Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0701080240450.29593@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: oh lether to foofwa
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2007 02:41:08 -0500 (EST)
Foofwa - This is an open letter of sorts. I've been working with materials from Geneva for over two months now, not including the third trip itself. In the irreality of the image - an image the opposite of the punctum, an image surrounded by an imaginary gnawing at the surface content - I've lost myself, almost become sick. Distance in time and distance in space are both inherently obdurate, unbreachable; there are no jump cuts in the real, and if I've made an error in video for example, it remains an error, cut off from the source. It's not only the affaire-Maud (aM forthwith), but the very notion that such affaires now, are at a distance; they are a constancy. The Alps, the Aletsch glacier, retreat into the format of a picture book, and with every step of that retreat, something is lost within the haptic; touch has disappeared, replaced by "communication" which already foreshadows the permanency of distance. There is something else, however, which is the defuge or decathecting, which began with aM but continued as time advanced. Every video I made with the Geneva or Alps material involved a yanking-back; I couldn't return to the measure of the real, for example, that the four of us most likely felt in the grange. This relates to memory in general - in this case, differentiated (in the sense of a formal operation upon internal time consciousness) and exacerbated; to crawl back would be to be torn to shreds upon the spikes of events, words, adjectives, vowels. Yet it has been a long time since I've been so close to the bone with a subject, in particular one so close itself to the sublime. I'm tired of naked bodies and after aM, they become a kind of litter reminiscent of war. And all the movements such bodies might made, from falling and failing to flying and fleeing - spanning the continuum from suicide to death - just so - not tiredness, no, certainly not arousal, not disinterest - perhaps the flight of something which never really approached. Day after day I've looked through image after image, tape after tape, as if some secret would arise through special effects of even juxtaposition; what occurred instead was an internal mapping of every step all of us took physically and psychologically through that, and every other, landscape. Every organism is an organism of and by slaughter, every landscape, a landscape of death. Hannibal's elephants haunt the Alps. Where nothing lives always has fuzzy boundaries where the limited exigencies of life are contested. I think of the unholy matri-patrimony of aM and what it has led to, almost a denial that only Rilke was capable of. Actually climbing to the bluff, the church, the grave, seems an impossible memory now, as if I have robbed the experience of another. Memories always teeter on the verge of recognition. So this is to say, and not to say, that the work from Geneva and the Alps has entered a period of dormancy, one with an almost-consciousness of waiting. The rocks still gnaw at me; I think of the possibility of climb- ing between the twin peaks near La Gruyere. That would be an _episode._ So the work continues, wide-awake, and has entered a period of illustra- tion, as time distances and we become increasingly disinvested of psycho- logical trauma, if not of psycho-history itself. I manipulate images of a woman I don't know, have never known, among motions and images of the rest of us. That this would lead back to Aletsch, through Blatten to Belalp, is both a dream and an obsession. And we would be there in this false spring, when the world supports clear skies and a kind of moody warmth that appears after great exertion. And that one or another would be furiously creating. And that that, would be that.