Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1211041718440.4425@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Death Cull
Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2012 17:20:28 -0500 (EST)
Death Cull The new reality is watching, walking death, repeatedly, until things finally come to an end. Everyone goes through the same; we are always the new old. Every week there are new disappearances; because I have so many acquaintances, I see these disasters constantly. Why disasters? Because, unlike everything else in life, there is an obdurate finality about death; communication, palliatives, reminiscences, are no longer possible. Death points to the impossibility of life. Death points by virtue of non-pointing; there are no vectors in and among death. Death is neither singular nor plural. My friends and acquaintances disappear; my daughter and I are estranged: mutual disappearance. It began when I was a child; whole generations died off. By the time I could think through them, they were gone; by the time I could think, death gnawed me. Life is a process of sinking through life and lives. The new reality is always present; what's new is the constant birthing of death. Death is assigned names: X died, whole sets {x} pass on, veterans, generations, species. Death begins with _death-of_; it is the last use of the name, which undergoes absorption. Another way to think: the proper name contains the seed of death. Another way to think of it: death is a time or demarcation for the living. But this is not death, this is the signifier. The signifier of death is not, can never be, death. Death for the living is a gathering of similarities. The proper name changes when death enters; it no longer serves as the reception or transmission of messages in the name of the body. Or rather there is an ontological shift in the body, which enters the virtual in its entirety; someone may speak in the guise or simulacrum of the body. Death transforms the speaking body into an other speaking-for. What was unspeakable, the body, is the responsibility of others; the speaking body, even before death, lives within a recessive mode, every utterance a portal unto death, every utterance a gift on the verge of being returned. How does one approach this, one's death, the death of others? One only waits; being is waiting, and being alive is living awaiting. As one ages, one awaits time itself, the real is transformed into the passive substance of dying, rebirth and rebearing elsewhere beyond a horizon, immovable, unnamed. We remember the partings of others far more than their arrivals; we remember the arrivals of deaths, more than the parting of others. We passively take our place in this panoply; there is never anything more to do, never anything more that has been done.