Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.61.0410181513550.26480@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: baby jane
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 15:14:05 -0400 (EDT)
baby jane it's all over now. we've waited for some change; we've known all along we can't control ourselves. our best intentions led to definitions; definitions collapsed, one after another, as if eternity melted away, as if language slipped through our hands. structures became ghosts; words no longer mean in uneasy parades. we wait for votes, decisions, absolutes, that are lies before their forming in/formation. all time is borrowed; our environment hardly recognizes the continuous countdown of species, subspecies, whole orders of life. radiation bears harder beneath the onslaught of primates out of savanna, out of control. everything centers around control, the application of a function across a domain, already useless, porous, close to damaged memory. in the reversed world, suicide is the proclamation of bravery, as is cowardice, a creature crawling just a bit longer towards the future. the only absolute is the absence of god, spirit, soul; the hedge around the torah is wilderness itself, and the flames of the letters proclaim only another tired delusion. the human race is exhausted of itself; some of us pray for the end, for a temporary armageddon in the flux of things where the surface is cleansed of all humanity, other things lining up for choice and conceivable tomorrows. don't misunderstand, the wilderness itself is the aegis and nadir of pain, self-warning control systems without regard to the registration of injury. what we have is less than nothing; only our despair is our own; only our despair is memory of despair. the play of cyber-crypto xmen xplay is already the play of the dead; the joystick hardly moves, and the dream of implants takes nothing to an equivalent level. our reality is one of fracture. there's no turning back, because there was no progress, no travelled road, in the first place. we're living in the burned-out case of the world, the burned-out shell of existence. distraught survivors, we dream of other planets, other stars, erosions. we stumble through ourselves, in self-defined pathos; we've always stumbled, but nothing was ever due. now islands disappear as well, there is shuddering at our own ineptitude. but whose shuddering, whose final corrosion, the corrosion of finality itself? _