[NetBehaviour] Kittler just died, I remember Sartre going, my father at 97 was born

[Alan Sondheim]

see - eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/


Kittler just died, I remember Sartre going, my father at 97 was born in 1914, 
his mother died very shortly after, the world went into flames, has continued 
along the same path. So everything, Derrida, Lacan, Jack Benny, falls apart, 
falls out, I continue to work not with _those_ references, but in new currents, 
until something withdraws, draws me back. It's too simple to think of the past 
as stories, that what one ultimately offers is stories, that these go the ways 
of mourning, lamentation, pain, death itself. As if we're continuously walking 
wounded. I'm tired of this; I want to work new for another twenty years at 
least. Memorials throw me back into pasts that gnaw away at my soul, with the 
appetition of souls as so many Barthian puncta, grasping away. It's all 
fiction. Tonight I was given a sheaf of pages from a scrapbook or photobook of 
myself at ages maybe 1-2 until 7, black and white museum pieces with my father 
smiling at me, openly in a way I cannot remember. Everything dates the images, 
which, analog, breathe with an other's air/heir; they crawl over me, and I 
cannot look at them directly, only askew. This memorial lasts four days, the 
day of arrival, the day of business and organization, the memorial proper, the 
day of leaving. The reading of the Torah begins anew during this same period, 
Simchat Torah, Friday the 21st, as if in preparation for the Shabbat. I need 
this renewal myself, this beginning of a beginning, not my own, not my 
beginning of the end as death is always making that beginning, something 
however otherwise. What am I saying here? That on the fifth day, the Monday 
morning I am meeting Monika Weiss to begin thinking concretely of a mobile 
installation/performance/video/workshop at Eyebeam, that this, for me, as to be 
as an infant, without the weight we may be leaving behind. And oddly it might 
be my father's smile, which was lost on me early on, that could create an 
uneasy resurrection, a false past, that gives me momentary grace.

In any case, the litany of names, Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, Roland Barthes, 
must cease, not seize.

I am murmuring against or through the in-corporation of Eyebeam, with a sense 
of wonder based on any and every architecture, corners reflecting perfectly, 
hiding places full of magic, the smiles of the demons within us.