The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

Sed, the Slip, and the World,


*/ from man sed:

" [2addr]y/string1/string2/ Replace all occurrences of
characters in string1 in the pattern space with the
corresponding characters from string2. " */
http://www.alansondheim.org/sed.jpg


So then:

Went to the doctor earlier today, the hacking cough now with me
for five weeks; I'm in a permanent brain fog, exhausted, dizzy,
stumbling about, wondering if this is the onslaught of something
new in the world, my world. It seems like it. And in similar
fashion, the terminal window, where I'm typing this, has its own
form of inertia, making it difficult, impossible, to think
through the visuality of the text; I write blindsighted. So it
was that earlier today, I was thinking "the" but typing "and" -
which wasn't caught in spell-check, but which I caught, myself,
on my own grounds, later, this unexpected substitution which
worries me - dementia, neural failure, aneurism, transient
ischemic attack thwarting everything I think and do. In any
case, then back to reading text on the holographic universe,
and, elsewise, thinking about programming and cross-stitching,
musical improvisation, and the despair of exhaustion, shuddering
with chills and other un/natural phenomena. I finished reading
on the history of Tara Tantra and The Invention of Morel, began
Faulkner's Pylon and A Geology of Media. But that slippage, that
_typo_ so to speak or write, sed 's/the/and/g', opened a door
which had hitherto been closed.

Think of the door as a gateway, V spreading from the punctum of
displacement through the condensation of wings (Pylon), a slip
which is a fabrication as well, Bell's Theorem and so much else.
The situation is that this displacement, this "sed" itself
becomes an operator; through /the/and/ anything may slip,

/e1/e2/
/ / /

anything _of any size and duration, of any place and period, of
any universe and body, of any interiority and exteriority._ I
can't emphasize this enough: the displacement is a process which
opens a path, or patheme, of _universal substitution,_ such that
the result is a _universal operator_ that might, on one hand,
promise universal life itself, and on the other, the collapse of
space-time to a primordial idea in which body and mind are
irretrievably lost. These sed are rents in the very fabric of
existence, something boiled up, embroiled, in the inflation of
the early universe; they come to remind us of every otherwise
and otherwhen, every elsewhere and elsewise, of every McCarthy
formalism If A then B else C, of every

f = (if p1 then e1 else e2)

collapse of Dijkstra's GOTO and replacements by GOTO NEITHER A
NOR B, GOTO NOT BOTH A AND B, generators of Expulsion that tend
towards the selfsame gap on one hand, pulling back into the
primeval propositional calculus on the other. Far from deriding,
denigrating such slips or splits, far from regarding them as so
much psychoanalytical debris of repression and replacement -
think of them - yes, again, think, through this brain fog, think
of them, as those universal processes of condensation and
displacement, gathered farther and farther from any law,
inhabiting the lawlessness of the downfalling trajectories of
catastrophe theory for example, dwelling within noise, glitch,
everything present, everything possible, in the Universe, even
in the Multiverse and its wild and wilderness models; then
you'll see that sed is before and beyond any god and spirit, any
model (and I should point out here that Wittgenstein's gathering
of elements under Sheffer's stern and shaky operators,
themselves rattle and roll through any conceivable creation or
world); the maw increases greater than any exponentiality,
remember the Ackermann function for example and its swellings:

all of this through the presence and absence, through the
shadowy preamble and postface of "the" and "and" or any other
and all such - glancing for example at one thing, then another,
the shadows of memory and the memory of shadows, an exhaustion
into the bit by byte by bit construction of geologic time:

this then the hope of the future, the hope transcending death
and the unfathomable/fathomable destination of the mind:

the mind fog, brain fog, itself, the _vision of utmost clarity,_
of contours blurred and interconnected, of entanglements at
_every conceivable distance and time,_ the particles and
particulation of the ongoing enfoldings and unfoldings of the
universe:

it is then the _vision of the blur_ itself, the truth of the
world, of this and every other world, in fact and fantasy and
fiction and fictivity, of _worlding_ in the deepest and
shallowest sense of the term and idea, residence and dwelling
within and without us:

indwelling:

in the interstice, in the blink of an eye, in the periphery of
the shadow, in the penumbra, in the glance behind the back, in
the face in the window, the window with nothing to indicate a
face, or tree, cathedral or stone, branch or the gap in time:

the leap-second as well, think of this as a suture or stitch in
time, a cross-stitch, crossing it out, every clock and
calculation to its own breathing, its own momentary and
invisible dismemberment, forget the protocols and calculations,
forget the institutions and corporations reliant on such
mensuration and its technologies; this is the something other at
the top of the stairs that I saw as a very young child as that
something dropping a series of blocks, clattering down, at 30
Reynolds Street in Kingston, Pennsylvania, and no one was there
but the presence or absence of the ghost or penumbra:

therefore this is the essay, which I spelled, once, as a child,
S-A, at the beginning and end of time, of space, what might be
considered an unraveling or desuturing (exposing the cut, the
tumescent flesh beneath the surface) of the body and the world's
body; as if I were to postulate any sort of truth in my writing,
it would lie, here, tumescent itself, in the split which is
always present (slip of the tumescent tongue, of the galactic
clusters, of the necessity of dark energy, of gravitons,
monopoles, and inflatons), already present, a leakage from one

other

to the Other, from the tongue to the early hydrogen-helium stars
which had no metals in their singular evolutions:

the slip which, as thought experiment, saves us from our world,
within and without our world, opens a knife or wound or slit of
hope:

in every error we make:

which is not an error:

every universe we are in, and we are in them:

which are not our own;

written on the day of the slip, "the" to "and," thinking "the"
in Vygotskian inner speech, writing/wryting "and," the day split
on the leap-second, the insertion of technological time into
technological time and its suturing (therefore again the twin
operations again of displacement and condensation), now, several
hours in, I don't know how many, not sure what time it is, my
brain's foggy, difficult to think of these things;

some other time, maybe;(it might be 3:40 a.m.); maybe not;


============================================================

Exercise

the "and "the and""
and ""the" and "the""
the "and" and "the"
and ""the" "the and""

============================================================


6c6
< stumbling about, wondering if this is the onslaught of something
---
> stumblng about, wondering if this is the onslaught of something
9c9
< form of inertia, making it difficult, impossible, to think
---
> form of inertia, making it difficult, impossible, to thnk
12c12
< which wasn't caught in spell-check, but which I caught, myself,
---
> which wasn't caught in spell-chec, but which I caught, myself,
40c40
< formalism If A then B else C, of every collapse of Dijkstra's
---
> formalism If A then B else C, of every collapse of Djikstra's
58c58
< than any exponentiality, remember the Ackerman function for
---
> than any exponetiality, remember the Ackermann function for
71c71
< of contours blurred and interconnected, of entanglements at
---
> of contours blurred and initerconnected, of entanglements at
73c73
< particulation of the ongoing enfoldings and unfoldings of the
---
> particlations of the ongoing enfoldings and unfoldings of the
103c103
< body; if I were to postulate any sort of truth in my writing,
---
> body; if I werer to postulate any sort of truth in my writing,
105c105
< always present (slip of the tumescent tongue, of the galactic
---
> always present (slip of the tumescent tongue, of the glacatic