Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1309011150150.6987@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: the miller and the field
Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 11:52:13 -0400 (EDT)
the miller and the field "It is impossible for me to say one thing which has not been lived, one thing which is beyond the tips of my hair." (Henry Miller) The field of the qin is before me and slightly lower than my hands, my face. My face does nothing; my brain, which I have seen, is puffed, creviced, inert. The strings are the field of strings just as the body of the qin is the field of the body. The harmonics are the divisions which each string carries as potential; the fingering of either hand or any finger or thumb, is a caress reining in alterity, making the strange familiar, constructing signs which are momentarily audible; signs are, as Barthes knew, discharges. The music crackles as what is there, that is possibility, that is, bound and grappled to culture. But culture is not there; the qin, drowning in culture, brings an other into play, and the caress is a caress of nothing, just as alterity is a sign already under dissolution. At the core of this the qin has been present, as object and subject, for at least twenty-five hundred years in evidence. The dance of fingers around what would be transformed into the flute, occurred much earlier, and unlike the strings of the qin, the flute insists on its inertness; what moves is air intimately revoked by breath, the musculature of a body which may or may not have been human. I have handled stone tools, handled only before, by something similar, this other body, thing, not quite human, within sound that surely was heard among several of them. I stay close to the bone, to the living; I write in the land of the dead.