Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1209211244520.22868@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Precipice
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:47:46 -0400 (EDT)
Precipice To write on suicide, or death, or suffering, is always to make a wager, not with oneself, but with the other: that the writing ultimately is not a talisman, is neither sympathetic nor empathetic magic, but exists in a realm of its own, where nothing has consequence. Otherwise the writing becomes a cry for help, something tawdry, beyond or beneath consideration. So the wager must be made, the theory must remains as such, attributed nowhere, to nothing, emptied, not of content, but of consequence. What, for example, would occur if this were the last written statement I've made, publicly or privately? What of the rest of my work, how would that be garnered or distributed? The material possessions would be given their due, no longer united as collocation, community, or collectivity, but transmitted elsewhere, fallen into other and alien hands that would efface the history I've taken so much care to preserve. Conversely, the digital would be distributed, living within a phenomenology of inscription and the corporate - for the digital is always corporate and always inscribed - and thus would be disseminated, much as it is now, until the material is forgotten, or the sites begin to close down, one after another, and everything is lost. I have no faith in the digital, but I put my trust there, that something would remain, as if in an entirety, within its aegis - that each stroke of the bow for example, would carry the movement of a human in its memory, that each sound would be the uncanny resonance of that movement. What if the movement were the last, that no more sound or movement would occur, that all that would come after would be the remnant, debris, residue? My father slipped away and then was gone and there is, as of yet, no stone to mark him, nothing but the position-in-relation, of my mother or other grave, or the graves of my mother's family. The stone will be there, obdurate, remarked, unremarked against the mountain where the graves are, but that absence, now, of the granite also marks the absence of the analogic world, as both analog and digital become other within new and competing cosmologies that return to us the inconceivability of multiverses and space-time so near the Planck's constant as to be always already naught, and forever, and beyond recall or recalling-forth. It is froth. Perhaps "It is froth" would be the finality of my thought, neither death nor suffering nor suicide, but imminent in relation to stroke or cataclysm - what then? That the description of froth is froth itself? I am writing this with closed eyes, without the recall or resonance as well of the upper portions of the essay; it continues and returns, but the return is an accident. And I must clear up the feeling that R.H. has betrayed me in the past, and has remained smug about it ever since - and yet he may well not be alive, or in good health, or even capable of reading this. I want to write on Azure and her work, this is something that has been with me, a kind of thinking centered on her arrangements and rearrangements, her mixture of craft and content half virtual and half real, as in the work for example of Ree Morton, or what I remember of the work of Nancy Kitchel. But Azure has remained with me for so many years now, with a grace I could not imagine, and a creativity which is always there and unknowingly bearing the gifts of depth of wonder, which has kept me alive, within or without the rubble that constitutes my thinking far too often. I am always awaiting the world, I am always on the verge, and as I grow older I fear that discovery may become nothing but murmur at the futility of it all. So I return, still sightless, to the original theme, that of the constituting of endpoints, within which one will be unique, and begin the recession into history and dispersion that one always fears. What we do with our books and belongings is continue a process of retardation, holding back the decay, tending them like good steward, so that they may yet add another century to their well-being. They're dependent in a way that humans are not, and we ourselves are not. We are on the lip or nub, not of the body and its abjection, but just beyond both, near the precipice where the good topples according to catastrophe theory; what remains in the valleys are pools of time that themselves seep elsewhen and elsewise. The only theory is that within which this self suffuses life and the living; theory is always theory with its back to the wall, and its back is our own. Thus there is the moment of loss when even phenomenology stutters and becomes descriptive physics at best: one may describe and describe, but multiverses and holographic horizons remain hidden, beyond the pale. We look for clues in our life, for our death - and clues in dying for our life. We hope there's something more than the scattering angle. We hope, and there's the precipice, and there's the end. http://www.alansondheim.org/aug31bbg6.mp4 ( now I open my eyes ) http://lounge.espdisk.com/archives/922 (easier) http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/precipice1.mp3 http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/precipice2.mp3 ( now I open myself )