Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0905251109350.9382@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: World ii
Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 11:09:54 -0400 (EDT)
World ii Fields appear to have no touch, nothing germane to the body; one thinks of action at a distance because distance seems emptied. Heat transgresses for example; nothing happens in mediated space. Magnetism implies qualitative distinction; the field attracts or repels, depending on polarity and just what is brought into the vicinity. An approach may be +/0/-; two out of three attract. Epistemologically, ontologically, difference is drawn out - here is something out of the ordinary, perhaps non-Aristotelian, who knows? In any case, it's neither 'spirit' nor a thing of the world, although clearly it is of the world, within the world, part and parcel of the real. No hands push or pull the metal; were it not so common, it would be miracle, but it seems to 'come along with' everything familiar. Even boundary is contradicted, and one might be sure that the attractive impulse, presence, is there, even in the absence of the Other. It just _is._ This should, except for that familiarity, already have signaled a break, bringing the edifice of thing and logic down. How is space and time - how is space-time - when something so common is there that is not within as an object is within, that is not graspable, except by effect? Energy already seems something other than the world's thinging, yet just as concrete. It's not far from these considerations to an aporia of three- dimensionality, not to mention mass, image, light, heat, all those spatial fillings that seem neither possessed of projection or ordinary physical- ity. The clues are there, have been there. Yet again, the dream is an Other whose ontology isn't simply a mapping for or against a real (which, yes, might be the dream itself) - we're back where we startled from, making harmony and fit where none exists in the life-world, where bridges are ad-hoc at best, still taking on the characteristics of extensions and truth. Then there's dirt, filth; I remember Socrates' bypassing mud as ideality - already a fly in the ointment. What simmers beneath the surface isn't just abjection; it's also froth, roil, wisp, membrane, magma, clay, plasma, species productions and particle rains. And it's here that the dissolution of things is the clearest, that humans are capable of tempor- arily reining-in, a momentary act of meaning-generation. Yet we're invaded by our knowledge; our projection bodies are processing, in the process of, corrosion, of being-vanquished, of always already disappearance of memory and noise. When lines are drawn, analog/digital, they're dependent on an alien phenomenology of potential wells: Existence is always bypassed, and bypassing characterizes existence. Fielding and being slough and incohere; to be sure there are formings and swarmings and no one can say much more.