Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1410100015030.21174@panix2.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Yahrzeit
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:16:27 -0400 (EDT)
Yahrzeit http://www.alansondheim.org/yahrzeitb.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/yahrzeit.mp4 the original text occasioned by my mother's death, exigencies of mourning, transformed by Azure and that Time of the Year, and the words somewhat lost in the Cave and the machinic, here unmodified, you can picture desolation, and the iconography of meditations near and far, co-present with the sound and machine sing-along, modified from: texts/lt.txt:(what i stumble towards) (what i stumble towards) (what i have wanted to describe) (what is indescribable) (the tendency of my work) (what characterizes philosophy: "philosophy has no regard") the thickness of the world the idiocy of the real when there is death, the interior of a world disappears there are details, one can see this in any past the smell of a kitchen, the paint on the edges of the chairs do the chairs need repainting certain parts of the backs are worn, he sits there, she here there's a sound they make, different sounds, pulled in and out the dulled reflection of the chairs on the floor when they were new when they began to disappear, the last memory of the chairs the light on them from the window, sounds of rain on the window how high the backs above the table, their reflection on the table the food, when the family may have been together familiality, familiarity when the chairs were comfortable, when they were turned when we turned them facing one another, or moved them aside when one of us left the room and the chairs were moved fly in the window's interior from the chair, tree outside, smaller then, different neighbors sounds from the street coming in the limitlessness of the world, its thickness over and over again, peering around the corner there is the world in uncanny, unaccountable, fullness there is no theory for this, this inaccessible description every explanation, there are heuristics, things glossed over not the things of the world, but their fallen worlds all worlds are fallen for that matter all worlds encompassed with this thickness, inertness, grain untheorizable, hardly memories, reconstructions, reconstitutions with every death, it is a matter of ethics, this disappearance of worlds with every death, loss of world and history with every death, redistribution of materials, severed ties and limbs i return constantly to this in my theorizing, this loss no degree of technological recuperation works in this respect no quantity of text or discourse plays the slightest role what is re-presented is always already 0/1, infinitesimal sometimes in a dream there is a horizon of what is gone it's almost present, not really, you begin thinking of something past you're thinking, it's almost present, almost on the tip of the tongue it's never there, it's not even problematic, controvertible i imagine paths through the world, turning beneath the chairs beneath or around the rungs of the chair or the four brown wooden legs paths opening up to interior surfaces opening up recursively stains beneath the seat of the chair, cobwebs connecting rungs to rungs the smell of the varnish on older paint, flat faded white shown through paths moving among senses, spectra and bandwidths paths moving from generation to generation, imaginary paths paths of the scraping of chairs, people leaving for the very last time paths of chairs pulled in beneath old new people eating, conversing laughter, crying, screams, whispers, talking, singing, filling the air chairs of first and last times, inconceivable speculations inconceivable principles, axiologies, hypothetical, hypotheses not, no ideas but in things themselves not, the last or second-to-last of the ox-herding pictures not, the grain of the real not, the practico-inert or materialist or idealist foundations not, tat tvam asi or fundamental or surface negations not, the interplay of signs, sememes, sign-systems certainly not that interplay of signifiers, semiotics, historiographies nothing that "might be said" to characterize, capture, recuperate something of absolute disappearance, annihilation, of trace turned ash something of charnel-house, but that too has paths, worlds, traces traces upon traces, perhaps i remember 1968 perhaps i remember 1945, 2003, perhaps i remember 1789 perhaps berlin, ankara, grise fjord, kurume, providence, katmandu perhaps street, street-corner, room, field, forest, cliff, lake, tarn perhaps you, perhaps another, perhaps others perhaps events, occurrences, what happened, what happens those anecdotes without endings, well what did she say, what was next receding into pasts, backgrounds, irrelevancies of the present but never irrelevant, always equidistant, equivalent, always inert and present and unaccounted for and present and uncountable and present and unaccountable, all we can theorize is this, collapse of description and uttermost alterity the being of which knows no regard, is obdurate in the world i'd write this, this error of philosophy: "philosophy has no regard" of which is the condition of speech, language, any and all interplay * so that i tend to produce, reproduce, overproduce moving among media, modes, representations - this is all so futile an attempt to pull back from death, from constitution or somewhat of a release among interiority and world negation gnaws at doors and portals chairs and chairs, or wood, or institutions of chairs and wood or ideologies or constructs: one crawls, lifts on the back stumbles to the feet, totters, almost gets it in the air * the thickness of the world the idiocy of the real nothing in a seed but seed nothing obdurate but always in a corner or path everywhere the thickness of which "philosophy has no regard" what has disappeared and for whom and by what means what constitutes the disappearance and the world which disappears what is death "in this regard" who or what, or what of or with writing, what of the calligraphic **
