(I just found out Bernadette Mayer died. I knew her well early on, when she was writing Hunger and Studying Memory. She had a huge effect on me at the time. The text below was written yesterday - it also seems apropos and to my thinking across times and genres now.)
apocalypse, vision, cancellation http://www.alansondheim.org/past.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/headturning.mp3 (sounds in neck) Maybe a dim effusion of proper names. The last bird calling for a mate who will never come. The last sea-cow churning over near the Bering straits, now unnamed, the earth curls in on itself, plateaus, continental plates. Something falls somewhere, something loosened higher above something that is pulling, gravitation mute, dust. (Right now, someone calls for Total War. It will end all wars.) 1^1^1^... i settle for this. it can mean anything. as if it gathered thickness, community, at least one other. apocalypse, none other, 1 remains strangled. perhaps in the rubble. if everything is rubble, there is no rubble. if everything is one, there is no other, no Other. 1*1*1*1*... calls now, like Vision, visions, vision, collapse. [ ] --> [] <-- ][ <.. Is the apocalypse statistical? Whose statistics? If a nation is destroyed, what is constituted? If a species of bird goes extinct - the dodo for example - or a Sirene - Stellar's sea-cow for example? Does Apocalypse pass unnoticed? If I alone survive to bear witness? To bare witness? For whom or what do I bear or bare? If there is another - then two - is there apocalypse? Is there Apocalypse? To whom is given the word, who is given the speech of the word, its presence? If there is one other? If there is no one?Posture abandons me. In that case. In that situation. Recently I have been having visions. Not dream, not hallucination. There are others. We talk to them. We talk among them. They may have passed on. They may have passed on and on. The precipice, the basement room with a large space for someone is speaking, I find a bathroom, come back. Soon it will be my turn. To speak, bear witness, bare witness. I am writing in lower ascii. There is no barred zero.There are hauntings in the absence of, in the void of, any conceivable figures, ghosts, others, souls, communities, even murmurations. Do things move, shudder, in the post-apocalyptic? No one will know; in the future anterior within which I would have written this, no one knows or could conceivably know. My death is not the end of knowledge, knowledge dies when death dies, when there's nothing left to die. It's inconceivable, this procuring, determination, vector, no witness to witness, to bare witness. What is the point of writing which begs for its unraveling? Remnants and indeterminacy, I'm sure there would be recordable sound, even recording in process. For no purpose at all. Something partially melted, left behind. Everything is partially melted, "melt" does not exist _per se_ with respect to what? We now are always already dancing in the supernova, not an instant or otherness in time. The questions and answers shift now, to command: "write your dirtiness of death now" again inconceivable, instructions given in a language, extirpation, extinction, that has long since been drained of meaning. I can bear witness only up to the limit, which does not cascade into increments, only compression. What I have learned: what disappears, disappears in self-devouring. We are thus. I write this in a cafe on Westminster Street. In the war they are hammering, burning, cutting, mutilating, slashing, raping, bodies. The Apocalypse I insist again, is always present. Armageddon, Ragnarok, is a continuum of annihilations, a paradox. A paradox which will never be attested, read. A paradox gone like the gone human, long gone, of whatever address, scoria, debris, paleontologies. The visions join me to you. The Visions. Clarity bears witness to clarity, closes in upon itself, curls. Touches itself. Buried that way, almost a young of some unknown species. There are structures, maybe it saw something. The visions, Visions, week into broken space. No, they weep Nowhere. Not yet, no, they weep nowhere. they weep. (I learn: there is no Now; this mythos is already the beginning and ending of the end, occurring everywhere and nowhere. I have my visions, my Visions. They were already held, discarded, disappeared.) you are alone to tell me total truth. if there were a Reader. a reader. I am such, come to tell thee. To tell you. among all the others, why have you been chosen to hear? why have you been? i have been chosen to hear. among absence. "in this world 0/0 is empty." a message is an emission. an emission has on control. an emission expands. an entropic emission disappears. "i am writing this in a cafe on Westminster Street." -> ___ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
