Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1312151240450.19881@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Psychosis
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2013 12:41:53 -0500 (EST)
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.