Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1007211438130.7186@panix1.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Occupying many positions
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:38:30 -0400 (EDT)
Occupying many positions, Occupying many positions, some of what I write must be true, in one or another world. Shall I kill myself now, knowing my mind is intact and will survive as such in heaven. If I die now, my partner will have long years ahead of her, fulfilled with the promise of youth. If I live I no longer want to watch myself. I refuse to stumble over the forgotten language that recomposes itself out of decomposition. I skitter over the truth; skitter is all that exists. I mean to return to autobiography, skirting the worst incidents, curtailing the self-pity, creating flesh from meat, and meat from suffusion of language. My work consists of aphorisms cauterized from the real. More and more I understand what I mean to accomplish remains out of reach; the best I can hope for is the incoherency of the anonymous. Out there, I am either nuisance or eccentric. Death ties a noose around my work. To call what I do 'work' is only to imply that a certain amount of energy and labor was exhausted in the creation of ephemera. If, as I believe, I have always been without a face, why can I never look in a mirror? I'll see everything else in the world, but I work to eliminate humans in my photographs and films. The fact that I can insert anything anywhere debilitates my philosophical analysis. Philosophy is always crippled, produced in a state of being-crippled. The failure of hobbies results in philosophy, which has no object. I can only write myself out of existence; the rest is already lost. If I die 'now' as opposed to 'now' - what is left out, what remains to be inherited, what has been lost, what has been gained? I used to read without writers; now I write without readers. There is never enough time to circumvent death. Circumambulation requires an origin and there is always the failure of completion. My music insists on notes between notes, and other notes between them; each clamors for position, for its right to be heard, for the necessity of sound and sounding in the face of annihilation. The return to the tonic is always momentary. The tonic slides out, depends, not on memory, but on the forgetting of larger, broken intervals. The tonic is never a decision. Truths yield up truths, truths yield up, truths yield. In the end, every thing gives up import; import neither gives nor gives up. If this is not written, if this is not read, then what? If this is written, and then lost, then what? If this is read and lost, then what? And then what?