Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.44.0210070137440.18409-100000@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: i
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 01:37:53 -0400 (EDT)
i don't have the field, the space, to write, to rewrite, properly, to contain the words, ascertain the exigencies of the concepts, internalize them. this is writing on the margins of writing; this is writing on the move, writing on walls, the scrawl, the scribble - there's no time for anything else. this is the theory of the inscription, the cut, the incision. this is my life's work under the signs of illness and poverty. this is the begging for another month, another day, another hour. this is the moment of the last rite, unfulfilled promise. this is everything from the world already gone, it's gone ahead. i can say i've seen it passing by at high speed. i've almost caught up with it. there are times i sit, sometimes when i sleep, it's almost in my grasp. but it continues, the ontologies are radically different; there's no way the hand holds on, no way the eye sees, the ear hears. it's gone before i'm awake, before i have a chance to move, before i have a chance to stand, to write. it's gone before the next meal, gone before the worries of staying alive. there's not a day that i haven't felt ill for the past several months. there's not a day i haven't had shaking, slight thought, chills, but a reminder or remainder, always present, an uncontrollable shuddering. the writing and the reading proceed in pain; recently, they're taken over by a dull anger that things have to be this way. i'm waiting for the moment when everything breaks - when i can catch it, hold it in my hands, place it within the context of the book or essay, video or video-speech, the gestural movement of the arms, the fingers dancing on the keys, evanescent sounds. it's all the case, it's all the case of all of us, it distorts, crumbles, without lack of further evidence, financial stability; my theory is a theory of stress and poverty, the theory of rising painfully in the morning, crashing sleepless at night, imbecility of it all. at night i lie awake waiting to capture or entrap it, but as i've said repeatedly, it continues to elude me, playing with my consciousness, already exhausted, until it appears at the periphery of my vision or whispering to me, just for a second, an instant, and then it's gone, and there are the lyings-awake and walkabouts until it appears again, often within the same night, stuttering as the frames of a film stutter, as if there were continuity to my work, as if it could be held down into the form, taking on the semblance of the form, corrupting and distorting just on the verge of wakefulness into pain, the theory or essay or book, the coherent thought, the gesture fully carried through, the boy and girl with broken arms ===