Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1310202339010.29351@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Brooklyn to Providence
Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 23:39:51 -0400 (EDT)
Brooklyn to Providence We're in the zone between two cities, two states of mind, honestly, I don't know what we're doing here. Beginning again means proving myself again and I exhaust myself with repetition since I have no permanent locus of repute, nothing to build on. I watch carefully for signals. I exist on a plane of incomprehension. My cough is getting worse and gets worse at night. There's no end to it. The truth is, we have no reason to be here, no deep connection with a job or institution or field that requires our presence. We might as well be otherwise, but this is indicative of nothing more than a random step on a Turing tape. Otherwise is always otherwise. The plane of the event is brute history, not historiography. What gets lost in the detail is investment or purpose, and use value appears as a chimera of exchange. In other words, there are other words. Through this process, psychosis or at least daymares and night terrors result. Our books which ordered our lives are diffused and separated from themselves. Our skin falls off and I dream this. Everything is duplicated in the form of displacement processes. The processes are non-linear equations, chaotic, with a mute inability to return or recuperate an origin. The result is my sickness gets worse and entangled. At times I cannot breathe and this is accompanied by frightening color shifts and a rattling of the visual field. The field appears to burn as if the world charred, as if my fallen skin charred and I do not dream this; this is a gift of the real and its horror. I know in the depths of my being I do not belong here, I do not belong anywhere; I am the aleph and tav of the dance of the knives. The core of the problem is the absence of routes from the core, the absence of roots within it. If my eyes disappear, I am no more blinded than in the uncanny gully of the real which seems almost the simulacrum of a life. I talk to my avatar and join her in the shards of the screen. One cannot have psychosis if one is psychosis; one cannot be flesh if one is flesh. Here, where I am not and have not been, one cannot be. The other cannot be either and none of us can. The shards of her avatar say so. [I take credit for the lines above. At first... I used quotation or pseudonym; the transformation into literary pastiche made it acceptable. But then I realized: I am not acceptable; this is the solution of equation and its more than imaginary routes. From out, there is no way out.]