Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.20.1610041744130.8137@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Revelation, Someone a Person
Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2016 17:46:18 -0400 (EDT)
Revelation, Someone a Person http://www.alansondheim.org/revelations.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/revelations.mp4 Modernism. I am sitting in a room. Revelation. Why One is Naught. A person is on earth for a limited amount of time; I imagine some unrecorded record (and therefore not a record) of perhaps one-hundred-forty years. The span of life gives us no opportunity to see how everything will come out; instead of coming-out, there is only becoming. The becoming of a person is thereby limited. Becoming is always limited; being, in the course of being, is always becoming. During this span, the person does things, which means the person is doing or being done to, which amounts to the same thing. How much is meaningless; each person is doing during her or his span, each person is becoming, each becoming is among those of every other; each becoming is a closed interval, cloning and dreamwork notwithstanding. So things are done and the person dies, disappears as such a person. Then there is the trailing. The trailing is a memory - my mother, my grandfather, I've heard that my great-grandmother ... - and the memory becomes a reconstitution of documents, the minutiae of life already fading, and yet so near! - the minutiae trailing off. Every instant a world disappears. The trailing trails off, names are listed, others (for example yours, my own, his or hers) disappearing entirely. What has been given lies for a moment perhaps in archives, digital records, hackings and recuperations, reconstitutions, and then that as well fragments, disappears. There are gaps, lacunae - knowing for example the name and a text of a poet who lived and wrote millennia ago, and yet, perhaps a few decades later, darkness presides once again. An ancient reptile or more ancient stromatolite is thrust into a representative of its species, perhaps entire genera. We're surrounded by darkness, our names do not accompany us, our projects are already limited by death, and what is carried on, exists only in its disappearance. All of this is known, but for how long? And to what aim? What does it matter, if a person understands, for example, field theory; on her deathbed, it doesn't matter, only the smell of the sheets, perhaps, should one be so lucky, spreading until it encompasses the universe, a universe on the way to shutting down - So one's projects become smaller, quicker, the goals quicker still, as technological progress develops exponentially by any standard, and organic life itself unravels, equally exponentially, by almost any standard. Then a person hopes to embody the digital, to collapse and collocate within it, to survive within it; he hopes for an infinite horizon, at the very least until the last proton has decayed. Things fall apart, he reasons; I will remain, retain as such, until then, at the very least until then. World swallows world, the person thinks, her thinking is slower now, circumspect, nothing may be delayed, there is no time for procrastination! There is all the time in the world for it. We fill the world with events we define well; well-defined events themselves are a non-fiction fiction, dependent on potential wells; all of these temporary categories, temporalities, vanish as well. (And well they might, as I continue this text, a first-year text or high- school or middle-school text, no other advances, the bleak and blank romanticism of unrequited death true in its absolute, with the possible exception of pathos and yearning.) What a person does is lay a path; what the world does, is disappear; what the world does, is path; what a person does, is disappear (one is never responsible for one's disappearance). Not 'what is to be done,' but what is to be undone, what is doing the undoing, what is the undoing, what conceivable imperative underlies the original phrase, underlies any phrase whatsoever - A person listens for a while. Within the world, there is listening. Always, within speaking and doing, within being and becoming, there is listening. (Listen. She listens.) No longer this listening person, no longer this listening, no longer this revelation of the world (this re-evaulation). I am sitting in a room. I am listening. Nothing is heard, nothing is revealed. Or rather, what is revealed is the _event._ The event is revealed in its disappearance, in its untethering. Tethering requires an origin, a structure, an archive, the maintenance of the tether, the fastening-fascination of its temporary origin, the vanishing and transcendence of an origin, the memory, listening, an organism, a machine, nothing, records (undiscovered fossils) permanently unread, increasingly unreadable. Dreams of moorings and tetherings, nightmares of cast-offs and untetherings, foams and dissolutions, waverings of the poles, inversions of planetary magnetisms ... The dreams, skeined tethers, cradling one to the beginning of the end, the shuddering of the ascendent curtain, the theater descending (as if these were dual), they accompany. Companion dreams and the species of companion dreams. Accompaniment. The trailing, the trailing to the nth degree, the exhaustion of the trailing. The knowledge of the zero. The zero The exhaustion of the zero. Then, somewhere else. - -