The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

January 26, 2016


fragility, elegy

http://www.alansondheim.org/films4.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/du.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/films2.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/films3.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/films1.jpg

audio from two violin overlayed tracks, one with revrev,
one normal, new strings on the 1881 Neuner & Hornsteiner
filmcans of my work at The Film Makers Cooperative, NYC

right before my mother died, in hospice, i followed my father
into her room, no one else was there, azure waited outside and
my father didn't see me. he slowly bent over my mother and
kissed, her, and it was the first time, and the last, i remember
him kissing her. right before ossi died at the vets, she was
quiet on azure's lap, and it was the first time, and the last,
she lay quietly there

when lives end there may be moments, so fragile, evanescent,
that they are almost overlooked, breathless, holding themselves,
as if existence were meditating on existence, just that

a fall of a person from two or three stories up, a swerve of an
automobile, a brick arcing its way across the sky, nothing else,
and histories are gone, incandescent, with infinitesimal
details, as if they had never been

someone dies, belongings are redistributed, the unutterable
sadness of belongings losing their histories, their place in the
world

with more clarity, now, the lack of alien contact, emptiness and
silence of the stars, the fragility of the stable in catastrophe
theory, the slightest breath

for if they were, they have destroyed themselves, creating
networks of their own, digital parceling, and our flaw is not
our own, our making, unstable nuclei and their resulting
holocausts, we're holding on as best we can, for a few more
years, the inconceivable fragility of the higher elements in the
periodic table

violence of radiation sweeps, supernovas, magnetars, inescapable
collisions in solar systems, their sunstars in disarray, dyings,
their organisms believing in the potential of solutions

the darkness which is upon us has always been upon us, and how
can one possibly believe stories of god or gods or deities or
ideologies, we need a momentary philosophy of the swept away,
not more and more reifications, spirtualisms

who can possibly believe souls and spirits, essence, can survive
the holocaust of hiroshima, star's temperatures, annihilations
to the limit, and who can possibly believe any repetition or
text can salvage anything, when we are here, on this earth, as a
matter of nothing more than happenstance, bodies and orbits for
the most part just missing us time and time again

taking out the dinosaurs and their unknown cultures, taking out
inconceivable (for this is a philosophy of the inconceivable)
organisms, of which there are no trace, and if there were, the
embers of the dying sun will eliminate utterly and forever

and within this raging cosmos, the smallest story of a small cat
now forever gone, and its makings and remakings of our small
place in an alien city, now history as well, and already lost
and losing to us and the noise of a civilization always on the
bring, perhaps even centuries, always on the brink

and the story of its makings, a punctum of the unutterable, the
unaccountable, unaccounted, unaccounted-for, a punctum without a
base, nomadic, a disappearance of such richness, and richness,
like our own richness, of no accounting

and all those myriad creatures, each with its own, its tracing,
its comings and goings, each with its communality, community,
forever lost

only the harboring of reversing time would comfort occur, as we
would move backwards from womb to womb in patterning almost
everlasting, mind among the cosmos, and forgetting everything
that had come before, from habitus to empty punctum, from empty
punctum to habitus, until regimes of radiations would take,
then, even that, away, billions of years in the past

image: my films in storage, unique copies, decaying, as if lost
image: my films in storage, unique copies, decaying, as if lost
image: my films in storage, unique copies, decaying, as if lost
image: my films in storage, unique copies, decaying, as if lost

the last image of the last sequence of the last video, the small
cat, lying on azure's lap, for the first time in her life
and the last image of the last sequence of the last film, my
father, leaning over my mother, kissing her quietly and so
gently, my father i never knew

Generated by Mnemosyne 0.12.