Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1209101954290.11937@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: The Essay in All its Forms
Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2012 19:55:24 -0400 (EDT)
The Essay in All its Forms The Beginning This is where the essay begins, with the title of this line performing modernism. The Middle The twitching in my left frontal lobe apparently isn't the result of TIA, but a stylistic device originating in postmodernism. The End I came and wrote and died, an original ending stemming from my own immutable style related to early European phenomenology and late American (including Canada of course) new media content. The Middle of the End I extend my life through writing, this could just as easily be Wittgenstein's laundry list or post-mortem memo. Back to the twitches: I haven't had any today, creating a sense of worry in the reader who might assume something is coming like the metaphor of a dust-storm just over the horizon. The End of the End I pride myself on the cleverness of my cleverness, in imitation of current writers (there must be many) who - later, rather than sooner (I'm always optimistic) - will inevitably fall through the cracks. So a new beginning, and here I am. If I've learned anything, it's this - there's no way I can look around and understand everything I'm seeing. Whatever I cut up will have a new beginning and a new invocation - where the essay begins, performing a new style, having been borne across any number of genres and motivations. So again "I find myself in the middle of things" and the middle is always where I find myself, and is always a muddle. Like <your name here> I pride myself on the clarity of my words. Aren't our words always clear to ourselves? Or we might return to the beginning of the sentence or book, appalled at what we have found, which we'd gladly erase if we hadn't already been in the middle of it - the middle of the beginning. The End of the End is a phrase constituting a breath or pause in an essay taking its roots from what is already plagiarized, there's no need to go into details. Or necessity. There's no necessity to go into details. It's a reached point but it's also a phrase that might or might not need correcting. Think of correction as a place: a correctional institute for example, which filters language inmates in and out of incarceration, inmates held in abeyance. Then nothing has changed and we might add that America (Canada excluded) has the greatest number of words undergoing continuous correction, of any country on the planet. It depends (again of course) since every correction is already a strategy, and has nothing at all to do with the greater good; in fact, goodness has nothing to do with anything here. There is no constitutionality in relation to the correctness of words. Every use modifies every other use and so in a sense every use is useless. For a newness might always collapse, always necessitate correction - it's the same old story here, tawdry and abject, promising the world but delivering nothing in its stead. The Beginning of the Beginning This is better, an escape clause from the thinking police, increasingly turning paramilitary and at the service of the upper one per cent of the upper one per cent. Remember they know each other, but at the beginning of the world everything is erased. Being erased is also the erasure of beings and of Being, so we might dream of new mediums, new ectoplasms, new technologies, carrying us forward, but carrying us without history, without origin, naked except for the clothes on our backs. Did we, at one point, say words? Were any of them saved? And does or will this end here?