Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1112290336100.2231@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: my writing of infinite depth
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 03:37:38 -0500 (EST)
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. =========================================================================