Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.58.0311051031110.8261@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: Don't listen to me.
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2003 10:31:21 -0500 (EST)
Don't listen to me. I honestly believe the only truths that exist are discovered by people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. After that it's downhill, gone forever, all that teen energy lost in the fabrication of real-life institutions harboring one forever. The adult world destroys insight, theorizes endlessly, corrects and creates imagined wrongs, produces hatreds and bureaucracies, rites and religions. Romeo and Juliet should never have lived into adulthood; they are the first and last philosophers. We learn later on in life to disseminate, dissimulate, hem and haw, build up layers of scar tissue covering our mistakes, as I've said before, we're carved into the semblance of a human being. But the carving is monstrous, the thickness of the tissue - which isn't layered as many popularly believe - is cancerous and filled with harbingers of future death. There's no space for breathing, none for proper motion, we take medication only to prolong our misery. The follies of youth are the birth of the world, rock and rap head-bang the difficult meanderings of latter-day classical composers honored for their ripe old age. Contradiction comes only later in life; we're all born into clarity. Trust no one but yourself, preen, move hard against and into the world, write forever. We take your literature, call it stereotyped, sentimental, typical, mean, and turn it into illegible stylings of problematic language, questions that only answer themselves in the ugly dawn of old age. Hormonal fury drives all of us; the rest is substance, paste, obsequiously crawling from one religion or theory to another, desperately hanging on to the presumed final word, or else talking about the journey of life, which should have ended long ago. The elders lure the young into war and other disasters, while decrying gangs which threaten their own territory. Revolution and eternal questioning are the only truths, beaten out of the world, or forgotten, as one hurtles towards the fourth decade of life. Kill the messenger in yourselves; there's nothing more to deliver, not even at warp speed. The internet brings the same old thing; it's already past its prime. Gather elsewhere, go.