Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0901180228260.25618@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: vents and vestments
Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 02:28:47 -0500 (EST)
vents and vestments http://www.alansondheim.org/ vent png series Perhaps I am too modest in my literary vestments, as if I promised nothing but moribund psychedelia for the purpose of entertainment or vision. I believe neither in vision nor spirit, and what you see is pretty much all there is, philosophical scaffolding notwithstanding. In these instances for example, an artificial topography is imposed on the 4-dimensional manifold that constitutes Second Life, since behaviors and other dynamic actions are equally susceptible under the law and lien of scripts. Here are simulacra of vents or smokers, and true to form, the emissions spew from somewhere beneath the surface, within a sea best described as _blue filter, details falling off, surface ripplings, and refractions as such apparently move in a windless, airless, spiritless sky._ Filtration, as anyone with sunglasses knows, gives magic to the world, eliminating the everyday, as if emphasis were the result of fecundity, not reduction. Now, here, nothing is promised, no premise, but that of the _index_ which, as governor or government, governs all things, all processes, all splayed and displayed solids, liquids, gases, and plasmas, such as are reconsti- tuted in the virtual environment of Second Life. As the poet Thomas Holley Chivers says, Like two spirits in one being, Were our souls, dear Isadore! Every object singly seeing-- In all things, like one, agreeing In those halcyon days of yore. We shall live so in our being Up in Heaven, dear Isadore! There have been so many of the variety of _amanuensis,_ from Jennifer and Julu to Nikuko, from Doctor Leopold Konninger and Travis to Aylan, from Clara through Honey - and all of the many other emanants who have given time and space, duty and behavior, to what may only be considered a use- less or quixotic enterprise. And how lonely the 'only' in that sentence, an isolated fabrication, meaningless to the deepest degree, _only_ imbued what what we can bring to it! If this were not spirit, nothing is; if this is spirit, nothing _is._