The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

text, sound and image from splitting the world *


http://www.alansondheim.org/splittingtheworld.mp4
http://www.alansondheim.org/split1.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/split2.mp3

the buddha exfoliates, negation cuts into nothing, suzuki's account of the
crucifix emphasizes not only ego but object; buddha visuddhimagga scrapes
away at the object until abjection remains; abjection's swept under the
re: religious purity - the scraping away in buddhism is the scraping away
of ontology - in the west, epistemology - the resurrection is an issue of
the episteme, contract, how do we know what we know etc. - tantric
initiation is the _other hand_ of ontology - it's a move from the ikonic
to the imaginary - w/ resurrection from the ikonic to the symbolic - in
the virtual world you're all skin and bones, articulated skeletons,
polygons, cloud clusters; in resurrection you're all flesh, nothing much
changes, you're there, you're suppurating, lazarus opposed to julu twine -
"Let us try to realize the awe-stricken dismay which must have oppressed
man's mind on the infliction of his first wound, his first experience of
pain; -- the breach of surface disclosing to his sight his blood flowing
unceasingly, or leaping, at sustained intervals, from its opened chambers,
his sense of fainting, and his untimely sinking on the earth under the
foretaste of death; this, too, with the recent denunciation, 'Thou shalt
surely die," still ringing in his ears.'" (John Hilton, Rest and Pain.)
The world splitting fissures the world; the world divided creates an
episteme. Inscribing difference, that be something oddly enough, of the
resurrection, so the suturing, what is it? the same again, same body, same
name, just a little bit older; the fissure operates within-beneath the
sign of negation, ontologies the same everywhere; one might say at best
"The residue of the fissure is the fissure." The wound has no bearing on
resurrection, which occurs anyway. But the wound bares and bears on the
fissure, is the fissure - the episteme has the addition of a curlicue or
diacritical mark, a mark already exhausted, bearing nothing, not a hard
mark to bare or bear. It might as well disappear into the slough, it
disappears there, just like that. Not even a spark; it would let you know
if there were a spark, and a char. Nothing like that, nothing like that at
all, nothing at all. */sound and image bring the sight/site/citation in,
philosophy at the crossroads of text and perception, philosophy leaking,
pooling, there might have been a _quincunx._/*

* originally "in two," no need for that.