Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.61.0502100016280.11711@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: after my death, i have been thinking about this writing
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:16:36 -0500 (EST)
after my death, i have been thinking about this writing you would notice my death as an afterthought, peripheral topos; or rather, you wouldn't notice it at all. it would emerge, slowly, out of the mud into consciousness; someone else might say something, might send an obit, and that would serve as the fulcrum or divisor of event and time. but not for you, and for me only in the past anterior, as if i might have noticed what i could not during and after the fact, the passage. it would change everything, this writing, the speaking and speaker of this writing, and of other writings that pass through my name, and through the names of others speaking my name, perhaps borrowing it in an area in which no return is possible. the writing, the writing plural, writings, would become remnants, signs of a life, symptomologies for interpretation, and interpretations which i could never answer, which would remain in other discursive strata, back and forth, without my author/ity and for that matter, sourceless, something that may be a matter of pride for the interpreters, a dissection table perhaps. the writing, all this oozing about death, this reiteration, inconceivable recuperation, would become uncanny, unheimlich, stateless, as if it were once again replete with the fecundity of speech, a paradox. in my absence, in the absence of my jarring personality, it would be recognized for what it is, a continuous meditation by the reader as much as by the writer, something ongoing, something freed from my personality. in this freeing the words would speak, as if my magic. they would be heard and seen for what they are: literature, philosophy, psychology. one might be heard to say, i knew him when, but that knowledge is of a shell, would be of a shell, and would be a shell. recognition would surely come, recognition of speaking and writing as an afterthought, recognition of a stranger behind one on the street, you can sense his eyes. the death would be forgotten in the reading of the writing, for what would remain would be just that, the reading, nothing more, nothing less, and the fluidity of a writing now always vulnerable, always on the verge of disappearance. but there would remain this sensation, one might sense it as a shuddering, the interpretation would come later, and would require work. the shuddering would submerge in everyday life among the living of men and women still alive. the shuddering would later bring the writing to the foreground for you and newer readers and readers born after the time in which i died. you would know all of this, reading the writing i have written, after the death, after i am no longer writing, at least writing in the ordinary sense. you would write what you know. _