[NetBehaviour] apocalypse, vision, cancellation
Alan Sondheim
sondheim at panix.com
Wed Nov 23 06:13:58 CET 2022
(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." ->
___
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