Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.61.0502111236420.8017@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: genesis genesis redux revisited
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 12:36:52 -0500 (EST)
genesis genesis redux revisited The explanation: genesis genesis redux is a reduction of the book of Genesis, the originary book from which the spiral of monotheism extends. Creation exists in the performativity of speech; "God says," which of course presupposes a language, sound and an atmosphere to convey it, throat, vocal cords, lips, teeth, and tongue to configure it. "God says," and it is done, completed, vocalization into matter. But there remains, at the beginning, as if in reverse, the remnant, the speaking itself, the origin and material grounding of that language, Hebrew, Akkadian, Assyrian, Ugaritic, for example, from which creation ensues. Wherever the account begins, began, in whatever district, desert, forest, marshland. A word is created only once. The creation of the word proceeds from the existence of language; language is always already there, just as information is: If we only had the means and patience to read it! genesis genesis redux borrows and extends the materialization of language; it also works through the aesthetics of the Thousand Character Essay. Ellen Zweig and I have been translating this, it seems, forever, stumbling across difficult classical Chinese, without any background 'for this sort of thing.' In the Essay, a thousand different characters are used; the essay itself is a thousand characters long, and there is no repetition. One begins anew with each character, and here we are. genesis genesis redux transforms the book of Genesis, and this is a better transformation than one I had previously completed, this is more accurate. This transformation is, and must be, the originary text of language, and therefore must be Important, and a source for scholars of Revelation in English. The words in genesis genesis redux are all unique; the programming below (with eliminate.pl a perl program by Florian Cramer, upon my request) takes the original text, such as King James would have it, and eliminates all redundancy. Every word is returned to its primordial uniqueness, regardless of syntax and placement. As such, the text descends into increasingly terse languaging, since the more common words are of course eliminated early on. By the end of it, the protolanguage code of all enunciation appears; the whole constitutes a supplication to language itself, my own production of the Word of God, with no emendation, with a purity that would have been well nigh inconceivable before the digital age. Here is an accounting. cat genesis.txt | tr -cs A-Za-z '\012' | tr A-Z a-z > yy perl eliminate.pl < yy > redux.txt where eliminate.pl is below: #!/usr/local/bin/perl5 while (<STDIN>) { @words = split /[\s]+/, $_; @spaces = split /[\S]+/, $_; for ($x=0; $x <= $#words; $x++) { $word_count{$words[$x]}++; if ($word_count{$words[$x]} == 1) {print $words[$x],$spaces[$x+1]} } } _______________________________________________________________________