[NetBehaviour] AlphaSmart 3000 late and early text

[Alan Sondheim]

AlphaSmart 3000 late and early text


http://www.alansondheim.org/wound1.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/wound2.jpg

final draft current text on Situation

always an edge here, writing again, returning to the scene of the
crime, the appearance of the body in the habitus of ascii; for
several billion of years, there was none, except what was written
in our code, our dnarna in our stars from the stars, the melange
that constitutes us. no longer can i believe in objects, even codes
reveal their existence only in the frailness of molecular chains
that fall apart under the slightest provocation. but NOTHING HAS
BEEN lost, there was nothing to lose, and now i sit here and type
this into a small machine with a screen that only reveals four
lines at a time, a screen which just about threatens itself to
disappear. the world is never one of appearances, always the moment
after, the long denouement, where that, this tail of exhaustion
that ends with the cessation of life, not as we know it, but as i
myself know it; what could be the last word spoken to Azure in the
finitude that for me and me alone is the descent of darkness. here
I write invisibly, and by association and extrapolation, i know
that the invisibility will reduce I to i, and that too will be at
one point the last word spoken or heard. i am the witness of a
dominion whose bounds are always indeterminate, just as the world
is, this one island universe among many on the way towards the
darkness of extrapolation. this is an unaccustom, and let us think
together that at the edges and elsewhere of the pool, what is, is
unaccustom, what will be, is unaccustom. thus does the space among
me, none of object or subject, waves which dissolve as if exhausted
among themselves i am among them, an amongness.

for i say unto you, amongness is what is, what exists, there are
none other, neither singularities nor myriads, what remains, and
here is that which is among you -

what remains, what is, is always already echos, reverberations,
thus for the fantasy of imminence, the dream if immanence.

it is late here, i write to weyou thus, youwe among always
speaking, sounds and these soundings among us

~
~

early draft early text on Network

A rabid network connects and interconnects everywhere and at all
times; so it might appear as substance, at best dynamic striations.
A chain may be as strong as its weakest link, but a chain may also
be duplicated; each to the other, each a procurement. A chain grows
at one or both ends; it's anchored, it's ascendent, it's linear.
Everything that transmits, transmits one at a time; even
multiplexing might break into thinner categories. There are more
frequencies than we know within the universe, more frequencies,
anywhere, and if we think of such as infinite in extent and
duration, we are limited to the infinitely small portion of the
world, quantum granularity notwithstanding. Chains and networks are
outgrowths; everything is natural about them, nothing is natural
about them. What extends, might do so with and without nodes,
surfaces, bearings, coordinates. One might prefer a world without
any of these; their presence signifies birth and day, and
unimaginable attendant cruelties.

There may be no originary object, no 0-> and no finality, ->1 ;
there may be slurry at best. This is the poetics of form, its
poesis, which refuses any mathematico-physical reduction, no matter
the reality.

The chain is a walkalong; the network is a walkabout. Notice the
difference. The network is full of contradiction; the chain exists
as [x-1][x][x+1] or some such, in other words a well-ordering; the
network might be, for all one knows, a continuum, a collocation of
surreal numbers, anything but _that_ which tends towards
calculation, the abacus, the clear movement of a bead from one
place to another.

A network might have no place at all, neither this nor that,
neither one nor another. There might be sheaves, layers, monstrous
topologies, foam, percolation. There might be something only
visible from the outset or the outside, or something invisible from
every conceivable vantage-point. There may be no conceivable
vantage-points. I remember writing the notion of the _anorectic
airliner,_ the motion of air in air, the introverted and intense
turbulence, perhaps without temperature gradients whatsoever, that
remains inherently invisible. Or caught with one or another
Schlieren optics. Or not caught at all.

The network channels movement, or movement defines the channels of
the network; the channels may have fixed walls, or none whatsoever;
there may be sloughs and surges for example. The channel/carrying
capacity/information model holds in a miniscule number of models;
at the same time it dominates all our thinking in a revolutionary
way reminiscent of the discovery of the wheel, the printing press
electricity. The revolution might well lie otherwise, elsewhere
elsewhen, however; it might lie in those glimpses of inconceivable
networks that pervade us and our objects, pervade organisms and
boundaries, problematize aristotelian logics, dissolve into
dissolution or the abject upon or within our notice or momentary
attention - or none or all of these. What might be of interest here
is the idea of the _lifespan of the network_ - in other words, the
temporality of what might or might not be noticed.

As open-ended organisms were bound and unbound there, within this
temporality, within the very concept, not of measurement, but of
objects or durations we find amenable. That brings us back to our
problem, our temporality, our networks and their chains which bind
them - as if they, the we within us, were the case or cases.

No 0,1, no beginnings and endings, (but) what might pass for a
(momentary) glance, something of the nature of attention or of the
economy of attention. We don't let sleeping dogs lie; we wake them,
sometime or other in the morning, it's a humid day, it might be
better or best to let them be.

(be, being, open multi-dimensional sets on any interval; care,
attention, absence)

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