Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1307052054490.19048@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: When I need.
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2013 20:55:58 -0400 (EDT)
When I need. I sleep when I need to sleep. I wake when I need to wake. Some- times I sleep when I need to be awake and I struggle. Sometimes I need to be asleep and wake perhaps in the middle of the night and there are the disturbed remnants of a dream. I feel my body clotted and abject and I can say it almost always is this way; I loathe my body and write of its death immediately beneath me, even before it or I touch the ground. It's this that stops me from being a man; I am arrogant and angry and despairing, but I am not a man; I flee even from the position of the coward. I am cowed. In the face of other men I cannot urinate or breathe; in their face I remain awake until sleep brings its nightmares to bare down on me. I consider all of this existence, and ordinary existence, mediocre existence. I have nothing to gain and always everything to lose, even in the state of exhaustion or penury or just having finished an improvisation. I attempt to improvise a life out of debris and scar and sometimes I succeed on a momentary basis. I look around and create an epistemology and it is the epistemology that lies just beneath the surface, an abject epistemology within which we bleed to death. At the moment of dying, if we are old, we are transformed, and someone said we are no long human, we are things sliding into the abyss. I am on the lip of the abyss and I write of the lip. The writing makes me uncomfortable but I am the one and many doing the writing and you are the one doing the reading but it is my writing you are reading as control slips from me. Control goes nowhere; it slips like my skin slips from my shoulders and the rest of me slips away; I an always pooled on a ground or foundation not of my own making. It is there now in my sleep. It is this that makes men turn from me, an abjection easily mistaken for the tawdry or sleazy, but in actuality that which grips all of us in our moments of fear when we piss ourselves or collapse somnolent to the ground. It is this that makes women turn from me, or those of any other sex or sexuality, or those of any other species or kingdom or queendom, or those of the earth or sky, or anything needing or avoiding breathing. I am seen as untoward, creepy, something or someone, if I am lucky, smelling not quite right, putting forth an odor or stench which accompanies me everywhere. I am kept out of institutions which rake their borders clean. I am kept away from collegialities which are dependent on the cleanliness of capital abstractions replacing the shit of corporeal monies and standards. The toilets I should say are also cleansed. The stalls and urinals are cleansed. The stirrups are cleansed. The needles are cleansed. Everywhere there are flows of brilliant fluids monitored for impurities; I am removed from the flows. Everywhere I am removed from what might have been, from the possible, replaced by semblances of security or comfortably controlled leaks. To leak a secret is seemly; to leak in ones pants is unseemly. The first leases life, the second releases death. You will know me by my red stains, my menses I have not hidden, my lymphatic nodes, the phlegm that steels from my eyes, the hardness of tears, the tearing of tissues as death and only death penetrates me. I am the gate of death, of spent semen and sweat, of useless language. You shift from foot to foot and pry open shame in every direction. Of my tribe the four directions, the six directions, the eight directions of shame. You consign me to the rubbish bin: who would write such a thing? Who would read such a thing? Who would be such a thing? But I am such a thing, and I am a thing, and a thing among things, as are you, and the rest of you. Only the vulnerabilities here are within my skin and you see them and stretch them until I disappear. Until my work disappears. Until the ungainly sanctions I have tattooed upon my eyelids are no longer visible, not even to me. In other words, until I am stitched and sewn into a tattered ungodly thing. Then I will hear nothing you say. I will see nothing you are. I will smell nothing. I will touch nothing either.