Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1307190033090.29634@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: cinders
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 00:35:20 -0400 (EDT)
cinders - As for me, I had at first imagined that cinders where there, not here but there, as a story to be told: cinder, this old gray word, this dusty theme of humanity, the immemorial image had decomposed from within, a metaphor or metonymy of itself, such is the destiny of every cinder, separated, consumed like a cinder of cinders. Who would still dare run the risk of a poem of the cinder? (Derrida, trans. Ned Lukacher) I cannot make out, to my satisfaction, the iconography of the frontispiece to the 1929 Vilna Haggadah which I have discussed elsewhere, to the extent of appealing to some within the Rabinnic community. Fear circulates among those present at the Seder, order is disrupted. The margins of the book appear burnt, the margins of the image roughly drawn out. To have found this in the sterility of Salt Lake City, the Haggadah which has continued to haunt me: in my reading it's a transformation of my work, the virtual world circulations of deities re/constructed as hysterical symptoms incapable of beginning or ending, fecund with incohering parts, other particulate matter. Likewise the repetition and automation of codework; it's the machine in them that is speaking (somewhat from Sartre); I am absolved; I continue towards death; the writing goes nowhere at all; what is born, is borne, is already still, is stilled, it's the machine in them that's dreaming - ness, smell of piss, cum, mucus. Cut the earth burned to cinder, cold ash ash burns. cinders burn. coals burn ash burns. cinders burn. coals burn ration; there is little separation between the self and the cinder, the treatise of innumerable cinders, and memories of trains - and tongs caught up, and monsters, dragon's scales, dragons, the world burnt in a fortnight, in a day, the fourth night, the last ash burns. cinders burn. coals burn star half-way burnt, burned-out, and dead earlier and before, 1914 star half-way burnt, burned-out, and dead earlier and before, 1939 ash burns. cinders burn. coals burn, and tongs and tongs, caught up, and monsters, emblems and signs the music does that, stains, curls, atrophies, i give you residue as difficult as any i can make of it, that is, music pushed to the limit as time runs out, nothing, no time for baking bread. so the last note is that which becomes the first, but it's the one i don't hear, leaving, it's what's spoken in imminence immediately after my death, the air flows and settles, breathing stops, quiet, then wailing, cries. it circles back to the beginning, the cinder, which is substance, neither part nor whole, neither abject nor hole, dividing same into same, fissured, but always the absence of memory or the memory of the absence of memory i will not be there i will not be there