The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

December 15, 2013


Psychosis

I talk and write to myself; I do this by a circuitous route
through social media. Words and images swirl around me; there
are a very few people who follow my work, who earn immense
gratitude. They are my soul's mirrors, if such existed, an
indication that language has a reflex art of communication,
although everything might be changed in every direction within
the semantic plane. The coordinates of the plane - its divisions
- are irrelevant; one might use one's own labels, if one were
reading, watching, listening. One is an active receptor. How
many of us are there, working fundamentally for ourselves,
waiting for the Festschrift, for recognition? How much is lost
in misinterpretation, misreading, misrecognition?

Psychosis enters with belief, belief in the stability of at
least a minimally receptive world. Such a world imbues itself
with meaning, bootstraps. The meaning can only return within its
own to a fundamentalism - of belief, theory, cohesion; belief is
always classical, always existing within the chimera of eternal
stability. Without belief, writing becomes a form of articulated
debris; with it, writing turns towards inerrant masquerade. What
lies between the two is ordinary discourse, and writing has no
place for that, no matter the articulating structure or mask of
anonymity.

We are all anonymous, all marked and demarcated; the psychotic
does not know, or recognize, that. Instead, the psychotic
proceeds as if there is the possibility of 'real' communication,
'real' communality - as if the circuitous route 'really' led
somewhere other than, momentarily, the self on the path towards
death and incommunicality. All these routes and files, all these
utterances, all beneath the sign of the enunciated on the
material-digital plane! _That_ way lies psychosis - and there is
no other.

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