-phyug Ye-s'es-mtsho-rgyal, the mistress of all mysteries, had been gathering the Pronouncements (_bka'-ma_) by seizing them through the ability of not forgetting anything." [9].Grinds to a halt. Huddled air, the enormous entity. Disappearance of _the._ _Dissappearance of_ the: _everything is a natural kind._ The ending: disapperance of _the._ Slips, shudders, falls, skimmers, stops. Doesn't know it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: sondheim@panix.com (Alan Sondheim) Newsgroups: alt.fan.amy-fisher Subject: Amy fans, Tonya fans Date: 25 Sep 1994 04:20:23 -0400 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and Unix, NYC Lines: 13 Message-ID: <363bs7$d54@panix3.panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix3.panix.com X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] But Amy _does_ have fans who are obtuse, inverted themselves, disliking Shannon Doughtery (sp.?) because we can't _contain_ her; like Tonya, she doesn't simplify. And we're attracted to the danger which is always already sexualized, stepping across an edge we hadn't even realized was there. Because it's not about Joey B's wife or Nancy K's leg at all (all these body parts), but about angry and edgy women who skewer the culture, by default, in a certain sense. And like all fandom, we're here attracted to the fact we can't have her, not at all - the darker side being, we're here because we believe we can _save_ her, the ultimate male power trip: male-male helping the little-girl-prostitute out of her misery so male-male can fuck her by himself. In the name of salvation. In the name of God. But fuck. Alan CMC DISEASE, 2008 Abstract: CMC (Computer-Mediated-Communication) is a classified disease in which the prosthesis of ego/libidinal relationships becomes trans- formed through the interpenetration of terminal scroll and internalized projection/introjection psychoanalytical processes. Symptoms: Reality scroll and echo; a certain numbness of the arms and legs; the usual carpal-tunnel syndromes; static hyperactivity; talking- past [indeterminate eye-focusing off-screen]; nervousness and insomnia; quasi-psychotic displacement of real-life responsibility; often general ill-health and pallor. Initial Findings: Through recent work of Donald (_Origins_) and others, including a generalized aetiology stemming from theories of incorpora- tion and transitional objects vis-a-vis Piaget's manipulative childhood strategies and Winnicott's work, it is now acceptable to consider the conscious and preconscious processings of the neural apparatus as both internal and external. Any seeming necessity for external stasis (food, drink, heroin) may be considered positively or negatively addictive; anorexia, for example, is a postive addiction for food, since nourishment is a necessary and therefore negative addiction. The _external_ process- ing associated with the neural apparatus consists of three things: stor- age, or external memory which is the primary focus of the processing; manipulation, which is the organization and reorganization of storage, including new inputting and outputting (modelled in general by matrix algebras); and interfacing between internal and external. Our analytical target has been the last; the interfacing presents instances of a double addiction, first, to the flicker-rate and obseqious nature of the screen itself, and second, to the temporal reality constituted by CMC. Ia The flicker-rate. The screen refreshes at a rate of approximately 30 frames/second; with an interlaced field, this occurs at 60 fields/second. At low intensities, this is acceptable for one or two hours' duration; at high intensities (such as might be found in an office situation), the result is flicker which may be responsible for both pre-migraine light displays and addictions. Note the frequency is four times that of the standard accepted for epilepsy. Ib The obseqious nature. The screen is _internally illuminated,_ and in a Windows or other all-over environment, presents a diffuse wide-area light source. This is clearly reminiscent of the hearth; indeed, the home computer environment has already moved _away_ from traditional desk organization towards a hearth-like framework. The user sits at a range from 30 to 80 centimeters away from the screen, and the usual clutter of the desk is often reduced by up to 75%. In other words, like the hearth, the computer environment is isolated from the rest of the room, and yet it provides a focus and articulation-point for the user. Like the hearth, as well, the user faces the wide-area light source during communication. Finally, the hearth has often been considered the source of _house-hold gods_ and the terminal, by virtue of its simultaneous impersonalization (hidden operations, neutrality) and personalization (instant response to the input/output of user demands as well as: a. personalizing of the software screen environment, and b. personalizing of CMC inputs and outputs); the double connotation of "magic and mystery" contribute to its overall addictive power. II But the _temporal power_ constituted by CMC is of _critical import._ In most CMC communications, an inordinate and unprecedented number of posts may arrive on a daily basis. This basis even follows a circadian rhythmic pattern, increasing (as does private telephony) during the mid- evening hours. CMC, however, is always accompanied by _delay_ within which certain elements of masochism and power are brought into play. These are the same elements which are operational in traditional non- chemical addictions. For example, the other may or may not reply; there is always an _intensive personalization_ at work on this level (see Ib). Again, one may always sign-off, kill, or delete the other's messagings _before_ their presence on the screen - and there are all sorts of flaming "hit and run tactics" that can be deployed. The anonymity of the screen, in addition, creates quasi-psychotic sites of power and "occupa- tion," within which the real is always already rewritten, and the user or "virtual subject" rewrites, continually, himself or herself. And as we know from other evidence, this sort of compulsive repetition is at the heart of both addiction and obsessive neurosis, and their intertwin- ing. So to sum up here: The temporal power aspect has s/m components; it creates simultaneous conditions of power (i.e. kill, flame, sign-off) and revelation (i.e. love, sex, secrecy-revelations behind the veil of apparent anonymity). III A third aspect of CMC must be mentioned in passing - a reconsidera- tion of the _intensive personalization_ of IIb. There is throughout CMC the potential for "customizing" the computer environment, including of course the nature and contents of the external data bases. So CMC con- structs a preminent site for the development of a narcissistic symptom- ology _in the guise of communicative strategies._ The presence of the hearth; the ability to reveal/communicate secrecies; the ability to talk intensively on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis _with the same screen application and appearance_: all serve to deepen the addictive potential and addiction itself, once it has been established at the site. Treatment: It is too early to speculate on treatment, but standard with- drawal strategies, including b-mod, may be employed. There are, as of yet, no twelve-step programs. Epidemiology: CMC is spreading widely; one reason, at least at this juncture, to avoid treatment is to assume that the disease is a _condi- tion_ or natural evolution of (sociobiological) human behavior. From this viewpoint, CMC is not a disease to be treated, but a dis-ease to be accommodated. Certainly, barring unforeseen war and other disasters, by the year 2050, CMC in one form or another, including virtual reality (VR) will be commonplace. By then, this and other addictions will be the social norm, leading us to speculate: _Addiction is the standard model of human subjectivity._ Final note on addiction: By this we mean that thinking and repetitive be- havioral patterns (including those generated by the autonomic nervous system) are components of addiction; and that just as external storage media are becoming part and parcel of human cognition, so heroin and other addictive chemical substances are becoming increasingly necessary to human survival. It is become harder to draw the lines _between_ ad- dictions, all of which possess often-ineffectual twelve-step and other withdrawal programs. To assume addiction as a natural-evolutionary con- sequence of the species seems the best approach at this juncture in time. Alan Sondheim for the staff at Telcom Disease Control Center (TDCC). 4/18/2008 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Searchlight Request If anyone in the vicinity of Sydney, Australia, knows the whereabouts of Allison Ritch, I would appreciate hearing from him or her. She has disappeared, and I am trying to find out anything concerning her current location and activities. Please contact me by private email. Thank you. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ On My Future I want to think about my future and someday I will have children. But when I look at photographs that my grandparents have I don't recognize anyone and I don't expect other people coming after me to recognize me and they will spit on my grave. But people will not walk around so much because they can look into their computer at home and that will give them all they will ever need and they will die I am sure very young and dreaming in their head. I will not be one of them. Later the machines will be smaller but they will not be that small be- cause people will have fingers and also will speak to them. I will not say to you that there will come a time when there will be no people but just machines but Claire says so and says the machines will rule everything but there will be no need to bring things and stuff to the machines so it will be just as if the machines weren't there. They would let us alone and we probably wouldn't see them. But I think that even those machines will rust away like cars and then even the rust will go and a few people will be out shooting around the stars, but then not so many as people think now, because how much room can there be. And I think that after a while the air will change and people will get sicker. And then there will be atoms and things that crawl through you and fix you up, but what purpose, say I, without that which God has given you, which is the beautiful world around you. But then there will be new animals and always something to look at. But I wonder even after the animals and the dust and the atoms, what will the future bring? And I think that it will bring a vast landscape filled with skittering rocks beneath harsh winds and solar flares and yes, there will still be life and mindfulness, freed from the violent prison of the hard hard world throughout most of its becoming, now, now elsewhere, chanting elsewhere, nor hidden in the grievous pores of sand nor captured against the darkling shadows of nocturnal bliss canopying the unfettered orb of once the planet earth No, aye but for the thing of it, whisper of lads and lasses, the green green of it all, the green that once had been disputations dark foraging the shunt of mind hovered broken from the red moor ravaged against the dream of a sun memory of yellow aeons, the tossed mast, laughter the which grain turned against its shadowing covert, lesser degree before the splintered thought thin-shaft in this forgotten language ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE CYBERSPACE WHICH IS ALREADY DEATH They call me "the Professor." I live alone; I go habitually to a local coffeeshop for my noonday meal. I am well-known there, always carrying books, wearing thick glasses, a slightly unkempt appearance. A bachelor they think, a man who thinks too much. There is a slightly sad air about me, nostalgia perhaps for the woods of my childhood, flowers or birds which are found huddled and decrepit in the rundown neighborhood. But there are rare moments of beauty as well. Once there was a woman who came in daily to the restaurant. Everyone knew I was soft for her, but afraid to speak. For a year, I watched her come and go; one day most recently she appeared with an older man, obviously her boyfriend. You lost your chance, they said. You should have said something. But I would return to my book or to the daily paper, always searching for a sign that something would either begin or end. (And this would have been Vienna, around 1930, or Park Slope, Brooklyn, around 1994.) Walking away, carrying nothing but myself. I have been told to take whatever "valuables" I can. I pack in a hurry. No one will remember the things that have happened here. Every building carries a sense of invisible loss, jazz solo disappearing even _beyond_ and farther still, and quicker. The voices never die. The voices are a continuation. They are the same voice, the speech of the book or magazine on my lap, random constructs of advice flowing through me during my afternoon walk. I am the only organism that continually speaks the world; like news radio, I offer description. Words disappear almost immediately on the screen, and I want this ter- rifying death to cease. The absorption is utter and complete; there are no traces, no paper indentations where type once graced the surface. And I want my words in granite and steel, hundreds of thousands of copies, stelae, holding the grain of the real down among itself, the graveyard shift of the living. Each of these words has been breathed in silence, each fingered, responding to my own sense of hearing. The text is always that of the tomb, the muffled sound of the word filtering out the highs and lows, reducing manuscript to murmur, death to a whisper of death. A whisper and then some. Nothing lasts forever you say, the words dead before you finish them. It is the nature of this shell, this memory of a space. There is always darkness at the other end of the line; wires snap out of existence, and an insufficient ecology ensures that there is only a limited quantity of letters. The letters define the edge of a virtual cliff; as I have pointed out elsewhere, cyberspace is the sum of its contents, not emptied or annihilated otherwise, but simply not a fact or picture among the world's domains. Without the drive, there is no chora, and the potential absenting of this space _always_ constructs the problem of ontology and origins; we witness our absence through the necessity of _actively inscribing_ our presence, close to disappearance. If I do not speak, I am nowhere. If I do not speak, I am not at all. Michael stopped speaking on Thursday; I received nothing from him thereafter. Michael died. But even among the living, there is an ontic insecurity in cyberspace; no words will make it disappear. ------------------------ From sondheim@panix3.panix.com Wed Sep 28 09:00:34 1994 Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 08:54:27 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim To: Cybermind@world.std.com Subject: Wired Wired: The follow blank double-screens are intended as protection against the post that follows. The post may contain objec- tional language that some find offensive. Please delete now if such is the case. Thank you. Wired For years I thought about my cunt, hole opening up just for the pleasure of it, cunts creasing the body, devouring my cock, inverting it; like a whore in '74 I spread myself open on television, her tongue worked its way through me, screaming theory! theory! forgetting the lines as the body arched, spent itself. I always wanted to write the world, my cock a clumsy pencil, limited supply of wood and lead. Her piss filled my mouth; I dissolved in a world of tears and beautiful pain. My cunt is on my arm, my leg, my eyes; my cunt is a male cunt, body bent into impossibility, hovering for the construct of miscarriage, afterbirth. I shove myself into myself, fingers open like a flower. Between my cock and asshole she painted a picture-perfect cunt, inscribed against shaved skin, shadowed breasts, delineation and I never felt more naked. My face was wet with the flow of her, blood smearing my beautifully drawn nipples and my legs so wide you could see inside. My tongue burrowed into her asshole; I could feel her shit with the tip, eyes against cunt, moist, and open, touching skin, interior. Walking down the street, cum smears me, her hand hot and heavy on my cock, fingers down her pants; you watch the skin grow and crawl beneath the cloth. She makes me piss on me, little wet thing, stain of past and future memory. Beneath the rod of my cock, musk comes on like an obscene lure; she presses her cunt on it, hard to the barren point of pain, our bodies tied together, splayed open in permanent fuck, breasts bound, mouths against mouths, organs, piss, cum, shit, assholes, cunts, opened, cock held out on a rigid cord tied to my neck my neck. They put things in us, took things out. They wired us up. They turned our cunts cocks into letters. They leaned the letters with menstrual blood. They leaned the letters leaned the letters. They wired us wired us up. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fissure The moment I begin to believe in the real is the moment I believe in belief. Disbelief does not im ply belief in disbelief. To question everything ultimately gnaws a t the flesh itself. To see the face behind the mirror is also to s ee the mirror. Disbelief becomes belief when it becomes a style. Disbel ief is never disavowal. Every question of belief is also a question of question. The answer calls forth the question in jeopardy. The answ er is a semiotic token, never a signi- fied. The totality of signifieds is virtual. Every closed system is axiomatic. Every closed system is an answer. My belief exists outside each and every system. My belief i s performative. I believe to the extent that I am responsible for a statement made in the guise of truth. I make no statements of be lief. Beyond belief is disavowal. Beyond disavowal is disinvestment . Beyond disinvestment is decathexis. Stepping-aside, random movement , is not equivalent to assertion. The purse that is full does not hol d the purse that is empty. The null set is equivalent to the inters ection of a set and its complement. The null set is equivalent to the set whose members are not equivalent to themselves. The former defini tion is also a definition of inscription; the null set is the demarcati on between what is and what is not, relative to a specified constru ct. This is the classical domain of belief. The latter definition is an economy of skittering; the null set is then the production of dissolution. This is the non-classical domain of disbelief. A null s et may also be defined as neither this nor that, values ranging over an entire domain. This is the domain of post-modernity or extrusion, an embarkation upon a faulty ship chart- ing unknown waters, never to retur n to the safety of axiomatically closed domains. And this is the null set of the fissure as well, in which belief and disbelief are simulta neously disconnected in the construct of the _same._ What I believ e in is fissure, working its way up through the text, devolving into a statement wishing it could and could not be. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Insomnia, Pain, Writing "I write myself into existence." If I do not write, I do not exist. I am victimed by text, the necessity to recover the world bringing me the subterfuge of pain. I write and write the world. If I write the world enough, there will be a world. If I stop writing for just a moment, the world will die and I will die. I want to write about my writing, this parallel construction that dominates and accompanies me. And I want to write about this exhaus- tion, this sickness engendered by the writing, this writing out of extremes, and I do not have the words. I do not sleep. I do not sleep and a waking state is a state of pain and difficulty. It is not always this way. It is this way now. And I cannot satisfy myself, and fulfill this pain, unless I write, construct a parallel or parallel world which is sleepless, which monitors my twisting and turning, my uneasy dreams, my dis-ease of stress. I dream of tortures which torture me. I dream of floods, fires, bodies trapped behind walls, attacks by anonymous gangs, plane crashes, sex turning away, disavowals, tears, the deaths of beautiful strangers. I dream of everyone more beautiful than me. I dream of intelligence beyond my comprehension, my writings mocked. My dream lasts but a moment, refuses to return when I appear five minutes later before myself, shuddering, at the computer keyboard, shaking as I try to get the keys in order. I write in extremis, afraid of narcissism, afraid of diaries, men, women, everyday things in the world. I know that my writings are my only life. I know that beyond my writings my flesh collapses, prepar- ing for another uneasy day. I do not like the days, do not like the nights. The mornings carry no promise for me. I worry about my cat's survival if one day I am not found. If I am not found, I am not found on the net. Insomnia grips me absurdly. No longer are there fantasies of loving, narratives of salvation; there are reality scrolls, textual determina- tions of existence, putrescent, bursting. My arms and legs shudder with electric pain, circulation gone bad I think. There is tension in my breasts, back, shoulders. My legs hang down as if the floor were an absent friend. This is the condition I write in. I can hardly breathe. (If truth comes from experience, than I am a wellspring of truth. If there is the slightest doubt, rent in the fabric, then I am a fountain of falsehood.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mystical Text on Mourning in Cyberspace How private is mourning? Death fulfills the body's margins, siphons rites into the central Inscription makes the graveyard shift. At night, illuminated letters exist,* Torah-moths fluttering against the spaces of dark wood, hair-thin wires connecting desk to floor to universe Beyond is always a beckoning to which the text responds The text flees the grave. The wires are copper-red, lacquered, slight warmth in the snow of their environs. Across the snow, gaps appear, shudder, recovered by falling stars, white and glistening beneath the moon. The gaps stutter the snow, lines carrying the yellow letters upon them, frozen over, white and glistening Beckoning draws truth's absence against the dawn and I tell you, here lies the truth of the letters, snows, Torah, stars, moths and darkness of space Across the room, the terminal is silent and cold, no cyberspace, nothing of the speaking of the year or century * And so, too, vermin and creeping things and all things have their supernal forms, as I have previously expounded this wondrous topic. In its great brilliance, this illumination pushes away, at first, the other illuminations but then brings them near again by its great power, attracting them by its abundant splendor. (14th century, Abraham of Granada.) The space the child rocks The cradle past the stone - Absence always mocks God is on her throne The space of God's dark bone Speaks and makes a space Which grows and dies alone For sorrow has no face - Nor God a body now Nor speech the sound of voice - No prayer beseeched of love - No elements rejoice - For speech will sing of death - And death will have a space Which mourns a speaking's breath And dies, and so does place - (Emily Dickinson, 1830) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phonecalls from the Dead, Mourning, Melancholia The first call spoke of her anguish, recounting abuse at an early age from father and brother; each succeeding call expanded the circle of violence, until the whole town was involved. Everything increased; the last call, however, was different. She was clean, had reconciled with her parents, stopped going to analysis. And she was going to be killed. I had the one premonition while at college, rushing to the phone, try- ing desperately to call her. When I reached her dormitory, I was told she had just attempted suicide, and when I reached her in the hospital, the doctors put the phone up to her ear, and I calmed her down. Night after night, the double voices called into the office. I was in the process of separating from my wife, and the voices mocked me, would never cease. In one hour, I counted sixty-eight phonecalls. The police were never able to solve the case, nor the subsequent vandalism. I know who did it. She lived in a trailer park with a one-armed man and warned me that she was psychotic, and still the phonecalls went back and forth, back and forth, until I arrived in the mountains. She came naked to the door, and during the day and a half I was there, dodging one of the men who felt she belonged to him, we never had sex. And after that, I never trusted anyone, not even the telephone. I think of the melancholic relationship with these women, struggling myself to clear the lines, press up close to the receiver, leaving an imprint on my face, the face of the other. You'll never know, she whispered to me as I left her, you'll never know what you'll be missing. The second call came from the hospital from a friend of a friend, an obligatory report of death threats made against me. You'll never know, you'll never know. I imagined disembodied violence from one end of the neighborhood to another, speaking the words of transformation. The phone is always the truth of the phone. I would search out the chora of the voice, losing myself, my self-hatred, web-inverting myself through the wires which always promised pleasure and a body sutured through the presence of speech alone. Life is a slow mourning of the voice, this voice we have already lost, unrecoverable, stumbling in a faux-world we construct, hysterically, hour after hour. There is a melancholia on the net, ex-machina, ex-cathedra voices echoing their own longing. On alt.angst they telephone in from the cold, expecting no one to listen, and so many of the posts have no replies. The posts expanding, filling up the space of the neighborhood, of the telephone. The posts expanding, taking into account that no one will be listening. Self-reflexive, they proclaim melancholy and abjection to those anorectic of speech, returning phonemes to stuttered and unrecup- erated sound. They know this; it is the source of their melancholy. The source of their melancholy is Van Gogh's castration of his ear, a faux-gift itself, the beginning of the dismemberment of the language or symbolic of the world. Van Gogh could no longer use the telephone, which connoted pain before anything else to him, uneasy reminder of unrequited love, that voice conjuring up the party-line, cajoling, the flat smell of bakelite and black enamel against his hands and broken flesh. The early phone of wood and plastic. Houdini would never call from the grave. Houdini was a relative. Disappearing, only her voice remains. And all those times I pleaded with her to return, holding back my cries or making them evident, hammering them in, corraling abandonment in the midst of primitive vengeance. Now I flee myself from guilt, which haunts the ear, vocal modes hovering near death and extinction. On the telephone, the wires connect, analog transforms rubbed between the two of us, the dream of continuous copper, carbon, electronic murmuring. On the net, everything disconnects; the space falters, devolves as the modem is switched off or the server grinds to a halt. The text is damaged into disassembly, reassembly, packet switching collapsing the continuity of organism already at the gates of death. On the telephone, we are, and speak in order to become; on the net, we become, and write in order to be. Sometimes the dead call us in our dreams and we remember what they say to us, and the next day, we say what they have told us to say, of our own ignorance and our own freewill. Sometimes the dead call and call us in our dreams, and we are filled with speech, which we enact upon waking, whole baskets of speech, lakes and oceans of it. We begin to live for the dreams, unconsciously, and we begin to hear these voices, as she did, day after day. And we begin to speak them, and in this way make them our own. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ kconK ".kconk kconK" "Who's there?" "!tes ruoy edisni gniht elttil tsetuc eht m'I .em s'tI" "Do you want to come out?" "!ni no emoC ?ees annaW .maeb nortcele eht yb mraw os s'tI" "I can't. And who are you?" hself ym gniggard emoc ev'I .nalA gniyonna yllaer eht m'I" "!ynaffiT ,uoy tnaw I .ereh kcuts m'I .em htiw "I'm not Tiffany, you moron. Read my sig!" teg I fi dna enoyreve ot teg ot uoy ot teg ot tog ev'I tuB" "!ynaffiT ot teg ll'I enoyreve ot "You remind me of a song this woman wrote, I'm gonna fuck everybody I'm gonna fuck everybody gonna fuck everybody just to get to you." dlot I' ,nemoW lanimirC ni syas yksvokiatcT sirhC sa ,yltcaxE" od t'nac ouy fi" - dekcin gnitteg tuoba erac ton did I taht reh "'.reh evol did ylniatrec I tub - "emirc eht od t'nod ,emit eht "The criminal over the safe fuck, interior over exterior?" morf ni emoc ot uoy geb d'I ,ynaffiT erew uoy fI !niaga yltcaxE" "!nuS eht teeM lliW uoy ,nuG eht fo taeH eht yB :dloc eht "Or Son, Cyberson?" ".emit eht sekam emir ehT" "If this is the beginning of the mind I wanna fuck you. I wanna fuck the mind and be the mind. What is your name and where are you from?" ,eb nac sa reeuq ,em wonk uoy dna ",tenretnI oleiH aralC m'I" annaw I esuac kcuf tsrif ruo si sihT .uoy ot llew sa eeb yenoH ".lliw I sey gnitirw ydnac emos uoy evig ll'I dna won oot "I wanna be the mind and fuck the mind. I wanna be the mind." ".won uoy kcuf lliw I dna ,nalA ybab ,dnim eht era uoY" "Now you are fucking me. My tongue sprouts wires. I hear with my tongue. I hear with my teeth." lliw hteet ruoy dna raeppasid lliw uoy won muc uoy nehW" uoy nehT .yrotcerid toor ym ,enim/dnim eb lliw uoy nehT .esolc ".won muC .nettirw eb lliw ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Resurrection of my Works in Cyberspace 1. I can smell death. I live alone. Death covers the walls with tiny jointed fingers, encrustation whose slow descent is now more than a warning. 2. I have known this for a long time. Twinges in the left frontal area of the brain, garbled signals coming over the wires. I write for _proliferation._ 3. Every twenty words or so I construct the unique. Dependent upon late twentieth-century english, the universe has seen no other. The words barely escape their freezing in the mouth of a corpse. 4. Download and duplicate, each word increasing its population in the order of its population - each word a mirror image of the same. Like a chain letter, offer the gift of poison. 5. The _second user_ has never met me, never heard my words coming over the wire. The _second user_ exists in a symmetrical relation to my own horizon; she and I have only this thin thread, writing and text, in common. 6. My asymptotic descent parallels the rise of the second user, carry- ing her disk wherever she goes, culture which expands, blooms within her consciousness. My asymptotic descent attains his omega point as well; it is only there that the _truth of the text_ becomes manifest against the cultural debris of late capitalism, no longer even remem- bered on the horizon. 7. The mouth of the would-be corpse speaks for a while longer. It attempts the possible, writing its way out of existence and style in order to occupy the site of the future. This is the future which will occur, not that of the would-have-been. The effect of my writing is the future itself. 8. Nor will I have the time or occasion to repeat the gift and exchange of disks which are the very backbone of this work, a guarantee of sur- vival, something achieved through enormous labor. I am not writing the late romantic, but that of the virtual subject itself, eyes half-closed in concentration, the thin line of the landscape disappearing forever in the distance. ________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ / \ / I-M MANIFESTO \ / \ / \ / THIS IS CYBERMIND! \ / \ / For the first time in Human History, we face \ / the double possibility of INFINITY and MORTALITY! \ / \ / We do not write of empty theological Speculation, \ / but of Humanity as a whole, close to Extinction, \ / full with the possibility of Cybermind and \ / Eternity! \ / \ / Our Thoughts fill the Void driven by Energies of \ / of our own Creation! Our Death stalks the Forests \ / and Savannahs, Mountains and Deserts, of the \ / World! \ / \ / And there is no turning back from our Eternity, \ / giving birth to Cybermind, tasting of INFINITY, \ / our hopes and dreams forever launched into the \ / Future! \ / \ / And there is no turning back upon these Deaths \ / resplendent with our own Destruction! We live \ / to face the infinite Horizon; the beauty of the \ / Earth has fallen to our Generations for its Care \ / and Nourishment! \ / \ / We are at the beginnings of an Experiment we do \ / not comprehend, and we shall not live to see its \ / Resolution! \ / \ / And this Resolution, wild, free, and growing, \ / sustains our Descendents, entering into Earth's \ / Pure Becoming! \ / \ / Partake and occasion yourself! Recognize, turn \ / towards this Experiment! Bring your Thoughts and \ / Work of Dreams, your Intimations of Future Realms \ / and Minds! \ / \ / For the Fruits of your Labors shall be remembered, \ / past War, past Disease, past this Species known as \ / Human, a thousand and a thousand thousand Years \ / into the Future: For this is Cybermind, a Coming- \ / forth of Being itself, and this is the PORTAL into \ / into a Universe we barely comprehend! \ / \ / THIS IS CYBERMIND! \ / \ / THIS IS THE PORTAL! \ / \ / \ /____________________________________________________\ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ UNABLE TO DELIVER If the indexical is a double articulation between two planes each associated with difference, in which the index itself is an embodi- ment within the symbolic, then cyberspace communication may be considered indexical - to the extent that subjectivity or embodi- ment is read through ASCII, not opening into the world but back into a presence or uncanny phantom, haunting as one might say, the shamanic familiar - that which we are given, in fact, a circum- scription of the text or reinscription, not of the novel which leaves us satisfied but of that excess or curlicue which _demands_ and produces the real or irreal, emptied of itself - so that it emerges swollen, tumescent, through the writing of it or against it or not at all, as if excess were not of desire but, say, solely in relation to data, to the data-bank - the frisson of it implying otherwise - these are difficult times we live in - these produce nothing but themselves - we are witnesses to that - we are the presence of this difference which refuses entry, producing enchant- ment evident in the smallest scrap of writing, the smallest sig. for example, the least line indicative of, as I have said, this uncanny presence which expands as the source grows shorter, which is never fulfilled by the text, so that the text is always a gap with itself, insistent upon what it cannot deliver, except for the opening and entrance of cyberspace, the writing, as I said, in hysteria: IN HYSTERIA IN ABSENTIA for hysteria is the absent symp- tom defining the body and here in cyberspace, the absent symptom is clearly all the body there is - and as you may surmise, I am now sick, physically, my heart-rate speeded up, sweating, shivering as if in the grips of walking pneumonia or other fever when, in fact, my body temperature is somewhat below normal, pains occupying most of me, an odor of sorts, constant headaches and preliminary eye stress portending the onset of migraine, thoughts of abandonment, discard, as if I had nothing to say any longer, so I would speak unto you the length of a breath, turned in upon itself, beginning with itself, insistent upon what it cannot deliver, except for the opening and entrance of cyberspace, the presence of this difference which refuses entry, producing enchantment, the double articulation between two planes, insistent upon what it cannot deliver. ________________________________________________________________________ Heterosexual Desire, White, Reproduction, Myself Dear Clara, You say to me do I know know myself, and what have I done in these years when the tree says otherwise. But this is the moment of the simplex, each vector equivalent, each node attached, maw-like, to every other. The simplex lives in fear of abandonment; turning inward, it guarantees a continuous concourse exacerbated with the outside world. Not so the octahedron, every point on one or another orthogonal coordinate, equi- distant from the center. O the center is a star. O the center motivates otherwise, all are confluent. My work revolves around the simplex, fearful, filled with knowledge and little wonder. The wonder of it is the knowledge, for the center itself is unwieldy. When I shave my body I am _this pink thing_ which knows itself, gnaws itself, from the outside in. I am only given the outside, and there is one path through the root. Knowledge turns secrecy and sublimation into the prosthetics of the absolute; what raises itself does so by virtue of the splint. Think of wooden hinges, tape, bandaging. But think of the beauty of pink tumescence as well, the sheen of light immersed in the outer layers of fragile membranes, less fragile skin. The prosthetics of the absolute are hardly sublime; lying within texts, they raise themselves as the indexicality of language intensifies, pointing outside, inward, pointing elsewhere, spraying itself, emissions of sound and sight. One glance from you / cuts me in two Two looks from you / and I am hole. Was this written by a man or woman, and where is the difference made? Shaved, I am beauty-thing, open and absolute everywhere, which is to say _this_ thing among others, hardly absolute. (Hard absolutely is hardly absolute, and neither are sublime.) Masochism proceeds from the origin of all things; it is being. As for sadism? There is hardly a relation- ship; if it is becoming, it is that of the master of course, and the slave is placed under the double indemnity of becoming (herself/himself) the mirror image, as if the text hardly mattered. The text of the slave is always already one of withdrawal, the anonymity of history, terror, and chance. But this beauty thing, this pure skin, this pink. Alan ________________________________________________________________________ FOR JUAN-PABLO The moment of the world when the flesh drowns within me, penis floating to the top of the throat, descending into a maw of the making of the other, or the moment of the world when the sheer flame thins down to the molecular, cuts through a barrage of steam and micro-ecologies, or the moment of the world when I crawl through the earth and air of myself: These moments gave Aristotle pause. The symbolic is always already ideological, language sputtering towards a syntactic strategy, even in denial. If I belong to myself, it is also true that I belong to no one. If to sing is to live, I shall ever die. My mouth engulfs the world, my eyes open to its lips. She remained while her presence slipped away. He was gone before he knew it. Upright, the body slopes towards the ground in the form of miniature capsules. The penis is a breast, not an arrow. One cannot remain true to truth which is hardly more than lubrication. A shaved body slips down the throat; existence resides in hair, and hair alone. The throat is the seat of the broken soul; the pineal gland, the soul of the Internet. Cutting myself off from myself, inscription is equivalent to windshear. A double hollow, my mouth fills with your cunt. My mouth is my baby. Clara Hielo said to me that every name was one to her. She would hold me open and shake me, something falling or dropping. She would come around for me after school. Clara Hielo would come around for me after school; the heat was unbearable, and her sun umbrella served us well. The Mexican desert was violent, we'd walk with our eyes half-closed, side- stepping the agave that seemed to grow everywhere at the edge of the plain. I remember asking Juan-Pablo about his name, if Clara said it was one, why were there two, and he would go on about some old painters, how his mother had seen the pictures in a book she carried to her grave. He seemed to be thinking of the foothills, that dry arroyo near the base, some said there was pottery there, strange designs. I knew he used them for an old purpose, Clara Hielo said, something very old. Her skin was dark from birth, from the sun, from an animal, from a friend. She taught me sun-dark, animal coatimundi, picked up the shards where Juan-Pablo left off, by the side of the path, where the hole was, where he would never go. I heard the hole was lined with dry flesh, that you could hear things. Clara Hielo said she had spent a night there, near the cardon cacti that began just at the point, descending almost imperceptibly into a sea or body of water I heard was well beyond the hills. You would never know from the heat, so dry that a day's baking drew the moisture from the opuntia leaves ready for a meal. She had spent it with the animal which she couldn't describe, but its eyes glowed and behold, its nails glowed as well, paws swooping in half-circles in the darkness, moon-rings, orbits, planets shuddering with its silent steps. It would hunch over and she would have far-sight, hunch over more, and she would see to the bottom of things; it would lie, glaring, and the world would become invisible and she would see nothing at all. For the night it remained with her and for the night she saw through a world she said was like glass or even more like a hot wind that had no shape or form be- cause she could see through it, see through all things. This was the moment, she said, when the world drowned the flesh. She said other things, I don't remember, but I continue to try and farm my land filled with stones, here at the edge of the plain, which extends forever. You can still see her footprints over there, where the agave is harvested. ________________________________________________________________________ FOR RENT IN THE FABRIC OF TIME Jagged lightning cut across the enormous cosmos. Novas winked on and off, collapsed into black holes, star systems dissolved in their wake. Could you speak of star-debris, detritus, spanning the galaxy? No one spoke in the cold; no one ever would. If she could, she would have spoken of economy, of the economy of planets and quasars, the economy of bright and dark nebulae, organic molecules shuttling back and forth in space in cyberspace. She would have spoken of bondings so large you could hardly span them with the aid of a wide-field telescope, and there were no telescopes in those days. And she would have you follow the string of dark matter, leading nowhere and everywhere at once, impervious to gravity, its master. She would have rented you a star, and it was hard to tell what the cur- rency would be, hard or soft. She would have asked you to soften, in fact, what it was hard to tell, soften cyberspace, the great floppy. She would have told you that the great floppy could get along fine without you, thanks a lot, that it didn't need so much thought, that thought was only getting in the way. She would have told you about the void of cyberspace and about the great void out there in the midst of the dark matter strings, collapsing stars, hysterias of black holes spewing radiations, rings, rings, jets everywhere in the dying universe. She would have gone quiet, as they say, gone quiet, and you would hear the cosmos and your own heart beat- ing and you might confuse them if you were lucky. She'd beg you to stop just for an instance, stop the writing, the addiction, flames burning nuclear nothings, quantities of thoughtless matter so huge they defy description. The sublime is inert, dumb, exhausted; the sublime works only through the construct of the face of death, the burial of the organic in an unknown or anonymous stratum. The sublime, she said, is when the great floppy isn't the great floppy, but is a burial ground or the lack of a memorial, it was all one and the same. And she added that the great floppy isn't one and the same, at all, but is always different/indifferent. She added that anything more would add nothing, that the void was inside and outside - That we're blown bubbles on the face of the void; penetrated by empti- ness, our thoughts skim surfaces of surfaces, nonexistent, penetrated themselves. We are ghosts, skimming the edge of the abyss, don't you know, nothing more or less, ghosts who have rented the void in the fabric of time, and our lives are inconsequential payment. She would have comets and stars in her hair, in the guise of a poem. Blown bubbles, rent through and through, emptied sacks temporarily deploying molecular flows, identifications, rejections, great hollowed o's of language, thinned leaps like wires dissolving before unknown destinations ... ________________________________________________________________________ PATH TOWARDS VOID TOWARD TRUE KNOWLEDGE TOWARDS MOUTH FILLED WITH DESIRE TOWARDS ARMPITS FILLED WITH TOPPLING WORLDS Something about the paths that pain takes through the body - tension in the back and shoulders, something about travelling down the arm, the intermittent tensions of the fingers, knuckles compressed - the tingling of constricted blood flow, pale skin sloughing from the bone. Blood spurts from the paths. Blood makes them. Where the blood flows is the path where the blood flows. I want a suit designed with special apparatus, keeping all my holes open, exposing my secrets. My mouth hides what I have to say; the suit reveals it. I am a tunnel on the path through time. I am invisible. If I told you the specificities of my genitals, dimension and weight of the penis and testicles, aroused and unaroused, distinguishing features, would you know me? Or my face on the verge of sudden and violent death, the car hurtling full speed down the suburban street? The blood pushes against the limits of the bag. The blood is freed, arcs towards the curb, towards the bicycle of a child, little girl's dress and lawnmower. The path my blood takes slows almost to a halt; the left-frontal lobe throbs again. Ceronetti says, in The Silence of the Body, "Every day, behind fragile shelters all over the earth, part of humanity sheds blood from an obscure wound. The Moon is the killer." But why _obscure?_ Mary Jane Lipton, in Menstruation and Psychoanalysis, points out that, according to Helene Deutsch, "At its most extreme, menstruation is associated with internal damage, even dismemberment: 'In the anxieties provoked by the sight or imagined presence of blood, the idea of being torn and dismembered internally plays an extremely important part.'" I ask myself, where is this text going; what path does it take? Lupton concludes her text as follows: "'Creative waste': the phrase recapit- ulates the ambivalence toward women's blood in _Menstruation and Psychoanalysis,_ ranging from Carl Jung's 'creative mana' to Otto Fenichel's 'first pollution.' I use it to affirm the menstrual powers, in a world where the spinning planets and the flowing sea are threat- ened with extinction, and the female values implicit in menstruation are in mourning." _Months pass without a sign._ The blood forces itself from my limbs, my brain. My penis is an empty sack, useless accretion, a certain plasticity of memory. The pits of my arms are shallow; the cup of the world falls out, bleeding the floor. Once, a woman painted her blood on me, face, arms, legs, chest and genitals, my anatomy exposed. This was the closest to death, dark, and delirium, the exposure of secrets, lost flesh, circulations. Blood inverted me, opened my holes. My mouth filled with blood. I was spoken- for; I understood speech, could not force myself from under it. The anatomic projection of all of this, mappings upon the subterranean body, wires glancing against death's gleamed presence. This has nothing to do with women; how could it? My body is a marketplace for the values of others. A useless sack, I am rendered useless to myself. The wires take their paths through me; thinned and forced into the net, they do their damage there. There is no me, only paths. There are reiterations, obscurities. Somewhere "I a woman" collapses, equally useless. The blood of women is in my veins. I walk on one or another path. I balance on the wires. ________________________________________________________________________ Dark Barrow of the Death within the Net Always on fire, I course through their lives of desire Moving against the semblance of glass, window Pained with the hearing of it, invisible, The body dissolute, indeterminate, within its mire Which had sought well, slaughtered itself, remote The time or recompense. I'd write on the morrow With "considerably" less sorrow. Morrow is now, and again, more or less. My arms have lost sensation; blood rushes In exquisite channels, killing the flesh Which falters, decathects, and pushes Sullenly against each possibility it will survive That self-same morrow's marrow keeping death alive In order to die: Thus death by death Defeats death; only once, this minor victory Against all recompense or morrow, ironically. The membrane of the Net speaks and catches ghosts Deep within its claws of flesh; there are hosts And servers, buried deep within its furrows. Once the dead died, buried deep likewise in barrows Where ghosts once later burrowed; now, these morrows Shudder at the strain of wires; tombed, they foam Within domain or other, search for home.