Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.63.0608180047400.16232@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: My Life at the Edge of the World
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:47:51 -0400 (EDT)
My Life at the Edge of the World Who set me adrift but my fathers and mothers, releasing non-existent shackles, tightening the reins of no-horse. I meander among extractive industries, worlds the poorer for them. My share is meager; I scratch surfaces, dig into the abject muck of fires and desires. To date, I have had enough to eat, but this is temporary; from date, I shall be eaten. Of water, there is thirst, of food, there is hunger. This area has memories of roads. This area is like any other. My life, at the edge of the world, that's all. What remains, what is not all, forms a culture, residue, forms a story, theory, forms something to be said. The edge thins to non-existence; in the absence of gravity, the worst that can be expected is cuts, fractures, divisions. At the edge the only economics is that of want, beings are in solitary, smeared, transformed; moving inwards, they're cauterized. Every acceptance is cauterization, every process of acceptance is cauterization- mechanics. At the edge hydraulic models no longer hold; what is sublimated may not appear anywhere at all, comes forward frothing. The liquidity of the edge is vascular, viscous, uncanny among collapsing divisions of states of matter. Economies flow into negative space, arbitrary quantific- ations, decisions beyond the Pale where doormen wait. Holes are breaches are holes. Life at the edge is insipid, Dostoevsky had it right, illnesses, livers, spleens. Something's always wrong, something's gone amuck, that something sure is something, is already gone, broken, splattered, sputtered, splin- tered, spat. My life at the edge of the world garners the world, inscribes the world with its broken edges, decathects the world with its buckets of blood, disinvests the world with its poverties and suicides. At the edge of the world there are no events, no non-events, no states, no operators. At the edge of the world, no-name procedures of procedures, no-name protocols of protocols, no-name processes of processes; no name is not no-name, nor forgotten name, nor a-name, nor anomie, nor division and construction by negation. No-name is left at the edge of the world where my life is, where life is, skeins are skins, bones are borne. Only members are dismembered, clubs are clubbed, puns seep, split spilt pees. Tropes choke at the edge of the world where life is, life neither originated nor dissolved, life was earlier and later, life was middled, muddled, and life in the interior was harvesting, harvested, disenchanted. I'd write the story of my life as this life at the edge of the world, but it would be a story, and this is not a story but a claim, a claim from the edge - from an edge without gates, roads, byways, vectors, paths. Unclaimed this edge, unclaimed this life, unclaimed this world without edge.