Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0702171237320.24974@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>,
Cyberculture <cyberculture@zacha.org>
Subject: In response to the singing of death, repertoire, life-in-death,
digital
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2007 12:37:46 -0500 (EST)
iii In response to the singing of death, repertoire, life-in-death, digital http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnzPy6SfvYo (both small) or looped http://www.asondheim.org/faceoff3.mov (better resolution) Death doesn't become a song; the song is prior to death. The threshold which lays poetics to rest perhaps, something Auschwitz clearly didn't do, is that - at least for me - of everything we might hold dear - that is, the wild, the compassionate, survival with grace. It's hard to visualize the catastrophe around the corner, when we associate catastrophe literally with sudden transformation, war, trauma - not this slow rise of tempera- ture, or the picking off of animals one by one. We react as if it were another turn or fear of the apocalypse, i.e. 'we've heard it all before' - as if this means it's not there now, we're in a permanent state of crying wolf. But animals literally on their last legs have heard it as well, time and time again, and still it comes. I'm at a loss for the poetics here, just as in I think Parmenides, Socrates was at a loss when muck, mud, was brought to the foreground in the discussion of ideal forms. Within the digital, within the idealized digital, there is no in-between - either here/there, or 0/1, or whateverx/whatevery - the rest of the world is held at bay behind the walls of a potential well sufficient to permit communication in the small - i.e. to permit communication. One might say: within the liminal, the digital doesn't exist - the analogic exists only within the liminal. Aphoristic, but accurate, perhaps nothing more needs to be said, or what else might be said might be of or within an/other register.