The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

December 29, 2011


just a little bit farther

http://www.alansondheim.org/clinamen.mp4

no inside, no outside, no direction, an urgency, a distance
beyond itself, a diacritical mark, a birth or push, a death
or pull, just a little more, just an urgency of sight, just
a sight of urgency, sight for sore eyes, site for soaring
eyes, just anyway at all, neither here nor there, just a
swerve and a run, just the running of a swerve, just the
urgency of it, the disquisitional mark, the dialectical birth,
just the pull of it, just a little less, just looking about,
neither here nor there, just a distance a little bit beyond,
just a sight for sore eyes, just little deaths everywhere,
little births, bursts or pulls, a little more pull, little
more push, just nothing, remain here, i'll go ahead

my writing of infinite depth
=========================================================================
my writing is my most important medium. it lacks the seduction of image
and sound, of performance and the smell of bodies; it lacks the arousal
accompanying the dreams or deliriums of the residue of flesh. instead,
there is always a substitution: that of the body flailing behind the
horse-drawn cart, bouncing from field to field, until not even the bones
are left, just the broken skein of tissues that once harbored thought.
it's here in this delirium that thought is born, out of exigency, out of
urgency, before its disappearance into the lost furniture of the world.
but it's where depth occurs in my work; nowhere else are wonder and beauty
at a loss, leaving the breaking structures intact in their lack of choice.
if you want to know me, the writing is the only path that carries sense,
not sensibility. i leave behind a broken family. i refuse to heal. i
refuse the scars they insist upon me. i refuse their trappings of shame
and guilt. i move towards the theoretical move, aware that theory, too, is
a body in a field. it is that move which occasions wayward and untoward
loss, from which there is no cure, that move which immures in the heat-
death of the universe, as if that were imminent and immanent. to awaken is
to witness death, and slaughter, and extinction, the natural disordering
of things. there are witnessed and unwitnessed disorderings, and the
former tend towards retardation, holding back until the wreckage passes.
that is called scar tissue, is called history, is called culture, and from
there the uncanny simulacrum of order emerges. hands tear at each other in
collaboration or enumeration of firsts which form nothing more than
holarchy, which were never ordered in the first place. the cardinals gave
way a long time ago, and ordinals, ordination, is a matter of clutching.
in the midst of all of this, turmoil is manifest, clutching is localized,
and only the dream of the transfinite continues the grotesquery of hope,
that evil will be sutured shut before the fall. examine all of this from
the viewpoint of any species hopelessly on the way to extinction, and
what's left of the world falls apart; memory no longer encompasses, and
the trace is irretrievable, consigned to the dead-end holographic without
illumination in sight. i live there, i inhabit that, this, and it is here,
there, that the world purveys truth, irretrievable and immersive as well.
such is the thing that it rings; for every truth, there is a collapse of
infinity, and for every falsehood, there is the unbearable richness of
being. to write this is to recognize its invisibility, the impossibility
of illustration in any medium other than the forest of symbols always
already in the process of burning to the ground. visiting hours are any
time in the day or night. i live only for them, awaiting the rotting of my
mind. in my eye, jennifer and julu, nikuko and travis, honey and alan,
accompany me, their organs, bones, and flesh already fallen by the side of
the road that is, in reality, a plain, open in every direction, neither
going nor indicating anywhere, any thing. my little band of characters is
in the process is dissolution. my little world becomes a world of stories
and no audience, my audience becomes a world of stories and no audience.
one no longer speaks with smashed mouths, writes with smashed fingers,
sees through the eyes of the death of the other, dreams or hears that way.
it is always ultimate writing because it is always urgent. it goes nowhere
because there is nowhere to go. destinations fall off the map which has
disappeared. every dream is a dream of death, every gem outlives the decay
of a pion, bringing misery in its wake. there is less and less time to
tell stories. did i say audience. was there any: 'my writing is my most
important medium.' nothing else speaks. i write in an unknown tongue.
=========================================================================

for Carol Novack

http://www.alansondheim.org/blanking.mp4

I was working on this, shot with Foofwa d'Imobilite at Eyebeam,
when I heard the news that Carol Novack had died. for many of us,
this was unexpected and awful, as if the year couldn't end
without just one more tragedy. Foofwa and I had talked about our
work together, earlier, about issues of pain, wounding, death;
I think this piece, made at the time, is all I could do, I speak
through image and sound, these words already lost, resting in
peace

thank you Foofwa and Jamie and Jackson at Eyebeam

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