Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.63.0604101146420.27596@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: pre-sent
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 11:47:12 -0400 (EDT)
please, won't you hook up to my blog, http://nikuko.blogspot.com ? pre-sent Leslie Thornton, to me, in a dream, "I realized something about your work, Alan. You never historicize anything. History has no place in it." I re- ply, "It's similar to Michel Serres taking Lucretius as his contemporary. My work is situated in the present and argues in the present. I have no use for history." I am on a vector now towards death. When I was younger, I could always believe my life was only half over, that my creative work was ahead of me. Now, it's now, and I have no time to lose. Every day wasted is an irre- trievable loss. Samuel Johnson: "I have no begun the sixtieth year of my life. How the last year has past I am unwilling to terrify myself with thinking. This day has been past in great perturbation...and my distress has had very little intermission... This day it came into my mind to write the history of my melancholy. On this I purpose to deliberate. I know not whether it may not too much disturb me. ..." I work towards the purpose of canceling such melancholy, which necessar- ily in-forms everything I do. In other words, the subject of the flight towards death becomes a subject of a flight against it, melancholic, a great waste. In every dark night, I take comfort only in the vanity and uselessness of comfort. I do not write history, because I fear it; that way lies madness and even earlier death. Thus: I remain on the barrens of the present. As long as present is present, I survive. The slightest break brings black corrosion. http://www.asondheim.org/readhwk5.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/readhwk6.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/readhwk7.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/readhwk8.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/readhwk9.jpg please, won't you hook up to my blog, http://nikuko.blogspot.com ?