Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1311080430340.20402@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Auto-Immune
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2013 04:31:42 -0500 (EST)
Auto-Immune When did Lyotard die? I look at someone say forty years old and I say to him, you have only thirty years left. That's not much time. Your body will revolt against you, peel off from your mind, you'll see; nothing will remain intact, taken for granted. It's not that it falls apart, it's telling you it was never together in the first place. I watch myself watching myself and there's no mechanism running; everything I have is the result of a faulty auto-immune system. It's one layer in alliance with another, resting on top, glued to it, they're together, or rather, one layer entangled with another, pulling apart, the weaving coming apart, almost separated, you'll see. The layers _simmer,_ one against the other, it doesn't matter which. The layers corrode, coagulate, collapse, they dissolve each other, just a little bit, just like that - they're in full attack, or rather, they pretend to a sweet friendship, as false as any other. The fissure, where they meet, it's there that everything happens, that the body wages its death against its death. It's neither one nor the other, it's not both; it's not zero or null - it's always throwing out, throwing away, if only it could get a grip on, one against the other - if only there were something to grasp, there's nothing. So the result is the slight warmth of the fissure, emanation of a sickly spell, the body falters just thinking about it. It's uncomfortable, neither rigid nor loose, salt nor sweet, the taste of these in more than close proximity, almost something obscene. I think of the smell of a puree of boiled plums, it's like that, where the attack simmers, where the surfaces are sticky, almost coming apart - it's that, the almost separation but not quite, the binding, where the horror lies in all of this, the auto-immune disease which tends the body against itself, the appetition tangled up in itself. Here the I has already disappeared, it's brought down by what - strands which almost suffocate it - certainly there's nothing like normal breathing here. But what's also clear, is that nothing is brought down, the I has already disappeared in sweats and coughs, in fevers and chills; the I has disappeared in a stickiness so sweet that the mind gags on thought - yes, on any sort of thought, it doesn't matter which. The sweats are the lubricant of death and something still peers out and says, you have only ten years to live, ten days to live. You're looking at someone else or you're not looking at all, fantasms. You're breathing, you're breathing in someone else, almost choking on him, on her, and maybe it was a woman, you have only thirty years to go, you're already fighting yourself, losing your balance, your eye is a cataract eye, your mouth is full of yourself, or so you think, your mouth is full of sweets, so sweet your lungs burst, your mouth can't handle it. You're on auto-immune pilot now, you're being run like a spy in the house of suppurating flesh, like nothing, things have already disappeared, persons too. Your ears burrow into your ears, air chokes the lungs with gases that don't register, you're gasping, you hear the sounds of your own _throat,_ you're nothing but throat. I'm speaking of what's left of the pronoun. I look up, say to him, you have only ten years to live, then winters and autumns, ten days and you're gone, already you don't remember anything, your own name, the salvation of the objects of the world dangled by their names, nothing at all. Some might move dark grey clouds like cotton in the throat, the windpipe almost swollen shut, the air moist across the membrane of inner and outer. Some might do this. The body is ripe with the fecund body, with sweats dissolving what used to be arms, legs, chest and eyes. The body falls into the body, dissolves in the body. Some might say the body dissolves but in the body, a morass, microbial soup. The eyes might be the last to see the light. I look at her and say you have twenty years. If I could I'd rule the apportionment, I'd write the measure theory. Everything ends with the measure theory, with the division, with digital collapse, analogic slough. There are periods and spots of wetness. There seems to be something that won't get up, that moves and shudders, that strains slight, that won't move, won't move from here, won't think here or there. There might not be anything at all. Air swallows air, water swallows water. Stains dry without the periphery associated with things he barely remembers, cleaning things, washrags, towels, soaps, vacuum cleaners, sinks and drains. She remembers thinking about the fester, what festers, what is festering anyway. The auto-immune grapples with the body, the fevers are harsh, the temperature cool, just about the same as the room, or pool, or swamp, just the same as the soup, slightly elevated. That's it, the temperature is slightly elevated, everything's useless in what was once the legs and caverns between them. You never know when it's going to happen, when the body will feel once again it's falling towards dissolution, not the wall of death or any barrier, or the zero and one, nothing but the slime, the abject which has no alphabet at all, you remember towards the asymptote, a philosopher, she has fifteen years you say, she has no alphabet, there's no time left, there's all of that and more, your lungs are caked with chemistry, something so sweet it's sickening, you begin heaving, vomiting. How old was Kristeva when she died? Your breath is horrible, there's no breathing in it at all [...]